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
As part of the Gaza war, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have used artificial intelligence to rapidly and automatically perform much of the process of determining what to bomb. Israel has greatly expanded the bombing of the Gaza Strip, which in previous wars had been limited by the Israeli Air Force running out of targets.
These tools include the Gospel, an AI which automatically reviews surveillance data looking for buildings, equipment and people thought to belong to the enemy, and upon finding them, recommends bombing targets to a human analyst who may then decide whether to pass it along to the field. Another is Lavender, an “AI-powered database” which lists tens of thousands of Palestinian men linked by AI to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and which is also used for target recommendation.
Precisely what forms of data are ingested into the Gospel is not known. But experts said AI-based decision support systems for targeting would typically analyse large sets of information from a range of sources, such as drone footage, intercepted communications, surveillance data and information drawn from monitoring the movements and behaviour patterns of individuals and large groups.
· · ·
“We work quickly and there is no time to delve deep into the target. The view is that we are judged according to how many targets we manage to generate.”
Although it’s not known exactly what data the Gospel uses to make its suggestions, it likely comes from a wide variety of different sources. The list includes things like cell phone messages, satellite imagery, drone footage and even seismic sensors, according to Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, a group that facilitates military cooperation between Israel and the United States.
· · ·
“AI algorithms are notoriously flawed with high error rates observed across applications that require precision, accuracy, and safety,” warns Heidy Khlaaf, Engineering Director of AI Assurance at Trail of Bits, a technology security firm.
· · ·
“The nature of AI systems is to provide outcomes based on statistical and probabilistic inferences and correlations from historical data, and not any type of reasoning, factual evidence, or ‘causation,’” she says. “Given the track record of high error-rates of AI systems, imprecisely and biasedly automating targets is really not far from indiscriminate targeting.”
· · ·
While Israel’s use of the Gospel to generate a full set of targets may be unique, the nation is hardly alone in using AI to assist in intelligence analysis. The U.S. is actively working with many different kinds of AI to try and identify targets in the field. One suite of AI tools, known as Project Maven, is run through the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which collects massive quantities of satellite imagery.
· · ·
Ashley wouldn’t comment on any particular AI tool used by the U.S. intelligence community, but he says often these systems will stitch together multiple layers of AI. Some excel at finding objects in images while others can sort through things like radio transmissions . . . “You know the Russians are doing it, you know the Chinese are doing it,” he says.
I’m experimenting with Obscura VPN.
I’m largely curious about how they’re chaining Obscura —> Mullvad —> Internet.
“Traffic first passes through Obscura’s servers before exiting to the Internet via Mullvad’s WireGuard servers. This two-party architecture ensures that neither Obscura nor Mullvad can see both your identity and your Internet traffic.”
Via: Mullvad has partnered with Obscura VPN
According to Obscura’s FAQ:
Obscura is provably private by design.
Even “no-logs” VPNs see both your identity and your internet activity, meaning you have to blindly trust their pinky-promise for privacy. This is exactly why some privacy-conscious folks will tell you not to use a VPN at all.
Obscura is different – we never see your decrypted internet packets. It’s simply impossible for us to log your internet activity, even if we were compelled to, or if our servers were compromised. You can even verify this yourself.
Obscura’s stealth protocol is much harder to block.
Our unique stealth protocol is designed to blend in with regular internet traffic. It does so by leveraging QUIC – the same technology that powers HTTP/3 – making it far harder for censors or network filters to detect or block.
Not too shabby:
Meredith Whittaker making the case for why you should be using Signal.
No excuses.
Tolerance has been reduced to zero.
Hero Image: Jan Zappner/re:publica
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Re-publica_23_-Tag_1(52952663983).jpg
Something I try to share with people is the need to test links before you click them. Not all links, but anything suspicious. For me that means anything I receive via email.
VirusTotal has been a tool/service I’ve been using for a long while. Their browser extension facilitates the scanning of suspicious links by situating the functionality into the context sensitive menu triggered by a right click.
Selecting that menu option triggers the VirusTotal URL scan page to open and initiates the scan of that link. Results of that scan are returned and from those you can decide for yourself if you trust what’s on the other side of that link.
May your clicks be merry and bright
luv luv luv me some Jim Campbell
Opening: This Saturday, January 24th, 5 – 7 PM @ the lovely bitforms gallery
I’ve just closed out the Kismet process I had running around the clock for just over a month.
In that month the database files, which I had rotating daily were typically growing to 5GB before flipping. The total data collected is roughly 150GB.
.jpg){kind=link}
$ du -sh ./*
49G ./kismet
100G ./kismet_logs
# And the log files themselves
┌── kismet
│ ├── logged
│ │ ├── capture-20251213.kismet
│ │ ├── capture-20251215.kismet
│ │ ├── capture-20251216.kismet
│ │ ├── capture-20251217.kismet
│ │ ├── capture-20251218.kismet
│ │ ├── capture-20251219.kismet
│ │ ├── capture-20251220.kismet
│ │ ├── capture-20251221.kismet
│ │ ├── capture-20251222.kismet
│ │ └── capture-20251223.kismet
│ └── processed
│ ├── 20251215
│ ├── 20251216
│ ├── 20251217
│ ├── 20251218
│ ├── 20251219
│ ├── 20251220
│ ├── 20251221
│ ├── 20251222
│ ├── 20251223
│ └── boop
└── kismet_logs
├── capture-20251224.kismet
├── capture-20251225.kismet
├── capture-20251226.kismet
├── capture-20251227.kismet
├── capture-20251228.kismet
├── capture-20251229.kismet
├── capture-20251230.kismet
├── capture-20251231.kismet
├── capture-20260101.kismet
├── capture-20260102.kismet
├── capture-20260103.kismet
├── capture-20260104.kismet
├── capture-20260105.kismet
├── capture-20260106.kismet
├── capture-20260107.kismet
├── capture-20260108.kismet
├── capture-20260109.kismet
├── capture-20260110.kismet
├── capture-20260111.kismet
├── capture-20260112.kismet
├── capture-20260113.kismet
├── capture-20260114.kismet
├── capture-20260115.kismet
└── capture-20260116.kismetIn that processed directory is data I experimented with early on. I hadn’t and still haven’t put much time into it, but was mostly curious about how discreet, as in how unique individual devices are. Much of it generally is.
It’s really not about the static devices around me. I’m more focused on the devices passing my apartment window.
Turns out it was trivial to identify an individual device and recognize it every time it passed by. Creepy. Yes. Alarming. Also yes.
We bleed massive amounts of data as we walk down the street. I want to know what that data is, and from that, how that data might be used by others. That data you’re (un)knowingly sharing is being collected on a massive scale, then is turned around and sold to just about anyone who’s interested in paying for it.
The United States has some of the most disgracefully absent privacy laws in the world. Advertisers have found that your data is especially valuable, allowing them to build profiles to better target you with ads. They know an astonishing amount of information about us.
Many say they know more about us than we do ourselves.
I have lots to share about this. In the coming days and weeks, as I dive into and start working with the data, I’ll expand on what that data actually is, how it’s being used and what you might consider in adjusting—or not—your habits with that information in mind.
While transforming this data into information, it will simultaneously be transformed into visual form. Exactly what that will look like I’m unsure of at the moment. I like to see where an idea takes me, and to watch how the process governs the eventual shape it takes.
Maybe this knowledge prompts you to make adjustments. Maybe you’ll become aware of these things and simply move on as, who knows, your unknowingly surrendered data might make the groceries in your cart cheaper than the identical groceries in the cart of the person behind you. However, maybe the algorithm thinks you’re rich. Prepare to pay more for that flight (via Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society).
Happy? During the hour of the wolf? How dare he.
I *think* he says, “the joke about the podium is that it’s the only known USB-C compatible podium that they could find for me.”
Seen another way, he’s the conductor.
The room is filled by avant-garde virtuosos.
This is not a rehearsal—it’s an alchemical ritual. He and the hackers before him are smelting AI slop and surveillance capitalism into something transcendent. The future isn’t coming. It’s being sublimated from the bones of the present.
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet
Read it here:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
Hero image:
The amazing collages from the talk:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208
