Notices by Julian Oliver (julianoliver@mastodon.social)

Guardian article in advance of forthcoming series on UK spy cops. It details how 1/5th of those sent to infiltrate political movements ended up in intimate relationships with women therein, some even fathering children while using fake identities.

In my work for defenders of human rights & the environment I hear many awful stories as regards infiltration - the worst of social engineering. Arguably the UK has among the lowest, most disgraceful history within this space

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/02/revealed-at-least-25-uk-spy-cops-sexual-relations-deceived-women

Starlink became a geopolitical lever, just as we knew it would https://www.reuters.com/business/us-could-cut-ukraines-access-starlink-internet-services-over-minerals-say-2025-02-22/

Detailed analysis by The Observer finds that Google has been cooperating with the censorship requests of about 150 countries worldwide.

Harriet Moynihan, associate fellow at thinktank Chatham House, cited in the article:

"Transparency is the big issue. We are only scratching the surface as researchers into what these tech companies are doing, including the use of their algorithms … The balance of power has shifted way in their favour.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/15/google-helped-facilitate-russia-china-censorship-requests

#censorship

Hard to come up with words other than 'takeover' and 'coup' to describe what's happening in the US, in what is set to be the most documented and studied slide from a functioning democracy (however unhealthy) in history.

We are watching the country being ripped apart in realtime, and with it profound impacts across the globe.

China's new DeepSeek 'AI' product claims to have used much less powerful chips than rivals to develop its models, making them far cheaper to produce.

This has freaked investors out, worried that their massive investments in AI were overblown, in turn wiping 465B off Nvidia's value - the largest fall in US stock market history. Other US Big Tech firms took a hit, with OpenAI, DeepSeek's rival, esp unhappy:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/27/tech-shares-asia-europe-fall-china-ai-deepseek

(Notably, as soon as DeepSeek topped app stores, it was DDoS'd)

“The definition of fascism is the marriage of corporation and state.”
― Benito Mussolini

A good time to re-read climate scientist Kate Marvel's warnings on an over-dependence on hope.

"We need courage, not hope. Grief, after all, is the cost of being alive. We are all fated to live lives shot through with sadness, and are not worth less for it. Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending."

While her text is indeed about climate, we can just as well apply her warning to fighting the rise of fascism.

https://onbeing.org/blog/kate-marvel-we-need-courage-not-hope-to-face-climate-change/

Rafah, Gaza, Jan 20, 2025.

Photograph: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu/Getty Images

A few years back the Abandon Normal Devices festival (UK) asked me to submit a 'challenging constraint' as part of a pack of cards they were putting out entitled Abandon Normal Strategies. The deck is based on Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies, a method for promoting lateral thinking, breaking creative blocks.

Here's my offering. Feeling like a good time for this card.

In my opening keynote for the Ada Symposium 2024, I conclusively and decisively argued that what we call 'A.I' is in fact a pet rock.

I also argued some other things.

https://vimeo.com/952557065

(lecture starts at 3:35)

#ai #ml #technologicaldeterminism

It appears that melting Antarctic sheets may result in larger volcanic eruptions This is due to the unloading of ice mass shifting pressure across vast chambers of magma.

"The researchers note that even if anthropogenic warming ceased immediately, the effects of ice mass unloading that the West Antarctic Rift System has already experienced will still affect volcanic behavior here for thousands of years to come."

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-antarctic-ice-sheets-larger-volcanic.html

#climatechange #geophysics #fossilfuels

The ML-enabled voice-theft space is heating up.

Here's an article from presenter Georgina Findlay, who had her own voice cloned and used in far-right disinformation videos on YouTube.

"I was horrified to find that eight out of 12 of the channel’s most recent videos had used my voice"

In the article Georgina also provides some good coverage of the state of 'AI' voice-cloning policy and mitigations.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/07/ai-clone-voice-far-right-fake-audio

#ai #ml #opsec

#GrapheneOS appears to be standing up to UK forensics, in this painful and "unprecedented" case which could see a UK journalist go to jail for not relinquishing the passphrase to his devices. Not only is withholding his basic human right, but he does it to protect his sources, and as ratified in the European Court of Human Rights.

https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/in-edicola/articoli/2025/01/02/british-journalist-could-face-years-in-prison-for-refusing-to-hand-over-his-passwords-to-the-police/7822432/

#humanrights #infosec #privacy

Apple fined for recording far more than it let on (just as Google and Amazon have done).

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/02/business/apple-siri-privacy-lawsuit/index.html

Real life spy stories are boring. Rather than dressing like a courier and picking locks to plant a wire in the living room, feds can just get a quiet warrant to listen in on the expensive spy device that the target themselves paid to install.

TY @Christina

#opsec

To take this as good news is to evidence a worrying lack of techno-political criticality.

Recent history gives us no indication quantum computing will not be rampantly abused, to the same ends of capturing and consolidating even more power in the hands of tech oligarchy and political elite. Any hope that it will be employed under strict regulatory controls to the betterment of people and planet is, at the present time, completely baseless.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/09/google-unveils-mindboggling-quantum-computing-chip

Just Stop Oil activist 77 yr old Gaie Delap was jailed for her part in a nonviolent protest, later let out to serve the rest of her punishment under home detention. But now she has been recalled to prison because her ankles & wrists are too small for the monitoring device strap.

"Gaie is sitting at home terrified with her suitcase packed waiting for a knock on the door from police. She has been unable to eat or sleep because of this"

The cruelty and absurdity of it all

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/07/just-stop-oil-activist-gaie-delap-facing-jail-recall-as-wrists-too-small-for-electronic-tag

@mro @gert I'm a huge proponent of HAM, Software Defined Radio solutions, packet radio etc, but in an emergency expertise - rarefied knowledge - becomes a single point of failure. When the local radio or mesh networking expert is trapped by flood or a barrage of bombs, the community that grew to depend on them is no better off.

Expertise must be distributed for there to be resilience in a community.

@mro @gert I believe Meshtastic (LoRa) is at the current time the best option. The community is already vast, meaning route redundancy and fault tolerance are a built in in many cities.

This is only a part of the node population
https://meshtastic.liamcottle.net/

LilyGo, SenseCAP T1000 and Station G2 (incl Nano G2) are plug and play for the less technically minded, have kilometers of line of sight (records are in the hundreds for Meshtastic) and an excellent app layer.

This whole thread, but on billboards https://toad.social/@wdlindsy/113549720571907492

This article on the uptake of beans in the West needs a correction. It seems to imply that while the "green revolution" trends as overall good for the planet, it comes with the cost of nitrogen-based fertilisers poisoning our atmosphere, oceans and rivers.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/22/its-like-a-secret-why-do-the-leguminati-want-to-change-the-way-we-eat

It's not so cut and dried.. (1/2)