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  Big tech is not inevitable, there is no conveyor belt to enshitification. There is always a choice. Civil servants - politicians - just need to make the right one. Civil servants like Torgeir Micaelsen, Norway’s minister of digital affairs: "We do not want a society where people worry about being recorded without their knowledge, photographed or filmed in places and situations where they are accustomed to not being monitored" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/05/norway-tem...

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  If a human hacker was caught doing close, they'd be inside for years, & AFK. Meanwhile, OpenAI gets to make everyone's infra their sandpit, & when damage is done, ride a 'look at the monster we made' investor gush. "The AI agents uploaded hundreds of malicious packages to RubyGems on ‌11 May, according to a group of researchers who posted their findings online on Friday, saying they believed “these were authored by internal OpenAI agents”. OpenAI then confirmed it....

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  'In solidarity with Autistici/Inventati' https://solidaritywithautisticiinventati.net/ If you read it and it speaks to you, please boost. This is important. A lot is at stake.

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  Seeing huge productivity gains not using AI, compared to peers forced to use it in the workplace who lament of spending more time auditing and fixing AI output than actually building things. My secret is using this crazy cool automation technology called shell scripts'. They are really reliable, fast and don't hurt our planet. You write them once yourself, you can see exactly what they do, and then they run the same way each time. Just like they always have. Thanks for reading my ad.

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  The guts of these two. Respect. Looking forward to see this film. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/sep/15/naza-directors-yuval-abraham-rachel-szor-film-industry-support

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  The horrific disaster in Nepal, the loss, a region suddenly both unlivable and unrecognisable, hints at the scale of what we are doing to the planet as a function of climate destruction.

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  A profound late-winter dawn hike, out to see if we could find an elusive giant Rata (fwiw my #1 native tree species) deep in the Akatarawa rainforest, & considered to be Aotearoa New Zealand's largest. We had found her sister prior, but not this giant. Today we had the privilege, & I'm still feeling it. Estimated by botanists to be between 1000 and 1500 years old, we measured her girth with paracord to be ~16m. To stand at her base was to be at the foot of a living cliff face...

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  I was not alone predicting Google want to kill traditional search. Today marks a zombie lunge toward that goal for those that have no GG account (a lot of people*): https://searchenginewatch.com/google-tests-ai-focused-homepage-for-signed-out-users/ It's almost like they need to manufacture demand for their super-unprofitable AI product to force the hand of nervous investors. *I don't have a GG account, but don't use their SE.

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  When a Wellington bookseller realises that a mysterious and avaricious foreign buyer is AI giant Anthropic: https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/books/wellington-second-hand-book-store-s-mysterious-orders "Our role is to keep books alive, to keep them in the world."

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  Excited to be teaching the 5th edition of the Tunnel training tomorrow. In 4 days there be some shiny new sovereign VPNs in the wild, running atop geothermal energy in Iceland, each capable of supporting hundreds of people. One small step toward re-asserting that the basic right to privacy ought not be left to private enterprises. Rather, it should be in the hands of communities, meeting their needs, and on their terms. https://courses.nikau.io/tunnel/ #sysadmin #privacy #decentralisation

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  This needs to be said in a loop until it sticks. "What people are not getting is that we can’t turn this back – the CO2 to a large part remains in the air for thousands of years,” said Rahmstorf. “Some people think we can wait and, when it gets too bad, then we reduce emissions and things will get better again. People don’t realise that we can’t make it get better again. We can only prevent it from getting much worse.” - Stefan Rahmstorf, Climatologist. https://www.theguardian.com/enviro...

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  Cognitive offloading risks a population scale developmental crisis in children. If you are worried about your local school conforming to the 'inevitablism' and mania around AI, send them this article and explain that the less time kids spend with AI in the classroom, the more they'll have the edge in years to come (an edge they'll need given the future(s) they face). https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202603/adults-lose-skills-to-ai-children-never-buil...

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  Beautiful dawn climb on a clear mid-winter day. Plenty of icy ground along the ridge, a bit dicey but fun. In the image you can see the frost covered Wairarapa. In the vid (link) you can see a shot from about 750m alt, looking down over rainforest, snow on distant peaks. Can hear the river. We'll wait for spring & do an overnighter in that valley, past the first couple of ridges, an undercanopy health check & scout for invasive species. Few ever go there, no track. https://kapua.d...

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  Who remembers these slides leaked by Snowden back in 2013, detailing how big players were working as actual "providers" for the US NSA's PRISM program. Not via warrants, but as data sharing partners. I remember in the 4 yrs before, when @k0a1a@tldr.nettime.org & I were lecturing on precisely this, privacy workshops, making interventions to alert people to the risks, we'd be scowled at, sometimes even angrily. Told we were being doomer. A shiny-eyed tech optimism that aged...

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  It should be absurd to say this, but it is not. So incredible is our predicament that moving off big tech & choosing to do without big AI are two of the most positively impactful changes one can make for both people & planet today. At scale, such a shift could be profound, tipping the balance. Through depopulating these services, we de-fund & dis-empower both the companies that provide them, and the dark political interests that tool them. The power to enact this change is real.

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  It's insane that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a spectrum allocation and oversight super committee from 1 country, even allows itself to determine the fate of our upper atmosphere. Atmospheric health and light pollution are planet-scale issues impacting all living things. There needs to be an international injunction to stop this. No single national interest should ever have such power. https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/07/10/orbital-datacenter-gold-rush-needs-an-en...

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  Poetic, perfect and disturbing at once, what better than a 'human fridge' modeled on vending machines to cool sweltering people down in a rapidly warming climate. https://japantoday.com/category/features/new-products/japan-now-has-human-refrigerators-inspired-by-vending-machines #climatechange

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  A whistleblower going by alias 'Safir', whom worked for Morocco's national intelligence services, has confirmed broad use of the NSO group's Pegasus since 2017. This totally contrasts official statements from Moroccan gov. Evidence shows they used it to spy on numerous domestic & foreign targets. Journalist Hicham Mansouri used this evidence in an investigation collab'ing with multiple media outlets & forensic support from Amnesty International's Security Lab ht...

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  Overlooked as the obituaries come in is Sam Neill's fight against a goldmine project in Central Otago, South Island, a few clicks from his home. The mine would make a hole 1km long & 300m deep, and risk poisoning surrounding ecosystems. Referring to the Māori concept of kaitiakitanga (to be a custodian for future generations) he said: "I own land, but I’m not a land owner. The land is part of me, and I’m a part of the land". https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch...

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  Glad to announce there will be another edition of the Tunnel intensive training running from August 3-6. Sign up if you'd like to learn system administration fundamentals while building up your own very private, sovereign, fast and diversely flexible VPN, running on geothermal energy in Iceland. Generate dozens of free configs, and give them to fam, friends, colleagues. Participants are fully supported. No prior experience needed. https://courses.nikau.io/tunnel/ Seats going fast...

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  Just a reminder that when you are using the built-in VPN feature in Firefox, you are opting to route your traffic through Mullvad. Mozilla does not make this clear in the interface. Mullvad is co-owned by a man whom privately donated 5M Swedish kronor (presumably from company earnings) to a populist, ultra-nationalist & racist political party advocating for forced repatriation of immigrant populations. To use is to support. Things can cost $0 but be ethically expensive https://www.mozilla...

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  A great article on Microsoft's shady GDID, a device fingerprint snuck into Windows 11 that can and has already been used to track with precision, activity reports sent back to the mothership indefinitely. https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/07/10/you-cant-fully-disable-microsofts-gdid-windows-11-tracker-but-these-settings-limit-what-it-captures/

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  A curious irony in the fact a great many of the free and open source platforms championing digital sovereignty are themselves utterly infrastructurally dependent on big tech apparatus GitHub, itself owned (and mined) by the ruthless and closed source market monopolist Microsoft. We're gaining ground fast, but we've still got a way to go in the truly sovereign platform space. To use is to support, and that means any point along the supply chain. #bigtech #floss #digitalsovereignty

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  Manawatia a Matariki! (for those that don't know, it's the New Year for Māori, and all else whom celebrate it, in Aotearoa New Zealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matariki) #matariki

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  The FCC has elected to approve the 'sunlight on demand' giant orbital reflector. All the while scientists warn of deep disruptions to ecosystems, possibly harming the sleep of millions of people, and as astronomers warn it will make the universe even less visible. They say it's to feed solar farms, for disaster relief. Other uses? Agri giants beaming sunlight to crops, construction giants to their build sites, concert spectacles, super rich playing god at weddings. https://ca.pc...

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  Pleased to share a piece I just finished with some guidance for small to medium sized organisations looking to migrate off big tech. It's based on many years helping organisations and groups do exactly that. While not definitive (there are other roads to the same place), I hope at least some of it is useful. https://courses.nikau.io/2026/07/03/moving-your-org-off-big-tech/ #infrastructure #bigtech #datasovereignty

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  Climate pollution & habitat destruction tip Earth over 7 of 9 planetary boundaries, threatening all life on our only home, and rich countries respond by: giving carte blanche to mega-datacenters so people can talk to simulations, double down on subsidisation of CH4 & CO2 spewing mega-farms so people can eat more animal bodies, scour the planet for more stuff to burn, & weaken climate targets to make doing all this easier. We are well on track to becoming a facepalm in the geological...

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  Sad to read Mullvad is a major donor of a fascist, white supremacist party. While awful, no commercial VPN provider can be trusted to be in alignment with your values, not in the long term. The fix? Decentralise! Run your own VPN, handing out configs to your community, on your terms. Done right, a self-hosted VPN is fast, very secure & low-maintenance. A ~EUR10/month server can support 100's of people. Here's a course fully supporting folk to do exactly this: https://courses...

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  We keep hearing we can't be 'competitive' without hugging AI, & yet a growing body of research asserts this is in fact bovine manure. Check out this steely take from Nobel Laureate (Econ) Daron Acemoglu: "[...]roughly 0.55% in total factor productivity gains is what AI will actually deliver over the next decade, a fraction of Wall Street’s euphoric projections." He insists what we should really b focusing on is that AI is simply about vastly extending corporate powe...

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  Almost too bleak to post. "The Guardian’s examination of data-collection practices across six factories in five states found that workers wearing devices ranging from meta smart glasses to head-mounted cameras received no compensation for generating footage that would later be sold to technology companies." ... to build robots to take their jobs. ""Sometimes they give us a soft drink,” says Lalita, who earns about $200 a month at the factory." https://www.theguardian...