Just wanted to remind everyone that MacInTouch has not hosted discussions for some time now.
I am one who continues to visit Ric’s site and do so because of his variety of postings that are often helpful and sometimes catch important stories missed in the deluge of news and B.S.
While I mourn the loss of some good discussions and very useful technical solutions in the MacInTouch forums, I understand how prohibitive the costs might have been (labor, hosting/domain/equipment fees, etc.) I imagine it would be even more now.
Thank you, Ric, for everything you have done with MacInTouch.
I was worried it would turn into an Apple-bashing echo chamber, with the policeman committing the crime.
As everyone has said, including Adam, who I also value very highly, your site was wonderful for many years and I enjoyed reading it literally every day. I solved many Mac issues through its pages.
Let’s leave it here, as friends, and agree to disagree. I hope you get your site back working properly, if that is what you want.
The MacInTouch forum closed many years ago, and I have no intention of re-opening it. macintouch.com is working fine but is not currently publishing news, tidbits.com is the recommended alternative.
This reminds me of discussions I remember way back in the days of BBS’s.
Back then, operators who had strict moderation policies were often called “fascist”, usually by those who wanted to post content in violation of those policies. And the response was usually along the lines of “It’s my computer and it will present what I want it to present. If you want something else, go run your own BBS”.
And today people, for similar reasons will demand “freedom of speech” on on-line forums. To which, I have usually said something like: “It’s not freedom of speech - you can say whatever you want. It’s freedom of the press, which is only guaranteed to those who own one. If you want to post something I don’t like, start your own forum and post it there.”
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
It is worth noting that the First Amendment is focused only on what Congress may not do, and it does not specifically define what constitutes “the press”.
There has been significant litigation around the question, but overall, “the press” is interpreted in the USA as anyone with the ability to publish ideas. As technology has developed, virtually anyone can be “the press” in the United States. For example, the US Supreme Court has ruled that bloggers are members of the press. Other nations have different views, of course.
It’s interesting to read that a lot of the automated access is coming from Oracle servers. I host my stuff on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for free(!) so they’re effectively stealing from themselves if they index my content. Or maybe it just cancels out.
In addition to the free package I took the option to request access to an additional server in a different location (outside of the EU) for proxy purposes, for which I pay $2 a month. No content is hosted on that server.
In 2025 there shouldn’t be any huge expenses at all for hosting.
Of course, sometime (in the age of Alpha), Compaq bought DEC, and not too much later, hp bought Compaq. But by then, PDP-11’s hadn’t been made for four years or so.
Under the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment and other Bill of Rights restrictions on what Congress could do also applied to state legislatures.
I think Ric was just saying that he disagrees that he’s overpaying for hosting. For production services, there are a lot of extra bits that go into deciding whether the cost is reasonable or not, such as uptime, support, developer familiarity, geographic distribution, etc. Ric has made different decisions than I have, for instance, but they’re not unreasonable given his desires and constraints.
