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.pcmag.com/news/16760/fcc-approves-reflect-orbitals-giant-mirror-satellite-that-astronomers-hate

There's something in the planet / cosmic disconnect of western culture that celebrates a numerically-defined reference to a rotation around the sun, vs another that celebrates the shared experience of the return of a star cluster over the horizon.

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

For any interested in the last couple of seats for Tunnel, the hours have been set to UTC 15:00 - 19:00, so fitting in with a cohort that is largely US and EU based.

The AI twinkling stars thing is the interface equivalent of the housefly that you swipe away only for it to return to exactly the same place, every time.

I lived in Visby, Gotland, for a year. Could not have imagined back then it would one day be preparing for a Russian invasion. Let's hope their prepation is never needed.

Interesting however, that the history of the island as a strategic location prized by military is coming back around again.

“If you are able to control Gotland, you are able to control the Baltic Sea as well,” - Col Andreas Gustafsson

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/05/gotland-russia-sweden-ramps-up-defence-baltic-sea-island

Two seats left

One of the things I hope this article drives across is that just because you build it, doing your very best to tune, harden & carefully localise that deployment, does not mean they will (or should) move in.

I've been that free & open source advocate - a fever of well-meaning enthusiasm - and can speak from a couple of decades experience in saying that your energy is better spent listening to the membership, their needs & anxieties, than deploying something you think you know is good for them.

"Security researchers have confirmed that a European politician had his phone hacked with the Pegasus spyware while serving on an investigatory committee probing abuses of the notorious surveillance tool. This has reignited fresh controversy over governments abusing spyware to collect information about their critics.

The researchers at the University of Toronto’s digital rights unit The Citizen Lab say the confirmed phone hacking of Greek journalist and former politician Stelios Kouloglou during 2022 and 2023 marks the first time that a member of the European Parliament’s PEGA committee, tasked with investigating phone spyware attacks by European governments, has been publicly identified as a victim of spyware.

Kouloglou told TechCrunch in a phone call that the deliberate compromise of his phone was “reckless.” One serving European lawmaker described the hacking of Kouloglou’s phone as a “direct attack on the rule of law,” and called on the European Commission to take concrete action by imposing strict limits on the use of spyware across the 27 member-state bloc."

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/02/politician-who-investigated-spyware-abuses-had-his-phone-hacked-with-pegasus-spyware/

#CyberSecurity #Spyware #Greece #EU #Pegasus

I'm 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, 4 left.

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

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

A quick mention that I have not forgotten about all of you that have kindly continued to submit domains for this project. It's been a very tricky month but I am committed to adding your new domains to the project in the coming week.

To mention one more time, it's the contributed domains that are really spreading this project, continuing to trap and hold the crawlers. Thanks again!

The more endpoints trapped, the longer the parasites.txt grows, nourishing happy blacklists around the globe.

One of the works cited is "Sabot in the Age of AI", a list of tools by the Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group. The group unfortunately closed their website and fediverse account since our talk so we are re-publishing this resource for citation purposes. We hope that they'll come back online soon and continue this important work.

https://codeberg.org/luddite-academy/sabot-in-the-age-of-ai

📃 Luddite Academy; Towards a politicised digital creative practice
https://luddite.academy/assets/UCC-2026-paper/

The write-up of our inaugural presentation given last April in Cork is finally available! with nods to @320x200 @danmcquillan @varia @titipi @prepostprint @JulianOliver and thanks to @jcalpickard

edit: corrected Varia's fediverse handle

Staying in a hotel whose evidently unwell network admin doesn't like VPNs, Tor, SSH - nice things.

I found a way, but thought I'd send a message in a MAC addr:

---
~# macchanger -A wlan0
Current MAC: 00:06:bc:a6:7f:bb (Macrolink, Inc.)
Permanent MAC: <redacted>
New MAC: 00:04:da:f7:d2:fc (Relax Technology, Inc.)
---

#linux

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 record.

I've been testing scraper blocking strategies on different servers -- a couple personal servers, a curriculum website, and an API dev server for teaching.

I will write some notes/tutorial of what I've learned soon... I'm too busy today, sorry

But a quick defense that works pretty well in our cases is to block parasites from @JulianOliver's Science is Poetry project, plus heavy rate limiting on #GAYINT's naughty list

https://mastodon.social/@JulianOliver/116391284280771352

On the VPN thread, here's a good article sent in by a student of ours detailing the deep centralisation of the VPN provider market, showing just how consolidated and concentrated it is behind the scenes

https://codamail.com/articles/vpn_exposed.html

The need to shift away from dangerously expansive centralisations of tech power is just as valid for virtual private networking as it is for any digital tooling we use.

The fight for the basic right to privacy must be decentralised, or that fight is already lost.