muckrights-sans-merde
bonum fabula frat
### the-internet-was-made-for-cat-pictures-and-now-its-basically-crack
other pages:
=> no-you-dont-need-to-run-startx-in-openbsd.html no-you-dont-need-to-run-startx-in-openbsd
*originally posted:* may 2021
UPDATE: ron now believes his primary hosting issue is sorted, and thats not the only thing thats funny. but with that noted, its better for a separate article.
commentary on this: http://techrights.org/2021/05/30/decentralised-internet/ but just the text part, cant be arsed
hello from 2016, where i am getting still more caught up with the basis for a summary of more than 30,000 posts. fun, yeah? i skipped MOST of the patent stuff, because i find it boring.
oh, the patent stuff is super-important; thats what i think groklaw focused on and muckrights wanted to BE groklaw, im glad somebody has covered patents as much as they have. im sure it helped, too. with the exception of the ridiculous comment about some youtube video about a non-free license (thats not "open source", brah-- its not fs either) i figure muckrights does a good job covering patents-- and i dont follow those closely enough to call him on most of it if he doesnt.
but i thought id take a peak at the present, like i do, and tell everybody what the article im commenting on is REALLY about.
lets get on with ron opening the thing. usually i skip the summary, but this ones good:
> Summary: Why Techrights constantly explores decentralisation and so should everybody else
hehehehe. yeah. lets get back to "decentralisation" in a moment. we "agree" that exploring decentralisation is good, im not here to dispute that part of the argument.
> THE World Wide Web is often portrayed as the pinnacle of innovation or of human accomplishment. But it’s just a bloated piece of junk, nowadays dominated by little more than one or two companies.
obviously theres some truth to this. i dont want to nitpick the choice of words too hard, because whats a bit of an exaggeration now could be even more true next year. i mean, take mozilla-- mozilla IS a bloated piece of junk. its nearly the most demanding, unreliable piece of software i ever use. now go try to find an alternative. chrome/ium? no way. brave? still focused on a very narrow group of chipsets, they dont care about me. i dont expect them to. brave has a lot of stuff i raise an eyebrow at anyway-- mostly in terms of features i dont want or need. (yeah, so does mozilla. loads of them).
how about a lighter alternative? oh, like the ones that most websites dont work on. i mean, thats technically the websites fault for going so heavy on features. but really, if im going to use some of these lighter browsers i might as well just deal with the page source. im not being sarcastic, i wrote an article about that last year and i was completely serious.
you know what im really excited about? gemini. because it IS like dealing with just page source. but even better. but we havent gotten to that part of the article yet.
> It’s also a human ‘mindfarm’. It’s not a good place to be a participant (subject). Using devices that are attached to people 24/7 (by creating an irrational addiction), those same companies give us “apps” that are actually watered-down (practically useless) software/applications.
i dont think ron is very serious about getting away from that stuff. nor are most people, sadly. hes conflating devices and apps and the internet here, and while i almost dont blame him (no really, theres an argument for lumping all that stuff together) it would help to treat these separately-- both in terms of rhetoric, and solutions. but for an overview, whatever.
> We’re meant to think that replacing mice and large screens with pinches and listening devices (A.K.A. “smart” “assistants”) is somehow “progress…” even if those things were not technically infeasible decades back.
sure, those are somewhat gimmicky.
> More to the point though — we’ve come to the point where all major Web browsers are based on just one body of code (we were there two decades ago with Internet Explorer, now a dead browser), IRC is dominated by few very large networks (tens of thousands of people in each), less than a handful social control networks shape the minds of billions of people (for profit,
LOL, WAIT A MINUTE!
> ...IRC is dominated by few very large networks (tens of thousands of people in each)
hahaha, hes not wrong, but he wouldnt have mentioned that if it wasnt about something muckrights was entangled with at the moment-- in a somewhat bullshit sort of way...
points we are waiting get to now:
* lets get back to "decentralisation"
* you know what im really excited about? gemini
* muckrights and irc
> ...(for profit, for their sponsors and owners), and about 90% of people access the Web using Windows and/or Android.
> This is more like monopoly than decentralisation and emancipation of the ordinary person; we’re besieged by corporate and government power (conjoined in some nations).
no problem with that either. it shouldnt surprise you that he does a reasonably good job setting the article up for "solutions".
in many ways, ron doesnt care about centralisation or emancipation at all. and thats a shame. but it also undermines this article im criticising, and thats a big part of the point.
still, lets work on lifting out the GOOD points the article makes, so we can talk about solutions in a way that is hopefully a little more honest.
> In order to utilise the Internet more properly we need to take back control, decoupling and re-distributing the eggs (too few baskets nowadays exist also for E-mail; they’ve made it hard to run mail relays because of their ‘anti-spam’ gateways and other obstacles).
yes, good idea-- but ron is probably bullshitting here. and thats a problem, if you want real progress.
> Unless we lower the barrier to self-hosting and discourage this whole “clown computing” hype (the EPO is outsourcing almost everything to Microsoft) the Internet will increasingly become an instrument of oppression rather than empowerment and emancipation.
absolutely true, and well said.
> It’s already happening at an alarming rate. As The Federal put it, “the very freedom of expression in India is at stake,” but actually the same is true everywhere else, from China to Europe and from Europe to northern America.
i agree with this as well. i love how hes about to make this about patents when its barely a patent issue, but that is one of the central themes of the website, so alright then:
> Consider the fact that for many years Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos have blocked access to Techrights for no reason other than Techrights causing embarrassment to EPO management. There are of course ways to work around that (thankfully EPO staff has a different network provider at home — or for a phone — than what’s provided by the EPO), but we still try to diversify protocols, access points, and networks.
what the hell, its a fair enough point.
> It makes us a lot harder to undermine and censor.
hahahahahaha, wait, wait, wait!
* lets get back to "decentralisation"
* you know what im really excited about? gemini
* muckrights and irc
* censored muckrights
> The video above explains that this was the original purpose or key goal of the Internet; getting back to the raison d’être is essential. So much is at stake.
rofl...
im sorry, im sorry, these are very important issues. i care about them a great deal, but thats exactly why rons take on them (and particularly the timing) has me in fits of giggles. i honestly cannot help it when hes talking out of his arse like this.
### what he really means when he says:
> Why Techrights constantly explores decentralisation and so should everybody else
there are but two reasons that they are exploring decentralisation:
* its COOL and it will make people READ the articles and increase awareness of rons brand/website
* muckrights just got ANOTHER ultimatim about shutting down the website because he isnt kowtowing to censorship-- this one with a date
OH, EXCEPT HE HAS BEEN KOWTOWING, but the thing about appeasing impossible people is that its never enough. so now its come to this.
a more realistic way of saying "Why Techrights constantly explores decentralisation" is:
WE ARE RUNNING LOW ON IDEAS FOR HOW TO HOST THIS THING AND HOPE YOULL COME DO WORK FOR US OR GIVE US HOSTING!
and thats true. but this is not: "...and so should everybody else"
um, no. other people ARE working on decentralisation and ron pooh-poohs most of it.
in fact, the minute someone offers him a big enough traditional hosting package FREE OF CHARGE hes going to snatch it right up. and who could blame him? except this is really far more about that than pioneering fuck-all.
i know who setup rons ipfs node and ive watched how many times ron has bitched and moaned about it without knowing what hes talking about. if he was really interested in promoting decentralised alternatives he might learn more about them-- thats hardly what this is about.
first of all, not a lot of research goes into ron hosting anything. theres a lot of (other people) volunteering and a lot of getting free stuff. when muckrights got an ipfs node, all that was an experiment that was mostly someone else doing stuff for muckrights.
ironically he was "thanked" by having his own work censored, ON MUCKRIGHTS, which is pretty hilarious-- not to mention typical. i also spent a long time contributing, and i was thanked for my time and contributions with misrepresentation and a smear campaign.
just let that sink in-- the guy who focused on decentralising muckrights to make it more censorship-resistant was thanked for his time by muckrights censoring his work. you see why i say that ron doesnt really give a shit about this?
but its still a good cause to care about! if you actually care.
* lets get back to "decentralisation"
* you know what im really excited about? gemini
* muckrights and irc
* censored muckrights
i just covered two of those already.
* muckrights and irc
lol, so (im really sorry-- i shouldnt be laughing this much and its really only sort of funny) part of the reason that muckrights was threatened with a takedown (of its hosting) originally was for the sake of censoring irc. unpack this with me:
1. hosting was threatened...
2. by the person who ran the server...
3. because they wanted him to censor...
4. something on another server (an irc server) entirely.
and what do you think the latest ultimatim (with a cutoff date of june 30, but im sure that will change any day now-- or perhaps it WILL be for reals this time-- its not that i think its ALL a bluff, but all of it is intended as a real threat and some of it will be taken back, we dont know how much) is about?
again, its about irc bullshit. i generally prefer to quote and offer links, and i absolutely can, but this situation is such a crisis that even i dont want to make it worse than merely TALKING ABOUT IT it could do.
oh dont get me wrong, its not out of sympathy for muckrights. but there are plenty of things youd happily sue someone for that you wouldnt go to war with their entire country over, and although ive joked about the host pulling the plug on muckrights (and i will probably joke about it if they do-- muckrights will be back, in some form, you can count on it) im not going to try to push the host as hard as i could.
this is exactly why there are things like the geneva convention. because even when youre at war! there are some things that just. arent. necessary. ron may even talk about this stuff more frankly and in SOME detail when its over, but for now im going to make fun of the hilarious amount of spin thats being put on this.
seriously-- this is ALL ABOUT MUCKRIGHTS. and the way hes spinning it is-- LETS SAVE THE INTERNETS!
thats fucking funny! and thats why im laughing.
* you know what im really excited about? gemini
somebody got muckrights into gemini, and thats cool. as someone who LOVES wiki-inspired syntax (i liked html too, before it got fucking ridiculous) and simplified syntax in general, im in love with gemini text.
gemini is a protocol of course, its NOT just a syntax, so in many ways the part of gemini im most into at the moment is arguably the least important. but im trying to shift gradually to where all the fun web stuff ive done is highly gemini-compatible, and while i could (in javascript, python or my own programming language) just create a lossy html-to-gemini converter like the one muckrights uses, gemini makes me love hand-coding again. because its mostly > and => and the occasional ### we are talking about.
i was also into gopher once, but its based on tabs and i never liked that. the worst thing about gopher is the way the protocol handles (or varies by implementation and non-standardisation) lines longer than 40-to-60-something characters. i researched and experimented with all of that back when i was into gopher and serving gopher content. ive also run a self-hosted http server (not in quite some time).
and by self-hosted, i mean i could look across the room where it was sitting on a table, and hear the fans spin up when people tried to ssh to it before getting automatically banned. ive also owned some "real" servers that used to serve commercial websites, with hardware raid and other toys, but they weigh a lot and theyre no fun to travel with.
if ron wants to really get into this stuff, i dont pretend to be an expert-- he doesnt have to be either. but ron wants stuff to cover on his website, and whether he ever really changes anything (rather than just letting people do stuff for him, then treating them like shit afterwards-- or really not waiting until afterwards, because he probably lies to everyone who helps him) he wants to TALK about changing things.
for example, i came to muckrights to fight against the centralisation of (distro) development that is strikingly similar / relevant to the centralisation of browser (application) development both in terms of browser monopolies and development on github. sorry, thats a lot to say (or read) at once. but thats stuff i really care about-- stuff i work to fight.
and in 2018, i asked ron outright-- i said look, you dont seem to be against systemd. and he gave me this line about how the website was focused on this or that and thats why they didnt cover systemd except in links.
well, that was bullshit. he said the same thing in 2015, and he changes focus way more often than that. that was the false pretenses that got me helping him for TWO YEARS. and i know it was a help (or he wanted me to think so) because he kept thanking me. cool, right? whats to complain about then?
i spend so much time talking about how full of shit he is about systemd, its practically wasting your time to talk about it again here, but this is one of the reasons im working on this huge timeline:
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org/timeline-of-muckrights.html
oh, it doesnt look huge? thats cool-- ive worked through more than 20,000 posts (all recently) to fill that timeline out. ive curated all the stories (offline, nyeh-- with backups in various places in the world too, including rons own country) that i want to have handy for this purpose, and already this reference material (hand picked, hand copied, not automated) is one or two megabytes of PLAIN TEXT (not html).
can i handle that much material? no, no-- I ALREADY HAVE. can i handle it TWICE? i mean, its designed to be as close to as easy as what i already did for 2006. but its a lot more interesting than 2006.
ive already started compiling a LIST of FALSE NARRATIVES that muckrights has spun, generally on repeat-peat-peat-peat-peat:
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org/list-of-muckrights-false-narratives.html
and i DO apologise for all the redundancy, but im debunking one of the most redundant websites on the internet; it sort of comes with the territory, and tbh rons readers should be used to it:
"Ron is incredibly redundant. Kind of like propaganda..."-- another former contributor
(yes, im not the only person that calls him ron. there are a few now-- i didnt plan for it to become a "thing", and im still not sure it has).
but i used to defend various choices of his, as someone who actually gave a shit about what i thought muckrights actually was, so i can even defend some of his redundancy. sometimes its funny though.
but like i was saying-- if ron wants to really get into this stuff, theres a lot of stuff he could be getting into. for example, one of the WORST things about the internet is dns. there are people working on killing dns, and thats a great place to start.
gemini takes care of some of the bloat of the web itself, but most of us are still going to (begrudgingly) use the web for some things. even gemini isnt trying to KILL the web, but if you were tired of the web and wanted to get away, gemini is one of the most promising things.
i wouldnt write so many articles myself if my workflow werent based on gemini-text. ITS SO WONDERFULLY SIMPLE! and this is despite the fact that my foray into the protocol itself is so ridiculously minimal so far. in part thats because i avoid so much new software. but i still believe gemini is the future, which is why i promote it in an admittedly silly way-- but for example, every page on muckrights-sans-merde is written in gemini text and then wrapped in html and decoded with some very lightweight js.
thats sacrilege, yes. but the REASON its done this way is so you can actually SKIP the js ALTOGETHER and wget the thing if you prefer, then you get gemini text that makes up most of the document already-- you never download the js this way, you barely get any html (which you wont even have to parse, except the line with the license-- thats only because i havent moved that inside the gemini section yet-- mea culpa) and basically to "convert" all this to gemini... its already converted. all the gemini text is already there, whether you let js PRESENT it as html or not.
its basically gemini pages with a light html/js-based gemini browser built-in to the website. but thats the fucking web for you. but if you dont have a web browser, just wget -O- will be alright. i design for wget -O- as much as possible, and gemini text is a step forward. i know rons going to talk shit about how he has "real" gemini pages, but the difference is that im pretty honest and straightforward about the compromises im presently making-- and ron prefers spin and hype.
my focus, personally, is getting away from github and systemd as much as possible. ron is going to use debian until he cant stand it anymore, and its incredible what he can stand in that regard-- given how much he pretends to hate it (so his anti-systemd readers wont know how much he bullshits them about it) and how he compares it to nazis.
thats alright, i make fun of his silly poems-- political SPIN and deliberate bullshit in poem form IS silly:
=> https://wrongwithfreesw.neocities.org/in-2008.html
and i enjoy writing parodies almost as much as ron enjoys spin:
=> https://wrongwithfreesw.neocities.org/a-muckrights-carol.html
> the boys name was "bullshit", which ebenezer thought was a terribly cruel name to give to a child-- and the girls name, he could see, was "features".
which brings me back to the real reason ron is talking about saving the internet-- because of the ultimatim he received in the past day or two.
i cant take the credit for predicting this-- that must go to another former contributor (i quote more than one, i sometimes protect the source, but im equally happy to attribute if they like-- they know im quoting them).
=> https://wrongwithfreesw.neocities.org/a-muckrights-carol.html
> he glanced at tmux, and noticed that nothing seemed to be moving at all. so he decided to contact the admin of his self-host to inquire what the problem was.
> "i took it down, ebenezer", she said. "all the best with your future endeavours!"
okay, i actually got that part wrong. what it should have said for technical accuracy, was "toodles!"
but its time to get back into the time machine, and travel back to 2016. will i inform my past self to watch out for rons bullshit?
no-- sorry, present me. you and i both know i wouldnt change a thing now. but the future of muckrights is decentralisation!
unless you can give the bastard more free web hosting, of course! ron doesnt really give a shit about the internet, just like he doesnt really give a shit about systemd. all ron REALLY cares about is getting free (as in beer) hosting, free (as in beer) labour, and free (as in beer) publicity. and waiting around for people to fix system/debibm for him, since he sure doesnt give a damn about seriously trying any alternatives for himself.
we can still pretend, though!
what can we do about decentralisation? its sort of a funny question really, but only because of the funny world we live in. most of the stuff to "decentralise" the web is actually centralised-- on github. i wont give ron any shit for dismissing it on those terms, as long as hes honest (about that point).
github is about as centralised as you can get, so the idea of developing all the decentralised stuff there is-- its about as hypocritical and silly as ron is.
of course its impossible to get away entirely from github. its going to stay impossible until a lot more people try, but ron has attacked this by pretending more people are moving than there really are (i believe so. this is going to be a hard one to prove, but i havent seen him trying to prove his point either-- im very sceptical, and its something weve both done a lot of research on. oh, and he also told people bullshit about mine, so ive already caught him downplaying the problem in terms of numbers).
what im really getting at here, is there have been many, many efforts to decentralise this or that. and thats good-- we need to work on this. i know people who work on this. i hope this article pushes them to talk more about it (if i push them too hard, theyll just tell ME to do it. and it would be so much cooler coming from them).
part of it is that people are trying to be fancy. thats sort of alright, but the internet didnt start with fancy-- and it might not get back to being decentralised by fancy either.
if you really want to decentralise, get some smaller shit (like what many more people can get access to, RATHER than the sort of high-end shit that ron enjoyed bragging about muckrights getting for hosting, until it became a sword of damocles) and start looking for ways to OFFER INFORMATION over those things, and how to connect things together. really if everybody was doing that, we would already have better tools for it. its not like everybody is just waiting around for the perfect tool-- they dont care in the first place, thats the problem.
none of this is a priority for ron though, getting people to read his stuff is. so hes going to keep looking for whatever accomplishes that-- and all this talk of decentralisation will be more of a gimmick.
youll know when decentralisation is happening since there will be MORE NODES in MORE PLACES. but rons concept of that is the same as it is for more centralised hosting-- going around and asking people to do free shit for him. in return, they get: bullshit.
you wouldnt think that nature and technology were so entertwined-- giafam want centralisation because they ARE monopolistic and centralising, its their "thing". the fediworse doesnt end up being very decentralised (and ron and i both grew tired of how unreliable it is, but its fancy bloated bullshit based on github) and the people who ruin, or run most of the fediworse are people interested in controlling it-- so making it work in a decentralised way, controlled by individuals? thats not a priority. enabling censorship and recentralisation is, its such self-bastardisation. but so are the people who care the most about it.
decentralisation happens because people stop being monopolies. for example, the default license of muckrights (the same one this article uses-- and pretty much has to use) lets you mirror the article, no problem. so theres no copyright monopoly.
what makes muckrights a monopoly is the monopoly ron maintains with lies, spin and fabrications. so his form of decentralisation will also be like that. he will go around asking people to create and host ipfs nodes, and get back to business as usual, until he can find another very large webhost.
as for undoing the bloat that makes muckrights so vulnerable and "require" such overkill for doing hosting, the reasons ron hasnt killed that are:
1. not enough time
2. he doesnt REALLY care about those things (not as much as he says)
3. when he grooms people to do this work for him, he moves on to schmooze other people too quickly and screws over the people helping him, encouraging them to leave
4. he doesnt listen enough to people that know how to fix this stuff, and doesnt really trust the people who know more about it than he does-- so they have to argue too much (as they would with a pointy-haired boss) to do stuff for him
people say dogs look like their owners. technology also looks like its owner-- giafam tech looks like giant machines that we have no control over. the fediworse looks like a bunch of silly bloated bullshit that is as much about control as not. muckrights looks like a bunch of bullshit that nobody has really taken proper care of for a long time, which is maintained as much by suckers enlisted to "volunteer" (dont be pissy, im including myself in that description) under false pretenses as it is by ron himself-- because thats exactly what it is.
you can put wine in a new wineskin, but that wont do anything for an alcoholic who just wants to use people. im not saying ron is an alcoholic, i doubt it really but i honestly dont have a clue what/if he drinks. (hes probably mentioned it in chat, i could try looking it up, but i havent and its not the point). youll be able to trace the solution back to whatever false premise ron attracted someone to help him with-- such as the article i just made fun of here.
ron is addicted to bullshit. whatever he does with muckrights will also-- of necessity-- be about as much bullshit as he is. its the muckrights way!
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org