Julian Oliver

I deploy and secure sovereign digital platforms and server infrastructure for NGOs, human rights and environmental defenders, while teaching people to do the same for those important to them | https://nikau.io

I also make and teach tech/media/electronic art, exhibiting internationally since the late 90's | https://julianoliver.com

Big tech & AI free. Local rainforest conservation when I can.

Aotearoa New Zealand, Pākehā, Tangata Tiriti, he/him, herbivore

projects: https://julianoliver.com
infrastructure: https://nikau.io
learn from me: https://courses.nikau.io
critical engineering: https://criticalengineering.org

Public Key

npub1rc8yx99dyrz0rqd0y5zu50hgwqsg0w0xqklg9l4xtej8yajyy47s68nu7f

NIP-05 Address

julianoliver_at_mastodon.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqspurjrzjkjp383sxhj2pw28m58qgy8h8nqt05zl6n9uerjwezz2lgprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntdeph4w

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1rc8yx99dyrz0rqd0y5zu50hgwqsg0w0xqklg9l4xtej8yajyy47s68nu7f

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Last Notes

2026-05-15 05:04:25 UTC

Temperature check for some on-prem #selfhosting training.
Please nerdboost.

2026-05-04 02:13:18 UTC

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Ah yes, the old trick of warming the public up to something they probably don't want by answering questions they didn't ask. That "above board" feeling.

2026-05-04 00:52:32 UTC

Delighted to report that Amazon has abandoned its plans to build a datacenter here.
The "lease-and-equip" model they're switching to is a lot easier to get rid of, when we eventually kick these digital imperialists out altogether.
I'll raise a sovereign glass of fresh water to that.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/594164/amazon-takes-45m-hit-abandons-planned-west-auckland-data-centre
#privacy #datasovereignty #imperialism

2026-05-01 08:38:44 UTC

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I went through a bunch of VMs post patch and found one that had algif_aead loaded & so the PoC passed.
If that module is loaded, you're still vulnerable.
EDIT, for Debian family:
Blacklist like so:
```
modprobe -r algif_aead
```
Then put this into a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-aead.conf:
```
blacklist algif_aead
install algif_aead /bin/false
```
Then:
```
/sbin/update-initramfs -u -k all && reboot -n
```

2026-05-01 07:20:10 UTC

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sent through this helpful update. It appears Ubuntu web infra might be under DDoS rn https://status.canonical.com/

2026-05-01 06:23:38 UTC

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Debian's patched 6.12.85+deb13-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC seems GTG with the PoC published here:
https://github.com/theori-io/copy-fail-CVE-2026-31431/blob/main/copy_fail_exp.py
```
root@cake:~# su - eat
eat@cake:~$ vim foo.py
eat@cake:~$ cat foo.py | python3 && su
Password: su: Authentication failure
Password:
```
Bit worried about where Ubuntu is at. Ominously, their own fix announcement page seems down:
https://ubuntu.com/blog/copy-fail-vulnerability-fixes-available

2026-05-01 05:11:57 UTC

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Long fingers today, in many machines. Dozens of services patched, host machines alongside.
I've typed `uname -a` a great many times in my life, but I don't think as many in one day.

2026-04-30 21:13:39 UTC

Just kicking trying to manage my CopyFail nausea.
#infosec

2026-04-19 21:24:27 UTC

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Even faster now.
Again, these pages are randomly generated, and each line is a page request from a crawler.
To think of the energy expended at a global scale, the waste. All the money, water & minerals thrown at this. These AI companies are near DoS'ing the human web as they deep-sea trawl our content.
Computationally, infrastructurally, & culturally, it's an obscenity,
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/433/424/305/328/661/original/41100f04430ab3f4.mp4

2026-04-18 08:12:51 UTC

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It's approaching DoS at this point. This just one of the VMs, and just OpenAI's parasite.
Threading's holding up but need some more tuning of rate limits and burst. Trying sending 429's now to ask them to play nice.
To think the www was built for people.
And here we are
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/424/679/866/109/729/original/8fb981b8df279ef0.mp4

2026-04-18 05:45:55 UTC

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I've started to harvest a list of AI crawler endpoint addrs for your blacklisting pleasure.
I'll try to keep it updated. I've been fastidious with ensuring I'm only pulling those related to the known user agent, so as not to have any false positives
https://scienceispoetry.net/files/parasites.txt
It is at the same path for all contributed domains.
For instance:
https://carrot.mro1.de/files/parasites.txt

2026-04-18 02:50:20 UTC

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I have only linked them here and on the landing page, and already it's gone nuts.
These are *solely* the new domains you've donated, all in one log. These do not pertain to the project domain.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/423/428/203/341/884/original/dd71763d39ec5381.mp4

2026-04-18 02:27:08 UTC

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Thanks for all the domain donations, a beautiful thing!
Listed on the landing page:
https://scienceispoetry.net
And copied into this post:
https://carrot.mro1.de
https://car.rot.mro1.de
https://ca.rr.ot.mro1.de
https://sygrovelaw.co.nz
https://wholesaletechnology.co.nz
https://goldenageproductions.co.nz
https://kginno.eu
https://outgoing.nz
https://unbreak.nz
https://poetry.rainskit.com
https://poetry.narthur.com
https://madhattercorp.com
https://sustainable-collective.org
https://sustainable-collective.de
https://c0-cloud.de

2026-04-17 08:50:02 UTC

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Thanks all for the fine domains! I've decided to spin up a new VM and do all the site configs and TLS chain for them at once - more efficient, less prone to error. I will get onto that on my tomorrow and report back here.

2026-04-17 02:26:23 UTC

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A bit over half a million page reads a day by crawlers rn. Just to say the server is doing some good work.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/417/673/988/754/209/original/c5146299277872e8.png

2026-04-16 22:59:39 UTC

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Do you have an unused domain that you would be happy to donate to a counter-offensive against unchecked & unregulated AI crawlers that scrape human-made content to simulate & deceive for profit?
If so, pls reply to this post. Your domain would become an entrypoint to the AI tarpit & Poison-as-a-Service project below, allowing concerned public to choose to use it on their sites, helping make the project more resilient to blacklisting.
https://julianoliver.com/projects/science-is-poetry/
#ai #bigtech #tacticalmedia

2026-04-16 04:35:23 UTC

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A newcomer frantically lost in the Caves of Babble.
----
3.215.221.125 - - [16/Apr/2026:06:14:25 +0200] "GET /noodles/images/primigenous/orchiepididymitis/Lord/havent.png HTTP/1.1" 200 111459 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot) Chrome/119.0.6045.214 Safari/537.36" "-"
----

2026-04-12 21:17:41 UTC

Relieved for Hungary. The EU too. OK also the planet.
One less tireless and cruel fascist away from the controls.

2026-04-12 20:47:12 UTC

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If you're interested in learning more about implementations of resistance in this era of unchecked Big AI, direct action strategies and the techno-politics therein, be sure to check out ASRG's site (https://algorithmic-sabotage.gitlab.io/asrg/) and give them a follow here on Mastodon (@npub1mwg…zng5).
They've put a lot of heartbeats and neurons - human stuff - into this area.

2026-04-12 10:34:15 UTC

Pleased to share a page and explainer for the AI tarpit project Science is Poetry, with legal statement, rationale(s), and a few deployment notes:
https://julianoliver.com/projects/science-is-poetry/
The page may grow a bit. Just wanted to get it out the door.
#AI #bigtech

2026-04-10 19:49:20 UTC

May this sanity spread to all nations.
FWIW you can be absolutely sure there is no way the US public, gov and mil sectors would ever allow the use of non-US proprietary OS's.
We've all just normalised US tech dependency. Tireless pressure gangs of lobbyists on insane carbon miles have helped of course.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/10/france-to-ditch-windows-for-linux-to-reduce-reliance-on-us-tech/
#sovereignty #linux #floss

2026-04-10 10:21:36 UTC

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OK here goes. You get the first look at this madness.
https://scienceispoetry.net/noodles
Go easy on it. I did my best to thread & rate limit while LLM bots this very moment are lost deep inside. They never stop. It's a siege.
Link it in your sites and AI crawlers will get caught when they hit it, veering off into the maze of babble.
Going to come out & say I channeled my inner GeoCities 180% in a nostalgic grief walk back to a happier & weedier www, so that parts for us that still remember

2026-04-09 21:29:01 UTC

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GPTbot is still at it, throughout the night. It seems to have a different pattern to ClaudeBot. It pack-feeds from 2 or 3 different endpoints, and is slower, as though processing content in some way in the course of each page scrape. Its rhythm changes too, but I've not yet looked into correlation between payload size or complexity, and pattern. ClaudeBot is far faster, and has an even step as it moves through the babble. Seems to me it is solely concerned with collection.

2026-04-09 11:55:42 UTC

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I moved the project to a giant of a server, getting ready for launch.
Within 15mins (no exaggeration) of bringing up the reverse proxy, with one link in a wiki, OpenAI's gptbot has found the link and hooked into the maze. Very aggressive, so still some rate limiting to do, threading massage before it's good to go.

2026-04-08 00:46:36 UTC

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In fact now ClaudeBot has stopped reading, it switched to Anthropic's Claude 'searchbot' during the night. It seems it either gave up or decided to respect the robots.txt.
I misread that in the logs a few hours ago. The above address is in fact that of "+searchbot@anthropic.com" not "+claudebot@anthropic.com"
An interesting development.

2026-04-07 20:46:06 UTC

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Still solely ClaudeBot, a page every 2 seconds, but a new src IP of 216.73.216.37. The crawler at that addr has been at it all night. Ceaseless zombie walk through infinitely-hyperlinked randomly generated babble.
My non-Markov text seems far stickier to the ClaudeBot.

2026-04-07 11:57:33 UTC

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Rate limit in place. Seems stable and a little less like siege warfare now. ClaudeBot at least, still very much captive.

2026-04-07 11:45:20 UTC

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ClaudeBot crashed my tarpit. Working on some rate limiting at the reverse proxy to buy me time to improve the threading.

2026-04-07 11:02:34 UTC

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Claude is still going. There is now a robots.txt with clear `User-agent: ClaudeBot [...] Disallow /` and it is ignored.
I will say there's a contradiction in setting up a tarpit like this. Sure these crawlers are DoSing anyway - they're uninvited ultra-demanding company - but when you have an infinite maze it feels like volunteering for an exhaustion contest.
My end is CO2e neutral, or at least on traceable renewables. But the other end, who knows. That dimension of it cannot be avoided.

2026-04-07 04:54:33 UTC

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It is quite wild how persistent Claude is, and an eerie feeling watching it just roam ever deeper into the endless rhizome of generated linked pages. It's been like this for a couple of hours now, and is not touching any other pages on the server, solely those in the tarpit. So that PoC does seem to check out.
CPU spikes are worrying, so will need to work the threading a bit and provision a couple more cores.
It has a rhythm of ~10-15s gorging, then a pause for 20-30s, and then at it again
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/361/628/878/993/093/original/0fac94e7f618cc47.mp4

2026-04-07 02:25:36 UTC

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It hit it, but I guess decompressed in a thread. It's a 127M archive that decompresses to 128GB. The bot kept scraping for a bit and then dropped off. Difficult to know if it was a discouragement.
Strange is that soon after other IPs were reaching statistically non-guessable randomly generated URL paths, without touching the webroot or another other tarpit URL prior. They all had iOS UA strings (readily forged).

2026-04-07 01:29:27 UTC

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Running a non-Markov tarpit for half an hour on one public link, and already have Claude lost in my swamp. Waiting to see if it runs into my ZIP bomb
---
216.73.216.124 - - [07/Apr/2026:03:28:49 +0200] "GET /tarpit/until/same/drive/harmattan_leftmost_intranscalency_few_ministries_few_between HTTP/2.0" 200 10132 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "-"
---

2026-04-05 21:26:46 UTC

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After seeing ChatGPTBot blow 123 seconds on my drip-feed poison tarpit and then never come back, I got reading on how modern LLM scrapers might employ mechanisms to detect tarpits and blacklist.
During research I came across this tarpit evading scraper that provides some interesting insights into how modern LLM scrapers might do this.
https://github.com/Draconiator/Ipema
This gives me pause and has me looking at other solutions for counter-detection.
The GeoCities CSS is going nowhere.

2026-04-05 05:19:08 UTC

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Also working on a zip bomb, to randomly scatter in among the links.
Thanks to @npub1ukn…mmev I came across this excellent method, using LZ77:
https://natechoe.dev/blog/2025-08-04.html
TBH I was just going to `dd if=/dev/urandom` my way to a titanic RAM flooding *.gz, but am getting great results with the above, and with bonus site data honey inside to keep bots on the chase.

2026-04-04 09:46:39 UTC

Working on some poison-as-a-service (PaaS). Looking to launch in the next few days.
#AI #enjoythinking
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/345/772/878/134/908/original/a344ed44d6577ea9.png

2026-04-02 05:56:15 UTC

NodeJS, for all the brilliant projects out there leaning on it, has a supply chain that might as well run the length of a dark alley permanently at 2am in the club district.
https://thehackernews.com/2026/03/axios-supply-chain-attack-pushes-cross.html
Anyway, hope none of you good people are affected by this latest pox
#infosec #sysadmin

2026-03-29 21:28:38 UTC

Depicts him better than any photo
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/314/562/317/891/198/original/a7d68d75a992abaf.jpg

2026-03-26 20:23:53 UTC

Revealing piece on the scale and scope of AI-induced psychosis:
"There seem to be three common delusions [..]. The most frequent is the belief that they have created the first conscious AI. The second is a conviction that they have stumbled upon a major breakthrough in their field of work or interest and are going to make millions. The third relates to spirituality and the belief that they are speaking directly to God. “We’ve seen full-blown cults getting created”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/mar/26/ai-chatbot-users-lives-wrecked-by-delusion
#ai

2026-03-20 06:09:12 UTC

My biosphere bucket was filled today with this news. 10 Kiwi are being finally released into the forests of the Karioi Rāhui (Ruapehu) region. They were welcomed by local iwi (tribe) Ngāti Rangi before release into the land of their ancestors.
They come from a population of over 3000 at the Maungatautari predator-free sanctuary, a number brought up from just 8(!) breeding pairs over 2 decades. I did not know this wonder, despite living on the same island.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/ldr/590181/kiwi-come-home-taonga-return-to-ancestral-forest-after-30-year-effort
#conservation

2026-03-14 04:16:27 UTC

Buzzfeed's shares go from $15 to 70 cents, now approaching bankruptcy, seemingly as a result of going all-in on 'AI' generated content.
This emerging pattern does not speak to a wicked problem. Rather, it should be no surprise that people don't want to read machine-generated content that outwardly pretends to come from a person. Because it is innately &intrinsically deceptive, which people do not like, so ending trust that will be very hard to win back. If at all
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/buzzfeed-disastrous-earnings-ai
#ai

2026-03-01 19:04:41 UTC

Condemnation of the illegal attack on Iran is complicated by some Iranian people celebrating it as the beginning of liberation. An Iranian activist tells me this is further muddied by the fact many monarchists in Iran want to see the regime toppled so that the monarchy can be reinstated.
For others it will understandably seem a release from captivity.
But 'liberation' may not age well amidst a battle for control of the Strait of Hormuz & Iranian oil, US-appointed leadership etc.

2026-02-27 21:06:12 UTC

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It's here too that without some rigour and vigilance the beast can get fed on the sly. It is great to see folk depopulating BIgTech for small companies providing managed alternatives, a fine start, but don't get cosy until you know who they themselves host with.
Ask them "where will my data be stored?"
Some, many, are hosting on AWS, for instance. So when you move to their shiny new free and open source alternative to toxic tech, you've left the cell but you're still in jail.

2026-02-27 20:33:24 UTC

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I'm not saying "don't buy the US things", rather, don't invest in the enormously powerful planet-engulfing tech corporations that are openly partnering with the current US administration on their hideous projects.

2026-02-27 20:11:22 UTC

Every server deployment on Amazon's AWS, Google's GCP and MS Azure feeds the beast.
Not only do they reinforce pathways of centralisation in the topological sense, but they also invest in US supremacy geopolitically. That supremacy now openly includes a theocratic & racist, war-mongering & imperialist movement.
Every server you spin up at home or on a smaller DC, like every abandoned Google, Twitter or FB account, slows the beast down.
The 3D's:
Depopulate. Defund. Disempower.
#bigtech

2026-02-25 19:00:27 UTC

For the record, no, I don't use 'AI' in any aspect or component of the trainings I give, whether for Nikau, festivals and confs or any of the uni teaching. It is all entirely human made, from documentation, to image and video generation and comms. Always will be, even if supposedly less 'productive' one day, by some empty metric.
I personally don't use it at all.

2026-02-24 02:55:33 UTC

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Crystelle, co-director of Nīkau, said an interesting thing on this, noting that across history so many human cultures have necessarily localised expertise to meet the needs of their group, building in resilience - whether carpenter, physician, mason, blacksmith, gardener, hunter etc.
She argues that today, with a dependence on complex technical infrastructures readily abused by power, communities need to incorporate system administration & infosec into the skillbase held by the membership.

2026-02-23 20:49:00 UTC

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Here are some examples of this at work, in this case the Slack alternative Mattermost:
1. Our own instance in DE, used for online training
2. My friend's instance served from under her desk, on which I teach her students in CA
3. An instance in CH hosting thousands of environmental defenders that I deployed
4 An instance we deployed in IS hosting a US immigration support NGO, resistant to ICE warrants
There is no one deployment for all here, each instance meets the unique needs of the group

2026-02-23 20:28:49 UTC

One of the common misnomers around the migration away from toxic tech stacks is that the options are either 1) services managed by a company or 2) everyone #selfhosting themselves.
There is however an often overlooked 3rd option of community-scaled infrastructure. Here a group identifies their needs, plans & deploys to meet them. Much like a community garden, that infrastructure has people skilled & dedicated to its upkeep in providing for that group, working bees & skillshare as needed.
1/n

2026-02-17 21:37:11 UTC

Microsoft is intrinsic to the machinery of fascism in the US, and profiting from it. From minds to tools, storage to data analysis and automation, leaked files show just how deep they are in the engine room of ICE.
https://www.972mag.com/ice-microsoft-azure-leaked-files/
#BigTech

2026-02-12 20:18:32 UTC

If there is any doubt as to whether or not Musk is a white supremacist.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk-posts-january-white-supremacists
To give this person your money or to use X is to fund and nourish his influence, so doing harm to people and planet.

2026-02-06 00:00:04 UTC

Just off a call with over a dozen students in Canada.
The session was on BigBlueButton, cameras & voice, on a server hosted in Falkenstein. Chat was in Mattermost, #selfhosted at a home on a NAS in Berlin. My notes on a Nextcloud instance in Frankfurt.
Meanwhile, I'm in Aotearoa NZ, a couple of clicks from Antarctica.
A free & open source sovereign EU stack used over enormous distances & a diversity of endpoint devices.
Smooth, easy & #BigTech free. I never tire of how good it feels.

2026-02-02 00:14:43 UTC

As we guessed, it seems that despite Google saying they were not making recordings of people's voices and mining them for advertisers, they were doing exactly that.
If it was a colleague caught wiretapping the workplace, we'd have them sacked and never speak to nor trust them again. In the case of Google, it's even more personal.
No Google service is free. We are the terrain they extract from. We always pay.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-voice-assistant-lawsuit-settlement-68-million/
#bigtech

2026-02-01 21:04:41 UTC

Some sorely overdue time offgrid. Hiked into the Tararua rainforest on a fine summer day and found a spot that had been eyed before as a possible campsite: no clearing needed, close to water, sheltered, no flood plane. It was perfect.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/997/332/450/742/826/original/32b6dabc95f84ccb.jpg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/997/332/876/627/577/original/10a1cb7bbdcb94c5.jpg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/997/334/287/964/735/original/349286081aa277ff.jpg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/997/335/601/699/501/original/568032bf3afdc07b.jpg

2026-01-22 20:33:10 UTC

If you are in the US and have an Amazon Ring camera, disconnect it. The camera may be being used by ICE, by way of its participation in a Flock AI surveillance network.
Or sure, smash if it feels better.
https://futurism.com/future-society/amazon-ring-cameras-ice
https://www.404media.co/ice-secret-service-navy-all-had-access-to-flocks-nationwide-network-of-cameras/

2026-01-01 09:24:51 UTC

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Thank you!

2026-01-01 06:51:30 UTC

An enviro defense group reached out asking for my security take on using BigAI in activism work. After giving them the take (basically "don't"), I took liberty to talk about the ethics of using it in the first instance, especially in the context of human rights and climate activism.
Sharing here in case useful on the same grounds elsewhere.
#bigai #bigtech #climate #humanrights
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/818/474/826/893/443/original/d28409abcbb5df31.png

2025-12-26 21:53:20 UTC

Imran Ahmed, a British anti-disinformation campaigner & chief exec of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, has been living lawfully in the US with US family. He now faces deportation for his work holding tech giants to account for their role in proliferating & amplifying hate speech & misinformation.
He says of the sector:
"There is no other industry, that acts with such arrogance, indifference and a lack of humility and sociopathic greed at the expense of people.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/26/uk-campaigner-targeted-by-trump-accuses-tech-giants-of-sociopathic-greed

2025-12-15 18:11:16 UTC

A Moscow court has officially labelled Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot an 'extremist group'.
Founding member Nadya Tolokonnikova, now living in exile, is not phased however:
"When I was tried for the punk prayer, facing seven years in a labor camp, I told the judge and prosecutors that I was still freer than they would ever be," she said in comments sent to AFP. "In today's Russia, telling the truth is extremism. So be it – we're proud extremists, then."
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/12/15/russia-outlaws-feminist-protest-band-pussy-riot_6748524_4.html

2025-12-08 19:06:01 UTC

230+ enviro groups have written a letter demanding a moratorium on Meta, OpenAI, crypto and Google's, supersized datacenter land/water/grid grab in the US.
While encouraging, it seems the locals are already bringing the squeeze:
"At least 16 datacenter projects, worth a combined $64bn, have been blocked or delayed due to local opposition to rising electricity costs."
Water protests too, are ramping up.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/08/us-data-centers

2025-12-06 05:45:16 UTC

Also grabbed a Wio Tracker L1 dev kit. I nearly toasted it with wrong polarity on tbe JST connector (hence errm "REV"), swapped it and all good. The ribbon extension cable for the e-ink display was broke, so just connected it direct. Nice wee solar node project this will be.
#meshtastic #infrastructure #offline
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/671/025/207/154/686/original/e529a8f4308a338b.jpg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/671/025/940/917/916/original/eecc5ae920d97de6.jpg

2025-11-23 09:02:31 UTC

It's telling when invisible human workers whose job it is to proof 'AI' output, place no trust in it themselves.
One worker for Google was tasked to find the limits of the LLM software's historical breadth:
“I asked it about the history of the Palestinian people, and it wouldn’t give me an answer no matter how I rephrased the question"
And yet the same query for Israel was profuse with detail.
"We reported it, but nobody seemed to care at Google.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/22/ai-workers-tell-family-stay-away

2025-11-11 03:42:13 UTC

Today while training some sysadmins I shared this real photo of ancient Greek engineers configuring a mailserver.
On the left the brave engineer is trying to stop unauthorised pipelining through the MTA as their knee is viciously attacked by a subtly broken DKIM key. Meanwhile, their co-sysadmin is hammering away at a perfectly good Postfix sender restrictions policy, screaming "It's not DNS!", while bitten by a PTR record quietly hissing "It'ssss DNSssss".
#sysadmin #selfhosted
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/528/912/754/994/442/original/69c79c6c9886dc0d.png

2025-10-28 01:05:17 UTC

A thread asking difficult but necessary questions around Signal's dependence on AWS, & more generally the troubled narrative that scaling up somehow inevitably implies partnering with Amazon. A partner story to this is that all Internet infrastructure leans on Amazon in some way.
This is not the case, as we saw very well here on Mastodon during the outage, as those using Tor also know, & as those of us that self-host infrastructure do too.
AWS was off. We stayed on.
https://social.wake.st/@liaizon/115446955991466759

2025-10-27 20:22:29 UTC

A truly wonderful overview of the cherished Permacomputing 101 talk given at Critical Signals, by @npub1z8r…mrq6 in August:
https://100r.co/site/permacomputing_101.html
#permacomputing

2025-10-25 18:47:22 UTC

Amazon sought to hide the water use of its data centers from the public, for fear of looking bad:
"Instead, Amazon officials opted to use only the relatively smaller figure of primary use, 7.7 billion gallons, when calculating progress towards its target because of “reputational risk”, fearing bad publicity if the full scale of Amazon’s consumption was revealed, the document shows."
https://www.source-material.org/amazon-leak-reveals-true-data-centres-water-usage-secret-plan/

2025-10-21 20:41:59 UTC

I've been studying the chat app SimpleX (I have to keep abreast of these things for work) & was so over focused on the tool I did not see the hand that made it.
Thanks to a prompt from @npub1xse…lgk3, I looked into the political leanings of the developer.
The author indeed appears to be hardline, highly vocal, conspiratorial extreme right, even so far as drumrolling racist party ReformUK.
https://x.com/epoberezkin (trigger warning)
So it follows I will not be using or further supporting SimpleX Chat

2025-10-21 18:55:10 UTC

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Oh noes! I'll look into this. If I can confirm I will refrain from recommending it, and indeed not use it myself. I know very few using it.

2025-10-21 09:54:39 UTC

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Yes Delta is great. SimpleX is a nice alternative too - relative anonymity done right.

2025-10-21 05:42:36 UTC

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With Signal proving to have no failure tolerance server side, we have effectively seen Amazon could switch off Signal. Not that they would necessarily do that, but it is an extraordinary power to hold, even a lever to wield.
I'm not slighting Signal here. I use it in my work. Family, friends all use it. Folk invested trust, & depend on it.
Signal have popularised E2EE chat, brought it to the masses (spurred Meta to Double Ratchet WhatsApp). A huge contrib
The Q is: what will Signal do now?

2025-10-21 02:07:56 UTC

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Delta is really great.
I have to use many different messaging apps in my work, which is to support frontliners in the human rights and enviro defense spaces. 95%(?) use Signal, most could care less about tech, oft express platform fatigue (esp the older among them). They just want to be where everyone else is, to not think about it, and feel a bit safer. So Signal it is.

2025-10-21 00:25:19 UTC

For a really long time I have wanted a world with this in it:
- Self-host Signal server under my desk or in a network-near dc (https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server)
- Install Signal app from whatever store
- Open up app and select my alternative server
- Ask friends/family/colleagues to open up their apps and do the same

2025-10-20 21:11:48 UTC

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Also a reminder that when you give Signal money, some of that goes to Amazon. Tough, but true.

2025-10-20 21:11:11 UTC

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Disappointing to see nothing on Signal's blog as to the mass outage due to their dependence on AWS. Solely very specific social accounts. Their AWS use for serverside has not been a secret, but it would be good to have a detailed, transparent description of how far this relationship goes, if they have plans to add more resilience, decentering.
Their server side code is OSS yes, but just for audit purposes. To use it you'd need to rebuild the client apps, pointed to your instance.

2025-10-20 19:22:52 UTC

Reading paragraphs like these in front page mainstream media gives me hope tickles:
"Dr Corinne Cath-Speth, the head of digital at human rights organisation Article 19, said: “We urgently need diversification in cloud computing. The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/20/amazon-web-services-aws-outage-hits-dozens-websites-apps
#datasovereignty #selfhosted #decentralisation

2025-10-20 17:20:53 UTC

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"The list includes McDonald's, DisneyPlus, Snapchat, Signal, Roblox, Verizon, Fortnite, Venmo, Perplexity, Hulu, Duolingo, Perplexity, Reddit and Coinbase. Even Amazon.com was offline at one point, and some users have also reported that their Alexa smart speakers and Ring doorbells had stopped working.
Banks and even some government websites have been affected"
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/amazon_aws_outage/?td=rt-3a
#decentralisation #aws #amazon

2025-10-20 17:04:36 UTC

Way too many bytes in one basket makes for one very big single point of failure. This is the cost of an absurdly hyper-centralised fast-food-like data center culture.
Signal++ down, sucks, but it's seeing fundamentals like banks & public sector services break that stings most.
But hey, maybe this is what it tales to push more govs to actual #datasovereignty, investing in locally owned data centers or building out their team & hosting on-prem
#decentralisation #amazon #aws

2025-10-15 00:10:55 UTC

Interesting article citing research finding that US coal demand has increased 20% on last year, in large part due to datacenter growth.
The majority of that growth is of course attributed to the 'AI' industry, however I was not aware of the 2024 Morgan Stanley finding (referenced in article) projecting that by 2030 datacenters will "triple the emissions that would have occurred without the development of generative AI technology."
BigAI is #climate poison.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/10/datacenter_coal_power/

2025-10-09 21:58:46 UTC

This is mind-blowing.
"Scientists soon knew they were witnessing something both unexpected and profound: seeds and plant scraps, trapped underground for more than a century, had roared back to life."
Vast, mass-regeneration potential waiting to be unlocked in soil. It's like cryo but without the cold.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/09/toronto-waterfront-soil-plants-worms
#regeneration #rewilding #soil #conservation

2025-10-07 21:58:51 UTC

How the cookie we knew would crumble, has actually crumbled
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/335/107/101/490/876/original/2667d01e3d4583f3.jpg

2025-10-02 02:37:09 UTC

The flotilla was intercepted by IDF.
"The updates came after Israeli forces boarded several flotilla boats carrying activists and aid and took them to an Israeli port on Wednesday, disrupting a protest that has become one of the most high-profile symbols of opposition to Israel’s blockade of the Palestinian territory."
The flotilla organisers say they will continue "undeterred"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/oct/01/israel-gaza-aid-global-sumud-flotilla-middle-east-crisis-latest-updates

2025-09-24 22:24:22 UTC

Today, in planet-eating machine cult news, OpenAI plans to build 5x 'Stargate' 'AI'-only datacenters, upping OpenAI's energy use at enough to power 5.25M homes.
CEO Sam Altman looks to a day where they can "create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week.”
Naturally the benevolent "cure for cancer" is cited as an all-justifying prize in all this, as if that really was their end-game
https://gizmodo.com/openai-announces-plans-for-five-more-stargate-data-centers-in-the-us-2000663145
(Thanks to @npub17w6…yd5s for the pointer)
#climate #ai

2025-09-24 05:22:05 UTC

Very pleased to have been a part of this project - a great collaboration.
My contribution, an article, was specifically on helping chart a pathway for climate-facing organisations to shift from big tech platforms to self-hosted and sovereign infrastructure.
You can download the book free, or pre-order in print.
https://tacticaltech.org/replaybook/
#climate #selfhosting #infrastructure
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/255/941/315/773/422/original/c3f1c33912812e24.jpg

2025-09-22 05:35:18 UTC

Meta has been pulling strings to crush whistleblower (and fellow Kiwi) Sarah Wynn-Williams, who wrote a book on the abusive working environment & unethical practices of Meta during her time as Global Policy Director for the company
Her book recounts "her experiences working for the company, including accusations of sexual harassment by a long-time Facebook executive and claims the company explored breaking into the Chinese market by appeasing government censors there."
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/573766/meta-out-to-silence-and-punish-kiwi-whistleblower-sarah-wynn-williams-british-mp

2025-09-20 07:40:45 UTC

In other marauding barbarian US tech company news, Slack hits up a non-profit coding club for high schoolers:
"Slack reached out to us and said that if we don’t agree to pay an extra $50k this week and $200k a year, they’ll deactivate our Slack workspace and delete all of our message history"
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/19/slack_nonprofit_license_hike_threat/
But the kids will be alright - they switched to Mattermost.
#bigtech #floss #selfhosting

2025-09-18 18:26:18 UTC

The Critical Signals website, hosted on donated e-waste in a cupboard in Wellington, is currently down due to power outage in the building.
Had a DNS fiddle to point it back to a copy on a server in DE. It should be up again soon.

2025-09-12 07:52:45 UTC

Very pleased to present another round of Tunnel and Fortress, live classes in the design, deployment & administration of self-hosted, tightly secured & sovereign server infrastructure.
The classes draw from 2 decades deploying dozens of servers & services for orgs & groups, big & small, & often with powerful adversaries.
I want to teach you to be able to do the same, to get the communities you care about off Big Tech.
https://video.nikau.io/w/9RVN23fgj7AeMVmVrr8so9
https://learn.nikau.io/courses/course-v1:Nikau+TF2+2025_T4/about
#exitbigtech #sysadmin

2025-09-01 22:07:44 UTC

Leaked 'Gaza Riviera' plan made of generative 'AI' slop would displace entire remaining Gazan population, and put the strip under a US trusteeship for at least 10 years.
In particular, the plan proposes building "AI megacities" as the primary drawcard for investors.
To rub it in, they have decided to call it the 'Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust' – or GREAT.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/01/leaked-gaza-riviera-plan-dismissed-as-insane-attempt-to-cover-ethnic-cleansing
#ai #ethniccleansing #gaza

2025-08-24 06:03:55 UTC

It's not possible to have a meaningful chat about the siege and creep of corporate software automation in public & private life without coming to grips with the broader mechanism of Technological Determinism, one that our societies are largely captive to.
From the excellent WP page on it:
"It is, '... the belief that social progress is driven by technological innovation, which in turn follows an "inevitable" course."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism
1/n

2025-08-21 07:59:19 UTC

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Citing fringe cases of self-hosted, non-thieving, ethically-sourced LLMs and 'genAI' as a 50:50 counterpoint "but not all AI is bad" does not speak to the global scale and scope of this tech feudalist/imperialist project. It is community garden vs big agriculture scale of difference. It is all about power, capture, control.
Look too closely at the tool and you will not see the hand that holds it, nor that it is a weapon.

2025-08-21 07:23:34 UTC

Ever worth remembering we were never asked how much we wanted "AI" in our lives, if at all, and to what extent.
Instead we find ourselves thankful for opportunities to opt-out, forgetting all the while there was no opt-in.
It's not the '2nd industrial revolution'. It's just more imperialism.

2025-08-10 21:23:34 UTC

Instead of dedicating resources to finding and arresting actual terrorists, for instance the UK's many ultra-violent white supremacists and self-professed neo-Nazis, almost 500 people peacefully protesting holding pieces of paper and signs were dragged away on the grounds of promoting and/or engaging in terrorism, at enormous expense to tax payers and sanity itself.
According to the UK Police themselves, it was largest single day of arrests in at least a decade.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/09/palestine-action-arrests-london-largest-protest-ban

2025-08-09 08:15:23 UTC

To fellow locals in the Wellington region, this will be a talk you'll not want to miss.
@npub1z8r…mrq6 of 100 Rabbits will give a (remote) talk on Tuesday on the critically vital movement of #permacomputing, & with plenty of time for Q+A after.
There are still a few seats left.
Register here: https://criticalsignals.nz/programme/permacomputing-101/

2025-08-07 09:13:58 UTC

This is wild. A whole population's calls captured, studied, mined.
"Unit 8200 sources said the information stored in Azure amounted to a rich repository of intelligence about its population that some in the unit claimed had been used to blackmail people, place them in detention, or even justify their killing after the fact."
As a friend just suggested, perhaps one day people will speak of Microsoft & genocide, just as history 'never forgets' what IBM did.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-israeli-military-palestinian-phone-calls-cloud
(Via @npub1cna…myul)

2025-07-27 19:42:37 UTC

Missionaries have been secretly and illegally placing small devices on the lands of isolated indigenous peoples in the Amazon in an attempt to convert them to their faith
The 'In Touch' devices - made by a Baptist group in Atlanta, Georgia USA - play out passages of the Bible. Weatherproof and fitted with solar panel, they run indefinitely.
The devices have been found scattered throughout the Javari region, near Brazil's border with Peru.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jul/27/missionaries-using-secret-audio-devices-to-evangelise-brazils-isolated-peoples
#colonisation
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/926/826/414/136/057/original/4b521e1291c7f69c.jpg

2025-07-23 19:44:19 UTC

In about a week I'll be talking about #Meshtastic (a popular decentralised off-grid mesh-networking protocol) in the context of communications fallback during and after disasters. If you are in the quake-prone Pōneke/Wellington or Hutt Valley region, this is especially for you!
https://criticalsignals.nz/programme/introduction-to-meshtastic/
#aotearoa #infrastructure

2025-07-22 19:43:39 UTC

A smart angle from Guterres:
"The greatest threat to energy security today is fossil fuels. They leave economies and people at the mercy of price shocks, supply disruptions and geopolitical turmoil,” he said. “There are no price spikes for sunlight. No embargoes on wind.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/22/antonio-guterres-climate-breakthrough-clean-energy-fossil-fuels
#climate #energy

2025-07-16 20:35:33 UTC

Update from the planet-eating machine cult https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/16/zuckerberg-meta-data-center-ai-manhattan

2025-07-14 06:40:37 UTC

Pleased to share Critical Signals, a 3 month series of events in downtown Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.
The series centers practical & visionary responses to an era of collapses, with a focus on kai (food) sovereignty, data and communications sovereignty, collective resilience, & adaptation strategies under a rapidly changing climate and biosphere.
https://criticalsignals.nz
(Programme still growing as we confirm new collabs)
#climate #resilience #food #infrastructure #sovereignty

2025-07-11 08:43:26 UTC

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Thanks! This is solely in the context of screen-recorded video, of me working in the shell as a function of some new training I'm launching.
Further, some of my students will be on poor quality connections, and so how a terminal theme fares across differing video quality settings is a significant factor.
Finally, talking to some I realise that what is a low-fatigue colour space for me, may be quite the inverse for them! A fascinating topic, that leads me to look for a good compromise.

2025-07-10 07:39:38 UTC

I want to talk terminal colours, in advance of some self-paced learning I'm launching.
In IRL workshops and lectures with a projector, I've always found black on white seems to sit best for folk given long-haul tolerance and legibility.
But how about hours of UNIX commands, shell scripts and config editing in recorded video, and on your screen?
Which terminal colour combo would be easiest on your eyes in long episodes of video?
(Not in the list? Drop your pref combo in the replies)