{"id":8248,"date":"2018-09-06T09:07:01","date_gmt":"2018-09-06T17:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8248"},"modified":"2018-09-07T05:53:05","modified_gmt":"2018-09-07T13:53:05","slug":"aaaand-were-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8248","title":{"rendered":"…Aaaand We’re Back."},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

You may\u00a0 have noticed some breakage here at rifters.com over the past week or so: little black diamonds where punctuation should be, graphics failing to load, broken fonts and formats on some of the Blindopraxia pages.\u00a0 I think the whole site may have vanished briefly, although I can’t be sure.<\/p>\n

Basically, the conjunction of some crappy customer service from my previous ISP (Dreamhost) and what looks to be Canada’s imminent caving on a trade deal that not only builds on all the worst aspects of NAFTA, but also bundles the worst elements of the (back from the dead) TPP, finally inspired me to get off my ass and move this site offshore. I’m kind of ashamed it took me this long.<\/p>\n

It’s been untenable for a while now, what with the 5-Eyes policy of you spy on our people and we’ll spy on yours<\/em> to get around domestic privacy legislation.\u00a0 But the news filtering out from NAFTA suggests that while Canada bitches and moans about Dairy and sunset Clauses, nobody’s raising a peep about IP rules that w0uld essentially give corporations US-style carte blanche<\/em> to shut down any site, even in Canada, that they don’t like. (To cite one example: “Notice and Takedown” provisions allow corporations to force the removal of websites merely accused<\/em> of copyright violation, no evidence required.\u00a0 A number of activist sites\u2014 including OpenMedia<\/a> and the Electronic Frontier Foundation<\/a>\u2014 were recently hit<\/a> by DMCA takedown notices alleging that they hosted illegal copies of songs by an Australian musician whose work did not, needless to say, actually appear anywhere on the targeted sites. What does<\/em> appear on those sites is a lot of editorializing and campaigning against things like NAFTA and the DCMA. It is tiredly ironic that their efforts to fight censorship are being censored using the very techniques they’re trying to raise the alarm about.)<\/p>\n

Obviously, North America is no place to run a website if you want the option of speaking either freely or privately.\u00a0 The EU isn’t looking much better<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Iceland, though.<\/p>\n

Here’s a country that has freedom from censorship embedded in its constitution. A country that actually jailed its bankers after the Crash of ’08. A country almost entirely energy self-sufficient (well, except for its fishing fleet), a country with the greenest carbon footprint on the planet, the third-safest nation<\/a> on the globe for data storage and privacy (after Switzerland and Singapore).<\/p>\n

It’s also the place I’d like to end up when global civilization collapses.\u00a0 I have no actual strategy to move me or my family there just yet, but at least I can move rifters.com. So that’s what I’ve done: moved to the Icelandic hosting service called (please God let it be ironic) 1984<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It hasn’t been a seamless transition. Things got broken during the move; a few things still are. I’m gonna be poking around backstage for a while yet, trying to figure out how the <h1> tag on the Sotala and MilZomb pages got screwed up when they worked just fine back in California. Gremlins may have been involved. But for the most part, we’re up and running again, away from the grubby little paws of Trumps and Trudeaus.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Thunder Thighs, my ass. This is gorgeous<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

This is basically a test post to make sure everything’s running as well as I hope. If you’ve made it through all the house-keeping, though, here’s a very cool picture to reward your patience: the cover art for the Polish edition of Freeze-Frame Revolution<\/em>, by an entity going by the name of Dark Crayon<\/a>. It is amazing.\u00a0 I loved it on first sight, and continue to love it even after The BUG remarked that it looked as though Sunday Ahzmundin was being squeezed between Giant Thunder Thighs. Even that<\/em> could not stop me from loving it.<\/p>\n

Also I think I may have misconfigured Google Analytics back in North America. I’m not using it here (another long-overdue transition), but according to the stats on this new 1984 board I’ve been underestimating my web traffic by an order of magnitude.<\/p>\n

I should be less humble.<\/p>\n

Late-breaking Update [0900 EST]:<\/strong> sometime since “qa” left their lonely comment, it has apparently become impossible to post comments on the ‘crawl. I have no idea what the problem is\u2014 at least, I haven’t touched anything backstage in the interim. I’ve reached out to tech support. In the meantime, if any of you have thhe time and inclination, how about trying to post a test comment, and\u2014 assuming it fails\u2014 dropping me a line via the Contact link to mention the symptoms?<\/p>\n

Still a few bugs in the system. Thank you for your patience.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may\u00a0 have noticed some breakage here at rifters.com over the past week or so: little black diamonds where punctuation should be, graphics failing to load, broken fonts and formats on some of the Blindopraxia pages.\u00a0 I think the whole site may have vanished briefly, although I can’t be sure. Basically, the conjunction of some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-public-interface"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8248"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8254,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8248\/revisions\/8254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}