If you have been to Ghacks lately you may have noticed that something is amiss. In short: Ashwin and I are no longer authors at the site.
The longer picture: Softonic decided to sell Ghacks to another company. We, the authors, have not been approached by the new owner and do not really know who bought the site. It did not help that I was on vacation when all of this happened.
I can’t get into any specifics, because I do not know more than I just told you. However I can tell you that you won’t find new articles by myself or Ashwin on the site going forward.
As far as plans are concerned, I plan to publish the usual articles and some more here on this site going forward. You can expect the usual coverage here, including about Windows security updates, Firefox and other browsers, AI, tweaks and tips, software, and more.
Think of it as the “new Ghacks”, but better 😉
There will be some changes coming in the next weeks. I plan to add a “support” option, which you can use to throw some dimes my way, as this site will remain free of traditional ads and tracking.
I may also promote certain services of products that I can recommend highly and use myself. If that happens, it will be marked clearly.
If things go really well, I have hopes that I could get Ashwin on board again. In the meantime, if you know of a tech site that is looking for a capable writer, feel free to let me know and I pass it on to Ashwin.
Wow, the only articles I read on gHacks were ones by you or Ashwin. The latest article from you is dated December 18, but perhaps it was in the queue before the change. I hope they bring both of you back, and I will definitely be watching this site for news.
Hi Deron, yes, I scheduled some articles before I went on vacation and they cut off access to the site shortly after my vacation started. But the scheduled posts ended this week, so, no more post by us going forward.
Thank you, Deron. But I’m not sure that they will re-hire us. They had a chance, and chose not to.
TechSpot is usually looking for new talent!
I’ll keep an eye on their site, thank you.
Thank you for the kind words, Martin. I still can’t believe what happened.
I had been following Ghacks since 2008, which is when I started using Firefox. Your articles taught me a lot about it, tech, and privacy in general. Just imagine my joy when I got a chance to join Ghacks in 2019, it was incredible.
We had a good run, didn’t we? I’d like to think we were finally expanding our borders by covering macOS, iOS, Linux, games, etc.
And it stopped, just like that. I can’t even imagine how much this could have hurt you, the person who founded the blog 20 years ago. It isn’t fair to you at all, it’s extremely disrespectful. They should have at least given you an opportunity to say goodbye to the readers. I miss them too.
I for one only visit ghacks to read what you and Ashwin write.
If you need to fill that (pointing to the right) sidebar with ads to support this site and pay Ashwin to work here, I wouldn’t mind.
Thank you, for all you two have shared over the years. I hope to keep enjoying more going forward.
Thank you, Tachy. That is very kind of you, but hopefully ads on this site won’t be necessary. I’m thinking of starting my own blog if nothing else comes up. Let’s see what happens.
If you do, be sure to post a link for us here!
Sure! 🙂
“Think of it as the “new Ghacks”, but better.”
We will. Chipp.in already is as far as I’m concerned given the circumstances.
The now “old” Ghacks, without you, Martin, without Ashwin, has of Ghacks but the name.
I just cannot admit how the new owner of Ghacks seems to have had such a rude attitude in neither explaining to you and Ashwin at least the outcomes nor keeping both of you as the (main) writers.
For my case I had stopped commenting on Ghacks a few months ago when the site required access to [sdk.privacy-center.org] to allow a user’s words, yet I continued to read the articles. I may carry on reading, but it won’t be systematically, for sure.
Long live Chipp 🙂
Ah, so that’s why you stopped commenting there. Well, it’s good to see you here, Tom. 🙂
Yes, [sdk.privacy-center.org] is an odd place, hard to find any information about it, but what is sure is that behind the name it mainly serves as a centralized platform accessing several servers of which not all are required and most are blocked by either uBO or OS-level blacklists used by DNSCrypt-Proxy. In no case is it a privacy enhancer. Most sites I know will run perfectly well without this ‘privacy-center’ though some are limited, e.g. no video given connection to video CDNs are managed by this ‘privacy-center’ : these sites could establish connections to these CDNs without transiting via the ‘privacy-center’. And some other sites will have limited features, such as commenting on “old” Ghacks. The ‘privacy-center’ seems to be conducted by the “mix the good with the bad” principle : facing such combinations I prefer to miss the best and avoid the worst. Not to mention privacy when being followed by a 3rd-party server is not my cup of tea, another reason I block systematically 3-rd party connections with uBO and accept only those which are technically required. 3rd-party connections to Google, Facebook and a few others which flourish on many sites are NOT required for a flawless page rendering and full-featured Website. You know (or not), I am deeply and increasingly fed-up with the rudeness of too many sites which consider as normal to track users, to lay cookies and fill storage when there is NO reason to do so. Fed-up as well with a trending dishonesty among an increasing number of people, as if they were in a “survival’ environment, focusing on themselves and adopting behaviors they never would have accepted maybe ten years ago. I’m happy not to be a youngster because, frankly, I perceive but heavy storms at the horizon …
Anyway, we still have honest, talented humans around. Fortunately.
Interesting, I think it may be used for the cookie consent popup. Well, I have uBlock configured to block those, so I never saw any.
I noticed over there that “Arthur K” seems to be the new guy that likes to push advertisements/deals without labeling them as such.
Although I’m starting to wonder if he is actually AI. He reviewed the Anker battery pack but didn’t identify it in any kind of way, as if an AI were explaining a product that the prompter already knew about, and other of his posts seem “AI Bland” and are structured in just like an AI would write.
And watch out for the links in the comments there. They seem to have approved spammy comments. Not sure what’s going on.
Thanks for the heads up. Removed the ghacks bookmark, which was an eyesore anyway since its icon stopped showing ages ago.
Those spammy “Arthur K” posts were a sign that something was up at ghacks (and @Tony, I agree, sounds more AI than human)… anyway, Martin, no problem to delete my ghacks bookmark, as I’m just as happy to read your posts here. I wish you and Ashwin good fortune going forward.
Thank you icblorg 🙂
A follower of GHacks since late 2007 I’m glad I found this another place of Martin’s last year. It’s a sad end for GHacks indeed. Thanks for the 20 years of tips and valuable information!
I have just removed the subscription from the RSS feed and urge others to do the same – with this attitude chances are the site will serve unwanted or malicious content, likely sooner than later…
An idea : a page with a list of static links to original GHacks posts archived on archive.org will be more than useful. I can mine out the titles and links from the feed database so at least I probably do such a list for myself…
Martin, when I caught this entry last week, I was a bit puzzled myself to hear of the news, much less that you were kept completely out of the loop! Between this site and Ghacks of late itself, both of which I have routinely consulted for my day job, you and Ashwin have been 200% helpful with your articles. Already budgeting for when that “Support” button goes up on the website…
Well, after reading this post I deleted the gHacks bookmarks from my browsers right away. There were only two dedicated writers whose posts I enjoyed reading, and both of them are apparently no longer part of this blog. It’s outrageous to see how (deserving) people are treated these days.
Look ahead, guys, and make something great out of chipp.in!
By the way: Merry Christmas and all best wishes for 2026 to all of you!
Quite sad and disrespectful of them. At the very least they owe you an explanation. All the best to you and Ashwin regarding your future endeavors.
It took me awhile to figure out what was going on at gHacks, but I’m also now out. I’ll keep the website bookmarked to look up useful old posts, but I have used a Ublock Origin filter to block all posts except for those by Martin and Ashwin. The new and useless bot post format will without question fail, and the failure will be well deserved. Farewell to gHacks.
Maybe you shouldn’t have sold the site to * in the first place.
I removed the slur, please do not use it again. Things did not turn out as well as they were supposed to. It is unfortunate that the new owners do not need our services anymore, but it is their site now, so nothing that I can do about other than to move on.
This scammy & unethical behavior is FAR TOO common now-a-days.
It is common to one day wake up and realize your access is restricted/barred. Your e-mail address doesn’t work and neither do the synced services. Then comes the “We Care, but not really” phone call from an unknown HR/Legal, or at worse, a system-generated email to your personal e-mail ID “informing” you about the “latest development”.
The Corporatization and Enshitification of Online text-based Platforms, and mistreatment (and/or exploitation) of Writers is now as common as gluent-free bread.
On one hand, Consolidation is happening rapidly, which DIRECTLY results in “Restructuring” exercises (firing talent), and on the other hand, AI Slop is being generated and served as “Happy Meals”.
Yeah, I won’t be going back to Ghacks again. I rarely posted, but would visit daily, usually multiple times each day. Change sucks. I’ll keep tracking the whereabouts of each of you and hope you both do well.
Had no idea until yesterday that ghacks had gone in a new, horrible direction. Posted there and suddenly realized that everything was suddenly from “Arthur K”. Someone posted in one of the articles that you had started up elsewhere but didn’t link. Found you by looking for your name.
Will never read or post on ghacks going forward. Bookmark removed and exchanged with this one. Let the old site rot!
Martin? Bro? Add some flashy colors and spruce this thang up!!! XD
Oh, and bring Ashwin back. He posts reasonable gaming articles.
See if you can scare up Shaun too! LOL
Yes, it is a sad development. I would love to bring Ashwin back, but this site is unfortunately not making enough at this point to pay him.
It took me awhile to find out what happened, but I got there in the end. Finally enough changes with the site prompted me to investigate and the “About gHacks” page does mention that Martin is no longer affiliated with the site. Martin, you might want to change out the link on your Facebook from ghacks.net. It was one of the places I looked at on my way to finding this page.
Hi Cassette, thanks for the tip, just did that! Welcome to a new home 😉
Martin, I can’t believe this news.
I have learned so much from you in the last two decades. I am not that interested in technology as such, but obviously I need to know a little about it in order to function in daily life, and I am certainly interested in trying to have as much privacy and security as I can, so I have found your well-written, thoughtful, fair, helpful articles very informative and enlightening, and I always counted your former site as one of the first sources to turn to when I needed to figure something out in this area of life.
I went to your former site today to look something up, and at the end of an article I noticed something about how you “are no longer with the site” and I thought that maybe you had retired from it after an amazing run of 20 years and I must have missed a farewell article with hundreds of reader comments below it that paid tribute to your invaluable contributions to society — so I went looking for that farewell announcement, and didn’t see anything. Just a final column about something ordinary… no reader comments about what had happened… the “about” page had no information…. Then I worried that something tragic had happened to you! So I searched on Reddit– no mention of this (which surprised me). I searched on a search engine– nothing (except for links to your x page etc., and I am not on social media sites, so I usually can’t see people’s pages when I click those links). Finally, I looked at the Wikipedia page for the former site and down in the list of references, the first reference is a link to this page at “chipp.in”, where you explain what went on in December. I am amazed that it was so hard to find out information about this!
Please make it easier for people to find your current website and current “place of work”.
First of all, remove the links on your own webpages that still point people to the former site. A commenter above mentioned one that you acknowledged, and I just saw a minute ago here on chipp.in that on this site’s “about” page you still say that you are the lead author of the former site, and you link to that site from this site — please edit that!
I was not aware of chipp.in before the Wikipedia article on your former site referred to it in the list of references, but this website’s address does not refer to your personal name, or to your location in Germany/Europe, or to the subject of technology, so I was hesitant to even click on it.
I would suggest that you take advantage of the astronomical amount of “goodwill” and “brand reputation” that you have built up over the last 20+ years in the technology field, and put your own name on a website — which will help to attract the thousands and thousands of people who are probably looking for your online presence and who want to follow your current work but simply can’t find you (like I couldn’t find you earlier today). You could always have that as an overarching internet home for yourself and link this site from there.
I remember when you were exploring Patreon as a way to get paid for what you do at the former website, and after seeing your example of putting that into place, a few years later, I pointed out your example and suggested doing the same thing to another technology writer whose site I had learned a lot from, Woody Leonhard at “askwoody.com”, as a way for him to monetize his site a little and be able to continue his great service. I think Woody did put Patreon (and/or similar payment mechanisms) up on his site for a couple of years after that, and then ended up selling his site in order to retire and move out of the United States.
I am sure that it was such a shock to return from your vacation last month and be presented with this terrible turn of events — to have been “unceremoniously dumped”, and treated absolutely appallingly, unprofessionally, cruelly.
You appear to be a humble and non-self-aggrandizing person (which is great), but THIS is the time to marshall your forces, talents, personal industry reputation, and brand recognition, and put together an easily-accessible, search-engine-friendly “home” for the various strands of your work (including this present site and the other places you contribute) where people from all over the world can EASILY find you, and continue to learn from you, and financially support you (and your valued colleagues such as Ashwin)!
The people who pulled the rug out from under you last month, and are benefiting from your intellectual property and hard work of the last 20 years [yes, I understand that, with your eyes wide open, you did arrange some kind of sale of your former site to them a few years ago, and that their actions last month are probably technically legal, if not honorable or moral]… well, they may have full control of all of THAT from now on, but they should NOT be able to dampen your presence down and stop people from knowing what happened to you by their acting like you had simply fallen off the edge of the earth and disappeared with no one noticing and like it was not going to be a great loss to all of your readers,
so please be strategic now and think big-picture (and be a little self-aggrandizing!) about how to use your name and brand recognition and industry contacts to strengthen your current situation and shape your current/future internet presence, to rightfully honor your amazing knowledge, past work, future work, and sheer benefit that you provide to society.
Hi, thank you for your kind words. I have removed the links from the about page!
ghacks out chipp in, works for me. I dont post much anymore but sure glad to see your stil at it Martin. Was hard to find you.
Welcome 🙂