Notices by Julian Oliver (julianoliver@mastodon.social)

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-temporary-ban-smart-glasses-public-places

#privacy

'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.

The winner of the fiercely competitive Bird of the Year, here in Aotearoa New Zealand, is the Karure, or Black Robin. Weighing no more than an AA battery, they have also been known as "goth fluffballs" and "adorably fluffy bits of night".

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/environment/1485423/black-robin-bucks-shy-tag-to-take-bird-of-the-year-2026

#birding #gothfluffballs #birds

This smacks of 'solving' nuclear tensions by building nukes.

The solution to the "AI race" is to not participate, in so doing defunding & ending it so we have a planet to live on, while avoiding rogue & weaponised automation scribbling over our minds, markets, cultures & infrastructures.

Sovereign, contained 'AI' for medicine, radio astronomy, genetic research, OK. AI in banking, public sector, in our schools, on our networks, transport infra.. It'll only end badly

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/ecb-president-lagarde-warns-europe-114234133.html

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

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.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/11/openai-agents-rubygems-malicious-packages

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.

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."

@crumbletiltskin @evan No undo for climate change. It's a bit like trauma - no longer is the person the same.

However, after some hundreds or thousands of years atmospheric CO2 levels could return to pre-industrial, but not after the oceans have warmed considerably, and the face of whole continents changed forever.

I do rainforest conservation when I can. You can help, but never return it to how it was.

We're in it now. IMO we only have preparation and mass damage minimisation, at this stage

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

#climate

The answer is 'wrong question'. These are planet-eating, poverty-producing software products; deception machines built on the back of billions of stolen expressions & a grotesque centralisation of computation and capital.

Journalists need to start asking whose side they are on, and stop feeding this future-wasting machine cult.

@aral @berbatsson @peter Yes I hear their VPN service is decent too - a good suggestion for this thread.

I run my own. Here's a post on why I reckon we need more self-hosted VPNs https://courses.nikau.io/2026/03/24/why-run-your-own-vpn/

This hits home for a couple of reasons.

When I was a migrant in Sweden, by then barely speaking a handful of words, I had white Swedes warmly telling me that I'm going to be Swedish in no time. Meanwhile, I met brown Swedes that talked of having to work very hard to be accepted, if ever.

Secondly, my own home is mixed. My extended family spans Vietnamese, Filipino & Māori heritage. I witness how very different the world is for them, & so the fear, dread & impact rising populism can bring.

Just a reminder that when you are using Mozilla VPN, 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.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/subscription-services/

(Edited to clarify Mozilla VPN is not built-in. TY @berbatsson )

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/

Shout out to @Framasoft for walking their talk on this one. They show the way.

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

Note to self: "bought by" washes hands, whereas "sold to" highlights there was a choice.

@Framasoft This is not to throw shade on those small teams and developers using GitHub. Moving home's not always easy, esp given for many GH is their CV. It felt like a setup - GitHub was this welcome intersection of social networking and development that then got bought by the corporate equivalent of Cthulhu.

But for FLOSS associations and nonprofits receiving funding to build alternatives to digital feudalism, it's different. Building atop GitHub points to an unfortunate mission incoherence.

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.nikau.io/tunnel/