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  • US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows

    US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows

    Daniel Boguslaw · WIRED

    Spencer Reynolds [senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund] says that, despite the real if limited threat posed … a category like “anti-tech extremism” could be drawn so broad as to ensnare peaceful data center protesters, AI skeptics, and anyone with a bone to pick with technology that permeates modern life.

    · · ·

    “Suspicious activity reports are incredibly unreliable, often about vague or innocent behavior, issued under permissive standards. These reports, often received in large volumes, allow officers to inject their own biases and see what they want to see in the facts.”

    · · ·

    Among the vaguely defined activities flagged by the Northern Virginia intelligence center as suspicious are “expressed/implied threat,” “observation/surveillance,” “photography,” “testing/probing of security,” and “attempted intrusion.”

  • Old Stockholm telephone tower

    Old Stockholm telephone tower

    Wikipedia

    The Old Stockholm telephone tower was a metallic structure built to connect approximately 5,500 telephone lines in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. Constructed in 1887, the tower was used until 1913.

  • drinkybird: Kismet v Ft Greene

    drinkybird: Kismet v Ft Greene

  • media.ccc.de shell one-liner

    media.ccc.de shell one-liner

    Love love love media.ccc.de by Chaos Computer Club. And I love that all of the files are available via their CDN.

    A screenshot of a web directory listing titled "Index of /congress/2025/h264-hd/". The page displays a list of video files and documents from the 39C3 conference, including multilingual recordings of ceremonies and talks on topics like AI, Rust programming, and government access.

    Browsing to the corner of the CDN with 39c3’s videos I decided I wanted to pull down only the English versions.

    This is the shell one-liner I wrote to parse the HTML, filter it via awk and looping through to download just the files I was after:

    curl -sL "https://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/2025/h264-hd/" | \
  grep -oE 'href="[^"]*\.mp4"' | \
  sed 's/href="//; s/"$//' | \
  awk -F'-' '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) if($i=="eng" && $(i+1) ~ /^[a-z]{3,}$/ || $(i-1) ~ /^[a-z]{3,}$/){next} else if($i=="eng")print}' | \
  while IFS= read -r file; do 
    wget "https://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/2025/h264-hd/$file"
  done

    If that’s not so much your thing, their frontend is nicely accessible as well. https://media.ccc.de/c/39c3

    A screenshot of the media.ccc.de website displaying the "39C3: Power Cycles" video playlist from the 2025 Chaos Communication Congress. The page lists several talks with thumbnails and titles, including a presentation by Cory Doctorow on an "ensheittification-resistant internet" and a talk titled "Hacking washing machines."

  • Google DeepMind Workers Vote to Unionize Over Military AI Deals

    Google DeepMind Workers Vote to Unionize Over Military AI Deals

    Joel Khalili · Wired

    “A lot of people here bought into the Google DeepMind tagline ‘to build AI responsibly to benefit humanity,’” the DeepMind employee told WIRED. “The direction of travel is to further militarization of the AI models we’re building here.”

    · · ·

    “These conversations are happening . . . The workers at other frontier labs have seen what Google DeepMind workers have done. They’ve come to us asking for help as well.”

  • TMK: Do Not Become Addicted to Electrons (ft. Tim Sahay, Kate Mackenzie)

    This Machine Kills

    We chat with Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie — authors of the indispensable newsletter The Polycrisis and hosts of the new podcast Electric World Order
    · · ·
    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).

  • Critical Themes 2026: New Constructions

    The New School

    Via Mike Pepi who’s speaking on Friday.

    4—6pm

  • Hundreds of Millions of iPhones Can Be Hacked With a New Tool Found in the Wild

    Andy Greenberg · WIRED

    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
    · · ·
    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.”
    · · ·
    “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.”
    · · ·
    “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.
    · · ·
    “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.

  • CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples’ Movements

    Joseph Cox · 404 Media

    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.

    · · ·

    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.

  • ‘It beggars belief’: MoD sources warn Palantir’s role at heart of government is threat to UK’s security

    Charlie Young & Carole Cadwalladr · The Nerve

    “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.”