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.”

the Guardian

UK campaigner targeted by Trump accuses tech giants of ‘sociopathic greed’

Exclusive: Imran Ahmed says US companies are ‘corrupting the system’ of politics by seeking to avoid accountability

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."

Le Monde.fr

Russia outlaws feminist protest band Pussy Riot

A court in Moscow said it had upheld prosecution submissions

230+ enviro groups have written a letter demanding a moratorium on Meta, OpenAI, crypto and Google's, supersized datacenter land/water/grid grab in the US. While encouraging, it seems the locals are already bringing the squeeze: "At least 16 datacenter projects, worth a combined $64bn, have been blocked or delayed due to local opposition to rising electricity costs." Water protests too, are ramping up.

the Guardian

More than 200 environmental groups demand halt to new US datacenters

Exclusive: Congress urged to act against energy-hungry facilities blamed for increasing bills and worsening climate crisis

Also grabbed a Wio Tracker L1 dev kit. I nearly toasted it with wrong polarity on tbe JST connector (hence errm "REV"), swapped it and all good. The ribbon extension cable for the e-ink display was broke, so just connected it direct. Nice wee solar node project this will be. #meshtastic #infrastructure #offline

It's telling when invisible human workers whose job it is to proof 'AI' output, place no trust in it themselves. One worker for Google was tasked to find the limits of the LLM software's historical breadth: “I asked it about the history of the Palestinian people, and it wouldn’t give me an answer no matter how I rephrased the question" And yet the same query for Israel was profuse with detail. "We reported it, but nobody seemed to care at Google.”

the Guardian

Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI

When the people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least, it shows that incentives for speed are overtaking safety, experts say

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

A thread asking difficult but necessary questions around Signal's dependence on AWS, & more generally the troubled narrative that scaling up somehow inevitably implies partnering with Amazon. A partner story to this is that all Internet infrastructure leans on Amazon in some way. This is not the case, as we saw very well here on Mastodon during the outage, as those using Tor also know, & as those of us that self-host infrastructure do too. AWS was off. We stayed on.

wakest's server

wakest ⁂ (@liaizon@wake.st)

Is there a good article or thread countering this narrative that Signal (and communication of that scale) is not possible without its relience on A...

A truly wonderful overview of the cherished Permacomputing 101 talk given at Critical Signals, by @npub1z8rj...mrq6 in August:

100R — permacomputing 101

#permacomputing

Amazon sought to hide the water use of its data centers from the public, for fear of looking bad: "Instead, Amazon officials opted to use only the relatively smaller figure of primary use, 7.7 billion gallons, when calculating progress towards its target because of “reputational risk”, fearing bad publicity if the full scale of Amazon’s consumption was revealed, the document shows."

SourceMaterial

Leak reveals Amazon plan to keep water use of data centres secret

Amazon strategised about ways to keep the public in the dark over the true extent of its data centres’ water use, a leaked internal document reve...