If you look at "old" internet: fidonet telnet bitnet ftp fsp wais netnews whois++ gopher relaynet ... i mean irc is one of the only ones that is still used, and mostly as it was 35 years ago. Pretty impressive.
People love knocking on IRC but people are still on it, still using it...
But, seriously, that got me curious. There are many protocols from that early era that are still with us today. NTP, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, BGP, SNMP, NFS, ICMP. If you allow the 1990's as counting as "old" we can add SSH and SSL, DHCP, LDAP.
I started on the internet in 1991... used ftp, usenet, email, irc, telnet, gopher.
gopher is the one that seems really dead. ftp is still pretty common, usenet is still active (though maybe just for "Linux ISOs"), telnet lost its main use which was for remote shells and muds/moos but still use it from time to time for random devices that support it. IRC only had 400 or so active people on it at any given time. I haven't really used it in the last decade. The web destroyed gopher almost instantly.
Actually, its just inertia and lack of reliable forum hosting,
the actual "killer app" that replaced volatile and unarchivable
chat content, but no one learned from it and people flocked to Discord,
which is even more hostile to archiving/scanning chat history.
I am starting to wonder is archiving or scanning history even possible with how hostile internet has become. Especially when so many tech companies will scan and download same content countless times without single care of damage or cost the cause...
Just imagine hosting that history on your instance for users and then some vibecoder without care in his work starts scanning it automatically every 5 seconds just in case it might have changed...
Yeah, but the major upgrades for things like telnet and ftp were adding appropriate encryption layers and improved authentication to include things like certificates. IRC shoehorned those into the connections awkwardly but it's still not often mandatory and registration is painful.
Also usenet is still very popular but mostly used for file sharing.
> Yes. usenet, however, used to be social media. It was like text-only reddit.
Except, unlike Reddit, it wasn't centralized nor owned by a single corporation.
Usenet users did not have to obey the rules and whims of any corporation and there was thriving ecosystem of feature rich, free and open Usenet clients.
I really miss having my own killfiles and regex search abilities that were common on Usenet clients, but is missing from the Reddit clients and its web UI.
ActivityPub is essentially this in "modern" times with "modern" sensibilities (e.g. accounting for low power mobile devices that are going to hold open only a single connection and query for posts.) You can pretty trivially killfile whatever you'd like too. I vibecoded a super basic AP "client" that just speaks AP vocabulary to fetch posts from users I have in a JSON file.
I don’t believe it was or continually is limited to text only, but I do believe we had netiquette back then which helped to reconsider spamming internet with media and other decorators, only to have it all forgotten 72h later
Usenet could exist only because people could behave, unfortunately. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of shitfest Usenet as a social media platform would turn into today.
The eternal September complaint comes to mind, but even eternal September was a jolly walk in the park compared to what modern social media has turned into.
> Usenet could exist only because people could behave, unfortunately. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of shitfest Usenet as a social media platform would turn into today.
Spam filtering has improved a lot since the Usenet days, but even if it hadn't we had killfiles to deal with the spam and filtering out harrasers. Doing this today would be even easier with the help of LLMs.
This, which is not uniform across servers, and has more work if you want to do certificate-based auth. Additionally getting a nick cloak is good opsec and also extremely not uniform.
They are not confused. A lot of companies still use FTP internally and for B2B. Many people would be very uncomfortable if they knew how much companies including banks, payment systems, etc... and governments still depended on FTP and clear text authentication. That's even before broaching the subject of which of the applications and daemons in use are being actively maintained.
Hosting files to be downloaded via web browser isn’t what it’s useful for. If you’re going to do that, you might as well use… a web server.
FTP is useful for bidirectional file exchange over the Internet. There are other protocols, but they all have drawbacks. SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access. SMB and NFS don’t really work so well over the Internet and are a pain to configure for multiple users. For setting up accounts dedicated to transferring files, you really can’t beat FTP (or really FTPS, which is just FTP over SSL).
> SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access.
Security-wise you set it not to run commands (and maybe chroot) and you're done, right? And difficulty-wise isn't granting SSH access very similar to FTP access?
It’s way more of a hassle than that. Things like per-user chroot, managing permissions, restricting access to port 22… all much more difficult with SFTP. With an FTP server like vsftpd, you can just create virtual users and assign them home directories, then everything is just owned by the user running the ftp daemon process.
Those things don't require noticeably more code to automate with SFTP than with FTP, or need a more complicated interface. Maybe nobody has written that code to make the management easy? Someone that cares about security should then.
Google suggests that some servers can do SFTP with virtual users.
FTP is perfectly secure though when run over SSL (FTPS), so why not use the protocol that’s already designed for file transfer with the server that makes it easy?
Fair point, but I would assume the AWS S3 by itself is bigger than the FTP/SFTP traffic globally including banks. No idea if it’s true, and I’m not sure we can get reliable stats on this
There is still a niche community of people running Gopher servers. I wrote a small basic implementation of a Gopher server in Python before for fun once and it hosted a Gopher hole for a few years. I doubt even one person actually looked it at besides me, but the RFC is simple and can be implemented pretty fast.
I thought of that ... you could put it in the list but I wouldn't unless you're talking cron. I mean when I started it was like mail [email protected] and bob would open up pine or emacs and not get any spam or have to do anything crazy and we'd have a conversation.
that modality is long dead. we still have email but it's not that same ... I however could take mirc from like 1995 and still use everything.
I've got something similar to this using cheap ONVIF security cameras and kasa smart bulbs. I have an nvidia card process the capture and for the smart speaker I use just a microphone and speaker hooked up to a normal computer. The architecture is spread across many machines and it's nowhere close to this realtime. Also the video capture is fairly lousy because the lighting and resolution and coverage isn't great. The cameras can change the lighting to try to get a better shot. (well it's qwen with toolcalls)
I also have (I think, haven't counted recently) 12 cameras that are all ballhead so they move around and look for me when I say something to the smart speaker.
But I didn't think of the projector ... there's ~$30 ones ... might be worth buying a few.
Getting this level of response, feedback and accuracy, that's the real magic. The latency is garbage. I'm just using cheap OTS hardware though.
Anyone can do this ... it's not that expensive. Smart bulbs are cheap, wifi cams are cheap, omnidirectional usb microphones are cheap and projectors are cheap too. I'm talking like ~$100 total
still researching them ... some of these look like garbage ... i'll come back to this thread in a few days when i find something decent. I don't want high nits or resolution, just want to be able to send pixels and not have it be noisy and get a response in under 500ms.
Seriously, if a single politician stepped forward and said "i'll bring down ram prices" they could then shoot a puppy and call me a slur and I'd still go out and doorknock for them.
Look at the financials of these companies, they're all making obscene margins and do they plan to increase production? No. Micron is doing a stock buy back to pump the price of their share.
There's sanctions, tarrifs, and a DOJ who doesn't give a shit. Until we can fix that the insanity will continue. Phones will be unaffordable. Laptops will be obscene. Gaming consoles will be thousands of dollars. Desktops will be dead.
If you're waiting for some David Ricardo equation to happen, tough cookies, it's not coming.
The market is legally locked down and we're in hostage pricing mode.
And what's the story? You can't afford electronics because we're using it to build robots to take your job? I mean ...
Micron has 3 brand new fabs currently under construction, 2 Boise, 1 in New York as the first of 4 planned for a campus.
Plus expanding other existing facilities.
These things take ~3-5 years from breaking ground to full production. You'd have had to anticipate the current demand years before it happened in order to be bringing production on-line before 2030 or so.
Samsung and HK Hynix also have fabs under construction and planned.
CXMT started 11 years ago and only now is reaching any real volume. If they decided a year ago to react to the current demand cycle they'd be 6-7 years out.
Not much you can really do to wish for more fabrication to exist on any timeline not measured in fractional decades.
Could they do more and react quicker? Probably, but everything I've read on the subject seems to point to 3 years is absolute bare minimum if you happen to have a shovel ready project with the land bought, local permitting completed, infrastructure extended to the site, and a skilled workforce already in place. They could suspend buy-backs/dividends today and dump it all into building production and there would be no material impact until around 2030.
> The Micron CEO just recently said this is the exact plan
CEO simply stated the demand pressure will not go away through 2027, and supply will not increase until around 2028 when currently under construction fabs start shipping volume. The article does not support your statement.
You can see the SKUs they base the prices on by hovering over a data point, and the products just don't generally represent the market. Oftentimes the whole market is represented by some bottom of the barrel legacy memory, single stick in some warehouse. During the last years DDR3 and DDR4 haven't gotten as expensive as the current generations, and I think the memory compatible with current systems should represent the market rather than a Toshiba Satellite 4 GB extension kit.
> CXMT started 11 years ago and only now is reaching any real volume. If they decided a year ago to react to the current demand cycle they'd be 6-7 years out.
It's taken them this long to catch up to the DDR5 standard. They've only recently been through qualifications to be a DDR5 supplier for the big boys.
> Every Major Motherboard Maker Now Validates CXMT DDR5
I'm fully open to the idea of having to fly to China to buy hardware. If we're seeing $25,000 US prices versus like $4,000 in China, might as well go visit the great wall and have a vacation.
The second Micron boise fab hasn't even broken ground yet, they are still working on the first one. So don't expect these things to be completed in parallel.
Some of my family is pretty happy, though, with the job security as they are pretty convinced these projects are all going to take much longer than what's being stated publicly. Micron is saying the first chip from the new fab will be in 2027... though they also predicted it'd be 2026. The date seems pretty slippy.
Anyone who has been around the semiconductor industry since the last century will remember various huge fabs e.g. in Arizona that were partially built but never finished due to oversupply by the time the walls and roof were done.
If memory prices cool, in about 2 years, Micron will stop new projects, they have done it before.
Especially given CXMT has been able to scale up much faster than what most people expected, only reason their isn't a bigger impact is modern HBM is hard to CXMT even today.
We are likely to see supply double in the next 3 years, but demand even out with optimizations, cooling of data center demand, and most importantly moving some of the dram to flash demand instead which is much easier to produce and scale.
Capitalism eats itself this way. Second and third order effects will collapse the demand.
You need to keep the market healthy, not some insane Bitcoin style HODL pump - that's how you get wrecked.
I mean I'm not a neoclassicalist but I've read all of them. I'm in consensus with them here. There's a bunch of theories on what a healthy market is but what we're currently seeing matches none of them.
It's short term profitable but long term disastrous, especially in a world where new mathematics and techniques could literally collapse the demand overnight.
Imagine if some paper hits arxiv and the 256 GB requirement for some model now becomes 64. Woops!
Some clever trick about how attention heads and context Windows work could potentially slash a bunch of requirements by giant margins and all they're doing is firing the starting gun at that global race with every obscenely priced unit they sell.
But if prices were reasonable, this wouldn't be an apocalypse. It'd be fine. Consumers wouldn't rush to 64GB, they'd say " Cool I can multitask now at 256" or " great I can do horizontal scalability' or something else.
But no they created the market conditions so now what would happen is the consumer will immediately flip the 192GB they don't need on eBay, hoping to snatch a profit before the prices tank and the second hand market will be flooded the rug will be pulled out from the luxury pricing and everyone will get screwed.
This has happened in electronics markets before. Many times.
When Engels talked about the grave diggers of capitalism they were looking at it through a 19th century labor/manufacturing lens but arguably this same dynamic is at play here.
What "second- and third-order effects" do you suppose will collapse the demand for RAM? The people complaining most loudly about RAM costs are the people who want to run local models; if that becomes popular it will supercharge RAM demand, because locally-hosted models can't parallelize runs from many users the way cloud-hosted ones can. I don't see any slackening in RAM demand at any point in the foreseeable future, even if the big AI companies all go bust.
> The people complaining most loudly about RAM costs are the people who want to run local models
This is a tiny percentage of the population.
Samsung is cutting phone production because of RAM prices.[1] The consumer market is badly affected: budget phones, laptops, general electronics.
The budget segment of sub $100 devices in India has been almost wiped out. Manufacturers cannot afford to spend 50% BOM on RAM+storage. Unless employees are getting a 15-20% wage rise this year, I expect a similar situation in most places.
Between the engineered conflict in the ME triggering O&G price rises, and stratospheric RAM pricing, the situation is pretty bad.
This is all hypothetical and debating hypotheticals isn't productive so let's roll back to markets.
Let's say ram used to cost $100 and now that same unit costs $1000. You paid say $500x1,000 for that unit during the price increase or some price where you can currently flip for profit.
You have a very expensive data center and you're in debt financed on the premise that you have these special computers.
Now a new technique comes out and it turns out you only need 1 memory unit for something that used to require 8 or 4 or some meaningful multiplier.
This stuff happens all the time. It's why we don't use BMP files on websites or serve giant MOV files on YouTube. It's why postgres queries are faster now than they were 10 and 20 years ago.
You rent out your machines. You need to service your debt.. Demand may 8x overnight to accommodate but you have a monthly bill to pay and that's unlikely. It's likely going to drop.
Think about it. Your customers are paying maybe $10,000 a month and serving their customers. Now they can drop that to $1,250.
On market if you were to sell some of that ram you have 100% profit right now but not for long.
Jevons paradox assumes unlimited capitalization, zero debt servicing, infinite time horizons...
We live in the real world so what do you do?
Historically the answer has been "sell that shit"
There's an aphorism for this "stairs on the way up elevator on the way down"
If we had a healthy market with sane prices where you can't flip the thing you bought for 100% profit the answer would be "create more value."
> locally-hosted models can't parallelize runs from many users the way cloud-hosted ones can
Why not? Unlike many other workloads, LLM inference actually seems pretty suitable for decentralization (effectively stateless means no availability concerns; bandwidth and latency are relatively forgiving too).
I think locally-hosted models at the org level will definitely be somewhat popular, but you seem to be talking about decentralizing for people's personal, non-business use, and I just don't think that's going to happen to any real degree.
People who say they want local runs really mean it: they want local runs on hardware in their room, not on some decentralized system which, if it existed, would almost certainly just be a worse, less-reliable version of cloud hosting. I'm not saying nobody would use it, but it sounds a lot like things like IPFS, which have also completely failed to displace either cloud storage or buying a bunch of disks for your own private use.
Some people will care a lot about keeping their data on-prem, but many others probably won't, and the former can then resell their spare capacity to the latter.
Decentralized storage is much harder, since there reliability matters a lot more as it's inherently stateful. You have to assume data loss, so you have to replicate everything; with inference, you only have to spend extra resources at failover time. Also storage can't be time-shared in the same way as compute; if it's full, it's full even when not actively accessed.
I mean I guess there's nothing left which can settle this disagreement except to see how it turns out. I'll just restate my opinion that, from a user experience and product perspective, decentralized model hosting will look like using the big labs, except worse in every way. I don't expect it to please either the people who want local control or the people who are happy using the products from the big labs now.
> Imagine if some paper hits arxiv and the 256 GB requirement for some model now becomes 64. Woops!
If you were a DRAM manufacturer, isn't this exactly the kind of thing that would make you think twice about investing years and $billions in new fab construction?
>Seriously, if a single politician stepped forward and said "i'll bring down ram prices" they could then shoot a puppy and call me a slur and I'd still go out and doorknock for them.
How many people, outside of tech geeks and megacorps care about RAM prices? And how gullible would you be to BELIEVE the politician they could actually make it happen, and even if they did, that it would extend to the average person, and not JUST megacorps/megadonors?
Phone companies have been differentiating their models based on RAM for a decade. As have laptop and desktop sellers. The reason your router sometimes randomly crashes could very well be a result of not enough memory. The reason it takes such a long time to launch some programs repeatedly is because you don't have enough memory to cache it. Swapped from your browser to an app on your phone, but when you go back to the browser the site has reset and you lost everything you were working on? Not enough memory. Etc.
I think a lot of people care about the downstream effects of memory prices, but I agree with you that they may not realize that they happen because of memory prices.
>The reason your router sometimes randomly crashes could very well be a result of not enough memory. The reason it takes such a long time to launch some programs repeatedly is because you don't have enough memory to cache it. Swapped from your browser to an app on your phone, but when you go back to the browser the site has reset and you lost everything you were working on? Not enough memory. Etc.
That might be true at micro level, but at the macro level more memory just means developers get more lazy with their optimizations, causing apps to get more bloated, eating up any gains in extra memory. There's no reason why slack needs 1+GB to run, yet people are perfectly happy to put up with it.
> How many people, outside of tech geeks and megacorps care about RAM prices?
They don’t care about RAM prices, but they do care about the price of things that have RAM in them (or even NAND), and all of them are increasing way faster than inflation.
RAM manufacturers are bidding against NVIDIA and everyone else for the same constrained supply of EUV machines. And it takes years to build more fabs. Micron has multiple fabs coming online in 2027 and 2028.
I keep arguing that memory needs more competition, and people keep pointing out that it's too slow and expensive to ramp up. But if the threshold to enter that market is so steep, that means it cannot function as a free market and requires regulation.
In this case I think investment in more production is the only option, and it needs to happen even if it is expensive and slow.
> Seriously, if a single politician stepped forward and said "i'll bring down ram prices" they could then shoot a puppy and call me a slur and I'd still go out and doorknock for them.
The situation is actually much worse and the long term consequences will start materializing soon. The wholesale theft of humanities soul is in progress. It won't be a pretty sight in supposedly civil first world countries, when the human spirit awakens. Currently we are still pressing that snooze button hard and repeatedly, as I think most are keenly and deeply aware of what needs to happen but that too will cost our souls.
If we take some time to understand how HBM memory is manufactured (with particular focus on yield risk for final packaging steps), we will hopefully learn that the current capacity crisis is not bullshit.
I guarantee Micron & friends are not intentionally orchestrating their business such that they would suffer a massively reduced chance of yielding on a per-die basis. Unless someone is actually buying HBM devices, they are not going to be making them. These are not a commodity that can be speculatively manufactured in any economically rational way.
> Seriously, if a single politician stepped forward and said "i'll bring down ram prices"
Or abolished VAT (the meaning of VAT is that you pay a "rent" for all the infrastructure used to produce the thing) and import taxes (protect your market) on stuff we don't produce in our markets anyway.
What do you think they'll do? Neither repubs nor dems will touch ai companies in a meaningful way. Anything China does wrt memory fabs week be more significant
I don't have faith in the political parties. Everything is insane. You look at platter recently? It's up 3x in 12 months, not just ssd or nvme, but straight up traditional platter.
After 70 years of decreasing computer prices all of a sudden it's gone 3x, 5x, 10x up in 1 year, we are in total clown world and saying "dur AI" is lazy and doesn't map to reality.
It's Argentina style inflation - as if Honda said "we're only making $500,000 luxury cars now. Everything under $50k we've stopped." and then those cars shoot up to $125k.
It's destroys the market, destroys the consumer, destroys the company, dismantles everything, and they do it for the short term payday.
I don't think RAM vendors have formed a cartel and I think this is knee-jerk anger without any thought. RAM is a commodity product with massive upfront capex costs, and those always have boom-and-bust cycles. At various points in the 2010s and 2020s RAM vendors were getting eaten alive by a supply glut, this would not have happened if they were a cartel.
Is it really so hard to believe that RAM prices are up because demand is simply exceeding supply, especially in a market where additional supply takes years and billions of dollars to come online? There's no need to posit cartel behavior and a fair amount of evidence that there is none.
The AI boom started in 2022. Prices rose THREE years later after 2025 sanction and tariff style legislation to protect the market during a price hike.
I got a 4090 in 2023 for 1600, a 5090 in 2025 for 2000 with 256 DDR5 for about $1,000 ... and then, after some protectionist legislation passed, these prices quickly shot to the moon.
Man I think you're just spewing word salad and a lot of what you've written is either wrong or not even wrong. The AI hype really got started in 2022, but hype on social media doesn't mean anything for RAM prices, only real buildouts do that. They rose pretty steadily until OpenAI revealed their shenanigans re: locking up a ton of supply from two different vendors with secret contracts, and that's when the takeoff really started. This is definitely scummy behavior from OpenAI (big surprise), and I actually think they arguably should see an antitrust investigation for that (not that that will ever happen), but OpenAI is a buyer; that's not the same thing as the vendors forming a cartel.
You can't say "connect the dots" at the end of a raving, mostly-incorrect post and act like you've made an ironclad argument.
There's nothing raving about it. I was trying to communicate that I've got all the hardware I want. I'm still pissed these companies are ripping people off.
It was supposed to be over by now and then they said 2027, then it's 2028, and now I hear "oh it's going to continue to rise the rest of the decade".
I'm likely going to be flying into Shenzhen to put my next computer together. The one I put together in 2025 would have cost me about $25,000 right now. I paid under $5,000.
I can round trip to China for $750. So once they ramp up production that's the strategy.
Other countries already do this. Apple and Google aren't in every country and those people buy new electronics when they travel.
The USA is soon to be on that list
You aren't engaging in good faith and there's no reason to continue with you.
I mean, just because OpenAI started it doesn't mean the vendors didn't form a cartel afterwards (or conspire together) to ensure maximum profits in a "crazy high demand" situation..
ds4 is by Salvatore Sanfilippo ... this is by what looks like a highschool child who signed up for github last week based on the commit history and artwork. Not the same thing.
I'm sick of these 4 day old vibe coded projects becoming hyped to hell while I spend a year on something and it goes nowhere
I don't know who this kid is but I've looked at the code, it's all Claude. Saying you can run on 2-bit quant with some optimization flags at 100t/s isn't like some "oh my goodness" ... it's wasting everyone's time with noise. I mean give me a break.
What are they doing? Is it Tiktok? Discord? LinkedIn?
I want to do high quality work but apparently I should be dicking around on social media
There are quite a few of these, indeed. Most of them either start of with llama.cpp (everybody's favorite to rip off, make a minor improvement to and try to establish a reputation) or vllm. But some of these actually do have something to bring to the table, for instance, by limiting the themselves to be able to focus on a smaller set of possibilities and this can lead to favorable outcomes for a smaller size of the audience. One particularly good example of this I think is 'ninfer' which mainly focuses on the Qwen family of models served up on RTX 5090's, which it does outstandingly well. Other people then go and fork that to adapt to their hardware so now there are 3090 and 4090 forks of ninfer.
Then there is the 'unified memory' branch of inference engines, the most notable of which is probably DwarfStar 4 by 'Antirez', which also started off with a lot of code from the llama.cpp codebase.
And then there is 'the rest', but even there, some of these have interesting bits and I always hope that eventually those bits will make their way back to the engine where it started.
I run both ninfer and llama.cpp, vllm is an unmaintainable mess even though there usually is a performance edge (it is great if you are serving up for commercial purposes so you can tweak it for one set of hardware and one particular model). You'd essentially need to dedicate a week or more to getting a new model up and running on a particular set of hardware if it does not nicely match with the recipes found online.
One exception is the DGX Spark series, there vllm is supported by the manufacturer and the hardware is very consistent from one box to another. But the performance isn't really there when compared to a fat PC with a bunch of GPUs. (The 200 GB/s memory bandwidth is a serious performance killer).
Same could be said about models… every now and again there’s hype around a new model, then you look at the card and it’s a 27B or 35B-A3B without a single mention of Qwen in the text.
it's going to be mostly open models running on consumer grade GPUs except for a minority of use cases. Depending on what eval you use, the best 20-30b parameter models are at about 5-8 month lag behind the frontier closed source models and that's been consistent for a while now.
There's a longer talk I give on this but briefly we are in a time period where the development of the technology is quickly outstripping people's needs and they will be satisfied by models runnable on commodity sub-$10k machines.
That threshold has arguably been met for many users over the past 6 months and it will continue to be met for the majority of use-cases in the upcoming months.
So not only does Anthropic and OpenAI have no moat - unless they have other compelling products, the demand for their token-based subscription and metering products isn't sustainable because consumer preferences go elsewhere after any product quality reaches a sufficient baseline.
Luckily there's many many options. Faster, cheaper, stronger they're there but these are all zero-profit condition qualifiers. The labs current push, and this is across the board, is to have a compelling suite of applications where people will have a preference for them or there will be some side hustle. Look at Meta muse - they have an app for your phone that will hoover up your personal data in the name of convenience. 5 million people said yes in 3 weeks.
What's the actual, concrete, material, actual reality that actually exists?
Is Hamas killing every Jewish person or is the Likud party of Israel actually killing the residents of Palestine?
Let's look at the actual material reality.
For instance, Israel intentionally destroyed all the farms and ruined the fields to grow crops. They have a naval blockade that stops them from fishing so you can't get food there either. They've cut off all external water supplies, blocked food aid from coming in and have openly said they are trying to starve the population to death. Actual, concrete, material reality, available on any news website, with interviews, videos, satellite photos, extremely well documented.
Amnesty International, Doctors without borders, Human Rights Watch, the IPC, the UN, all have been unequivocal in their condemnation of this. Even Haaretz and other Israeli newspapers have been critical of it.
There's two possibilities here: Either every international organization, news source, academic journal, independent third party, satellite, photographer,and videographer is controlled by a powerful invisible puppetmaster or reality is reality.
I know stuff like this is unwelcome but someone's gotta stand up for reality.
People love knocking on IRC but people are still on it, still using it...
reply