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• Post #4493086

  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.

• Post #4492170

  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."

• Post #4347341

  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

• Post #4297577

  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...

• Post #4297416

  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...

• Post #4159628

  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...

• Post #4077420

  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...

• Post #4057481

  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.

• Post #4046500

  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...

• Post #4019576

  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

• Post #3883582

  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...

• Post #3853672

  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...

• Post #3853671

  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...

• Post #3826828

  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...

• Post #3784460

  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/

• Post #3777893

  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

• Post #3714880

  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

• Post #3714507

  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...

• Post #3572877

  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

• Post #3463378

  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...

• Post #3421613

  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...

• Post #3389193

  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...

• Post #3388317

  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...

• Post #3380001

  Setting up a desktop system today for some remote work and in the 30mins before installing an adblocker I see how intolerable the www has become. On several sites the content was swarmed upon to the point of being almost imperceptible. Packs of autoplaying attention-leeches, popups of video with over-gesticulating wow-faced cruft, floating footers swollen with ticker-tape inanity. The CO2e & cognitive-load savings provided by a simple extension like uBlockOrigin are not to be underestimate...

• Post #3324591

  A great piece calling out the desperate lack of ambition, vision and rigour in the EU's new digital sovereignty package. "Brussels fails to recognise that digital sovereignty isn’t just about who owns or controls your technology. It’s also about having an independent vision for how that technology is designed, developed and deployed. If Europe really wants to be sovereign, it needs to free itself from Silicon Valley’s ideology, not just its tech." https://www.theguardian.com/comm...

• Post #2559478

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

• Post #2523134

  Six seats left for Cloudbreak, kicking off Feb 16. In just 6 hours you learn to deploy, secure & admin your very own sovereign EU-based cloud server, complete with Zoom & Google Docs alternatives suitable for fam, small orgs & communities. No comp-sci or engineering background needed. This is a fully-supported and coached course offering. https://courses.nikau.io/cloudbreak/

• Post #2513532

  The Stratos AI datacenter in Utah got the go-ahead. 2x the size of Manhattan, & at 9GW, it will consume more electricity than Utah itself. It's also likely to directly imperil the Great Salt Lake, due to the absurd amount of water needed for cooling. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/utah-approves-datacenter-backlash If you use BigAI, you are driving up demand for such computational obscenities, projects whose sole purpose is to mal-distribute wealth, power &...

• Post #2472541

  Pleased to announce another edition of Cloudbreak, taking place May 28. For those that don't know already, this is a 6hr fully-supported live training opportunity leading participants with no prior experience in system administration through the process of building up their own #sovereign & secured cloud server. Hosted in the EU on renewable energy, the finished server also offers both Zoom & Google Docs alternatives. Info & signup here: https://courses.nikau....

• Post #2396977

  A good site to raise browser and interaction fingerprinting subjectivity/awareness. https://sinceyouarrived.world/taken Comes on heavy with the dark & personal, but gets the point over the line. #privacy #opsec