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.
Yo, I'm heading up a brand-new community project. 👥
We write code by hand. 🤚🏽⌨️
It's a growing opt-in directory of software developers who write code by hand. When you hear someone tell you “nobody does that” you can point to this and say “well these folks do.”
If you're #ProCraft and care about the future of handcrafted software, please add yourself to the list! I'd love to see this grow to 100s of signatories (I know y'all are out there!) and really send a message.
@JulianOliver what most people are also not getting is the fact that #bigoil (same for #bigtech) has NO, absolutely NO interest in stopping making maximum profit like they did in the past decades. Regardless the consequences. And they will lie and betray for reaching their goals. #exxonknew all this since the 80s, #bp invented the #carbonfootprint to distract. Lately this came up:
https://www.propublica.org/article/wedges-climate-research-bp-fossil-fuel-princeton
"Optimism without honesty is denial"
- Anohni
Rahmstorf, the climate scientist and oceanographer quoted, is on Mastodon :)
I think a lot about the self-reinforcing feedback of all the carbon from the burns. Most of our warming trajectory scenarios (esp many IPCC models and their reports, used by govs) don't account for this driver, and if they do it is incompletely. Difficult to calculate I know, but only more troubling as a result.
Truly unchartered territory.
Relatedly:
https://wiki.collapsible.systems/index.php/Main_Page
"- understand that species extinction and a changed climate can not be undone, that we are already locked in for decades of consequences regardless of any mitigating steps made today."
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/environment/2026/jul/30/europe-wildfires-climate-crisis-heat-summer
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).
Update Firefox, the Tor browser, and other derivatives if you are still running FF versions 147 through to 151.0.2.
Some interesting attacks exploiting CVE-2026-10702 are shoring up:
https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/researchers-show-single-malicious.html?m=1
Note that thanks to Android's lazy sandbox,
this attack can be used as the entry point of a complete browser-to-kernel chain, giving the attacker root (CVE-2026-43499).
(Unclear if/how Firefox-ESR is affected)
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.
Right. And back in 2008, Obama broke his promise to support a filibuster against the FISA Amendments Act, which helped provid legal cover for PRISM and was at the time the biggest expansion ever of warrantless wiretapping activity. Since then presidents and Congressional leadership in both parties have pressed to reauthorize FISA Section 702 without reforms -- and in 2024 expanded of FISA authorities in what Ron Wyden called "one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.” I recently summarized the whole sordid history on @getfisaright.net -- https://getfisaright.net/2026/06/26/get-fisa-right-turns-18/
@k0a1a Not to say we didn't also have a lot of support too, those with healthy paranoia and/or infrastructure people that could think through the harvest.
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 & 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 badly, then forgot about it all
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.
Atmosphere pollution from satellite burnup is predicted to risk rapid depletion of the Ozone layer, the radiation shield that protects terrestrial creatures with skin from getting melanoma, and other skin cancers.
I know this well as skin cancer is a leading cause of cancer where I live, due to a hole in the layer that is finally healing following a ban on CFC aerosols.
Musk's AI datacenter satellite project alone could be far more harmful than CFCs, changing atmospheric composition forever.
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.
@JulianOliver I think the only solution here is resistance to using AI and increasing union membership. Tech workers need unions now more than ever. The business models of OpenAI and Anthropic are such that they lose billions annually. It's not sustainable. At some point the bubble will pop.
I'm also interested in how this impacts all those kids out there today that have developed a natural fascination with computing; thriving when taught coding, perhaps seeing a future for themselves in it. There is future theft and loss there too.