Notices by Julian Oliver (julianoliver@mastodon.social)

@aral @skry Thank you!

An enviro defense group reached out asking for my security take on using BigAI in activism work. After giving them the take (basically "don't"), I took liberty to talk about the ethics of using it in the first instance, especially in the context of human rights and climate activism.

Sharing here in case useful on the same grounds elsewhere.

#bigai #bigtech #climate #humanrights

Imran Ahmed, a British anti-disinformation campaigner & chief exec of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, has been living lawfully in the US with US family. He now faces deportation for his work holding tech giants to account for their role in proliferating & amplifying hate speech & misinformation.

He says of the sector:

"There is no other industry, that acts with such arrogance, indifference and a lack of humility and sociopathic greed at the expense of people.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/26/uk-campaigner-targeted-by-trump-accuses-tech-giants-of-sociopathic-greed

A Moscow court has officially labelled Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot an 'extremist group'.

Founding member Nadya Tolokonnikova, now living in exile, is not phased however:

"When I was tried for the punk prayer, facing seven years in a labor camp, I told the judge and prosecutors that I was still freer than they would ever be," she said in comments sent to AFP. "In today's Russia, telling the truth is extremism. So be it – we're proud extremists, then."

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/12/15/russia-outlaws-feminist-protest-band-pussy-riot_6748524_4.html

Today while training some sysadmins I shared this real photo of ancient Greek engineers configuring a mailserver.

On the left the brave engineer is trying to stop unauthorised pipelining through the MTA as their knee is viciously attacked by a subtly broken DKIM key. Meanwhile, their co-sysadmin is hammering away at a perfectly good Postfix sender restrictions policy, screaming "It's not DNS!", while bitten by a PTR record quietly hissing "It'ssss DNSssss".

#sysadmin #selfhosted

Pleased to share a playlist of (my own) videos on UNIX shell basics, intended for newcomers taking their very first steps into server self-hosting - or just those curious about it.

Rather than looking at system administration in the shell, the videos cover what my own teaching has found to be the 'minimum viable scaffolding' needed to be comfortable in the UNIX shell when setting out to learn the craft.

https://video.nikau.io/w/p/o2pxK81gBR6ThhJa6HCAdz

(more videos coming in the next days)

#selfhosting #sysadmin

LLM tools used in medicine found to be loaded with white male bias.

"The findings by researchers at leading US and UK universities suggest that medical AI tools powered by LLMs have a tendency to not reflect the severity of symptoms among female patients, while also displaying less “empathy” toward Black and Asian ones."

Every time someone says 'AI', ask 'whose AI?'

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/09/ai-medical-tools-found-to-downplay-symptoms-of-women-ethnic-minorities/

TY @Christina

#ai #bigtech #technopolitics #racism #patriarchy

This is mind-blowing.

"Scientists soon knew they were witnessing something both unexpected and profound: seeds and plant scraps, trapped underground for more than a century, had roared back to life."

Vast, mass-regeneration potential waiting to be unlocked in soil. It's like cryo but without the cold.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/09/toronto-waterfront-soil-plants-worms

#regeneration #rewilding #soil #conservation

Four days of notes from a top-secret meeting by Five Eye (FVEY) member states detailing a strategic plan in the event of war with China found neatly written out on paper in a second-hand store in Lower Hutt, Aotearoa New Zealand:

https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/10/09/secret-defence-notes-pointing-to-sensitive-china-preparation-left-at-op-shop/

If this was in a sketch for a Tom Clancy-esque geo-politics thriller, the editor would rightly say "I think this bit is too silly".

#infosec #geopolitics #intel #secondhand #bargain

The flotilla was intercepted by IDF.

"The updates came after Israeli forces boarded several flotilla boats carrying activists and aid and took them to an Israeli port on Wednesday, disrupting a protest that has become one of the most high-profile symbols of opposition to Israel’s blockade of the Palestinian territory."

The flotilla organisers say they will continue "undeterred"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/oct/01/israel-gaza-aid-global-sumud-flotilla-middle-east-crisis-latest-updates

Meta has been pulling strings to crush whistleblower (and fellow Kiwi) Sarah Wynn-Williams, who wrote a book on the abusive working environment & unethical practices of Meta during her time as Global Policy Director for the company

Her book recounts "her experiences working for the company, including accusations of sexual harassment by a long-time Facebook executive and claims the company explored breaking into the Chinese market by appeasing government censors there."

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/573766/meta-out-to-silence-and-punish-kiwi-whistleblower-sarah-wynn-williams-british-mp

I know I know people are doing their best within means but I sigh hard each time I see a conference or lecture on the violence and capture of big tech recorded on Zoom and uploaded to YouTube. Tales of injustice, penned from jail.

YunoHost (https://yunohost.org/) comes into my feed with a wrapping of excitement from time to time.

It's a nice idea that people should not need skill & understanding to deploy a complex service, but know this: deployment is just the beginning (and often the easy bit). Complex services and the servers they run on need to be sufficiently understood before they can be secured, maintained debugged, patched and even migrated. This requires knowing what goes where, and why.

1/n

#sysadmin

The irony here is that communities are then left with servers that rot, falter and even completely fail because those that deployed them don't actually know how they work. This in turn works against this cause, any confidence in it.

Yunohost by all means, have a play, but if intending to host others on it make sure you're up for the task. Go right through the deploy to tune and lock it down, sufficiently safe to host a trusting community taking that big step of migrating to it.

3/3

It's here that an irony fades into view.

While click-through 'no-code' deployments came from the noble goal of lowering the entry barrier for server and service hosting, it can actually work against self-hosting as a movement.

Self-hosting isn't only about servers and their services, it's about shifting expertise from the capture of the gov and corporate sectors toward the community, such that communities can look after their own infrastructure and data sovereignty and privacy needs.

2/n

And now we apparently have fully gen'AI' titles on Spotify (I don't use it myself) with millions of views, 'bands' like Velvet Sundown (which Misagh played for audience). They appear to not have listeners for novelty, but a genuine fanbase. Spotify themselves are already generating music based on analysis of taste,
so entering into competion with musicians on their platform.

Further, it seems lot of people have no idea they are listening to wholly generated music.

In no way is this progress.

Good critique by Misagh Azimi on 'genAI' in the scope of music composition, tonight at Critical Signals. Some FOMO as I had to rush out before the end.

https://criticalsignals.nz/programme/songs-for-my-chatbot/

His strategy is to claw creative agency back while still using the tech, hosting local end-to-end & with human-centered processes.

Nonetheless, gruelling to learn what big generative 'AI' is doing to music culture & industry, esp for the smaller players (ie. the majority). The likes of SUNO are apex culture predators

It's not possible to have a meaningful chat about the siege and creep of corporate software automation in public & private life without coming to grips with the broader mechanism of Technological Determinism, one that our societies are largely captive to.

From the excellent WP page on it:

"It is, '... the belief that social progress is driven by technological innovation, which in turn follows an "inevitable" course."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism

1/n

Ever worth remembering we were never asked how much we wanted "AI" in our lives, if at all, and to what extent.

Instead we find ourselves thankful for opportunities to opt-out, forgetting all the while there was no opt-in.

It's not the '2nd industrial revolution'. It's just more imperialism.

Citing fringe cases of self-hosted, non-thieving, ethically-sourced LLMs and 'genAI' as a 50:50 counterpoint "but not all AI is bad" does not speak to the global scale and scope of this tech feudalist/imperialist project. It is community garden vs big agriculture scale of difference. It is all about power, capture, control.

Look too closely at the tool and you will not see the hand that holds it, nor that it is a weapon.