We chat with Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie — authors of the indispensable newsletter The Polycrisis and hosts of the new podcast Electric World Order
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We lay out what an energy transition under conditions of polycrisis actually entails: things don’t just smoothly change while staying the same, instead it’s more like a material shift in the centre of political, economic, energetic power: from the petrostate (e.g. USA) to the electrostate (e.g. China).
Via Mike Pepi who’s speaking on Friday.
4—6pm
Researchers at Google and cybersecurity firms iVerify and Lookout on Wednesday jointly revealed the discovery of a sophisticated iPhone hacking technique known as DarkSword that they’ve seen in use on infected websites, capable of instantly and silently hacking iOS devices that visit those sites. While the technique doesn’t affect the latest, updated versions of iOS, it does work against iOS devices running versions of Apple’s previous operating system release, iOS 18
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the hackers who carried out that espionage campaign left the full, unobscured DarkSword code—complete with explanatory comments in English that describe each component and include the “DarkSword” name for the tool—available on those sites for anyone to access and reuse. That carelessness, he says, practically invites other hacker groups to adopt it and target other iPhone users. “Anyone who manually grabbed all the different parts of the exploit could put them onto their own web server and start infecting phones. It’s as simple as that,” says Frielingsdorf. “It’s all nicely documented, also. It’s really too easy.”
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“Instead of using a spyware payload to brute force your way through the file system—which leaves tons of artifacts of exploitation that are pretty easy to detect—this just uses system processes the way they’re meant to be used,” iVerify’s Cole says. “And it leaves far fewer traces.”
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“People assumed that it was just going to be journalists or activists or maybe an opposition politician that was targeted, and that this wasn’t a concern for a normal citizen,” says Justin Albrecht, who leads mobile threat intelligence at Lookout. “Now that we see iOS exploits being delivered through an unscrupulous broker, there’s a whole market here for this to get to cybercriminals” who will use it with far less discretion.
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“If this one gets burned, I’ll just go get another one,” Cole says, describing the hackers’ apparent thinking. “They know there’s more where this came from.”
Quoted at length because paywall. WIRED’s reporting has been good as of late, and my subscription was absurdly inexpensive. Consider it if this is your kinda thing.
An internal DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows for the first time CBP used location data sourced from the online advertising industry to track phone locations. ICE has bought access to similar tools.
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DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) later found both CBP and ICE did not limit themselves to non-operational use. The OIG found that CBP, ICE, and the Secret Service all illegally used the smartphone location data, and found a CBP official used the data to track coworkers with no investigative purpose. CBP and ICE went on to repeatedly purchase access to location data.
“When you have that mosaic built from UK sovereign defence, health, roads, power networks, power stations, and our major industrial bases, you have a detailed understanding of virtually every aspect of the sovereign United Kingdom. For an adversary, or even a nation with whom we have a special relationship, that picture is worth more than all the fine art on Earth.”
This is mostly an article about the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but I was drawn to the intelligence operation, namely the construction of “patterns of life” through hacked traffic cameras.
Nearly all the traffic cameras in Tehran had been hacked for years, their images encrypted and transmitted to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel, according to two people familiar with the matter.
One camera had an angle that proved particularly useful, said one of the people, allowing them to determine where the men liked to park their personal cars and providing a window into the workings of a mundane part of the closely guarded compound.
Complex algorithms added details to dossiers on members of these security guards that included their addresses, hours of duty, routes they took to work and, most importantly, who they were usually assigned to protect and transport — building what intelligence officers call a “pattern of life”.
“Mark Leckey presenting his recent work including his solo exhibition enter through medieval wounds“
Friday, March 13
6:00 PM – 7:00 PM GMT
Online
Mo Piotr Orlov. Mo L&SD
Dada Strain @ L&SD is a bi-monthly series of live performances by (primarily local) improvisers and producers, that presents music for deep listening and body movements as a singular DIY loft experience. Rhythm, Improvisation, Community to the future.
This third Dada Strain @ L&SD night will open with a solo set by cellist Christopher Hoffman (member of Henry Threadgill’s Zooid band) live-debuting material from his wonderful amplified cello album REX, inspired by the work Rex Brasher, a self-taught painter who created an archive of watercolors of North American birds. (Tonight marks the record release party for REX.)
It will be followed by another debut, that of a very special duo: experimental vocalist and electronic multi-instrumentalist Christina Wheeler, an NYC music veteran now living between Berlin and Los Angeles, collaborating with the trumpeter and electronic producer, Chris Williams, two dear Dada Strain friends uniting in sound for the first time.
The evening will close with a live hardware set by Prince of Queens, the Colombia-born New York-raised house-meets-cumbia producer best known as bassist/synth player for tropical psychdelicists Combo Chimbita.
Selections before-between-after will be provided by Piotr Dada Strain. Tonight’s show was produced with the generous help of FourOneOne.
this is absurd
outta control
hilarious
jeezus .. that song
I really didn’t plan that soundtrack. I wouldn’t intentionally listen to that awful cover of an already brilliant song. But eff it, kitty somehow nailed the transitions … and in a single take!
Just arrived: Retia.io’s Nibble Zero – Meshtastic/Meshcore node. Paired with the Flipper Zero is a match made in a sunbeam.
Her brother is quite cute as well: RP2040 Meshtastic Nibble
For some time now, I’ve been looking for a solution to house a small Dark Forest. If that’s a new phrase for you, Yancey Strickler proposes, “Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet, because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay quiet.”
This concept has been applied to spaces online over the last few years. I sit in several dark forests built in Discords, Signal groups and a couple much geekier spaces. None are ideal, exemplified in part by the eminent mass exodus from Discord.
So when I happened to catch Yancey Strickler and Josh Citarella announcing the debut of the Dark Forest Operating System I wondered what the strange feeling I immediately felt might have been. I realize now it was hope, something rarely glimpsed these days. heh
Seeing that the option’s now available, I’ve started building out a first space on DFOS.
WTF is that? .. you ask.
Yancey Strickler (the same) presents it well:
Welcome to DFOS
If you’re reading this, you’ve stepped into one of the first spaces on DFOS, while it’s still being built from the inside out. Which raises the question: what is this space?
The problem DFOS solves
Fear grips the web. The internet becomes more hostile. Bots, slop, and trolls overwhelm public space. The internet as we knew it gone forever. People are fleeing the public internet and joining dark forests to feel safe. This is the world that exists today. Not because anyone wants it, but because it’s the timeline we’ve been dealt. We’re doing this in the most haphazard way possible — expensively chaining together a bunch of apps for ourselves and our communities. We do it because there’s no native way to share ownership, run a group treasury, charge for access, and have a private space together. Until now. (*dun-dun-duuuuhhnnn*)
What you’re looking at
That’s what DFOS is for. DFOS creates shared private internets: members, money, chat, and a private feed in one shared space. Each space starts with six apps:
💬 Chat Auto-disappearing chats and private DMs.
👥 Members Everyone in this space. Closed, open, by application, or paywall — your call.
💰 Treasury Where member fees and sales revenue get split and reinvested into new projects and impact.
📝 Posts Private feed of images, videos, and text from anyone in the space. Upvoted posts can “leak” outside.
📄 Readme Where you explain what your space is about.
🛒 Apps (coming soon) Space to create, generate, publish, and download new apps and functions for your DFOS.
How to use this space
This is your own internet, without scale. A shared private space among a community of people. There’s no wrong way to use it, as long as you’re doing it together. We use DFOS to make DFOS. We use chat to coordinate. We use posts to share ideas. We use the Treasury to pay for specific jobs our community can do better than we can. We make new apps to fill the wants and needs we keep discovering. Your way of using this might be totally different. Our hope is that whatever your needs, the DFOS operating system can support them.
The bigger vision
We imagine a very different internet than the one we’ve recently known. A web where we always know who’s there. Where we no longer assume infinite scale. Where we don’t isolate ourselves. Where we have private spaces to be real with peers rather than performing for the algorithmic gods and their commercial desires.
Welcome to your private internet. 🌲
Yancey Stickler 10.12.2025
