@JulianOliver@mastodon.social
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JulianOliver

@JulianOliver@mastodon.social

Critical Engineering, tech art, techno politics, infosec, resilient infrastructure, communitarian survivalism, environmental defense, planetary futures.

I spend a lot of time helping defenders of human rights and the environment protect themselves with best-practice information and operations security. Alongside, I deploy secure infrastructure so they can safely organise.

Bows, arrows & rainforest conservation when I can.

Pākehā, Tangata Tiriti, he/him, herbivore

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

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Daniel Ellsberg 1931 - 2023. Rest In Power.

JulianOliver, to random
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Aotearoa New Zealand activist Rosemary Penwarden faces up to 10 years in jail for sending a satirical email cancelling an oil industry conference, on counts of making and using a forged document.

“I like to think I was a threat to this industry, but for goodness sake, I’m 52kg, five foot three inches high, and 64 [...] These are the biggest polluting companies in our entire world."

She sent it from a non-personal GMail address, arrested 7 months later

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/15/nz-climate-activist-faces-up-to-10-years-in-prison-over-fake-letter-saying-fossil-fuel-event-cancelled

JulianOliver, to random
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Since the birth of the plastic industry in the 1950's, this petrochem material has touched every corner of our home Planet. It's in our bodies, rain, soil, the air, animals both wild & domesticated. But perhaps the habitats most poisoned are oceanic.

Special filters placed on boats traveling in a race through some of the most remote stretches of ocean collected between 92 and 1884 particles of microplastic in every cubic meter studied.

We have ushered a Plastisphere.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/05/microplastics-found-in-every-sample-of-water-taken-during-ocean-race

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A billboard in Linz, Austria, fitted with an atmospheric CO2 reading taken from @gordo and my project PerMillion (https://permillion.live). The billboard features as part of the Linz FMR festival (https://www.linzfmr.at/), opening June 6, and will be changed each day in sync with readings from our site.

JulianOliver, to random
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Great Guardian expose in honour of executed enviro activists Bruno and Dom. Here they expose how 800M trees in the Amazon, some 1.7m hectares, were destroyed in just 6 years to meet the global demand for grass-fed beef. That's atop soya livestock feed grown on deforested indigenous land, exported to EU & China to feed chickens, pigs, cows & even salmon there.

Few things better for the planet than to reduce your consumption of animals & animal breast milk.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/02/more-than-800m-amazon-trees-felled-in-six-years-to-meet-beef-demand

JulianOliver,
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Controversial but true, there are however rare contexts where meat-eating benefits forest biomes (& I say this as someone whom has not eaten it since a teen). Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, invasive species like goats, pigs & deer brought by European settlers are major drivers of rainforest stress. These animals have no natural predators here, & browse on the roots & undercanopies, ending regeneration. Damage is vast. Local subsistence hunters, many indigenous, are a force of forest conservation.

JulianOliver, to random
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It turns out that the Sixth Mass Extinction event is not only well underway, but happening at a scale and pace far worse than previously thought.

New research has found that "48% of [all] species have declining populations and just 3% have rising populations. They also found evidence showing that 33% of species currently classified as nonthreatened on the IUCN Red List are actually spiraling toward extinction."

https://phys.org/news/2023-05-anthropocene-sixth-mass-extinction-event.html

JulianOliver,
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Worth mentioning that folk often assume climate change is the primary culprit of terrestrial extinction. While atmospheric warming is indeed a new stressor on the block, it is habitat loss & land change that is doing the most harm to the wild. And it so happens the primary driver of habitat loss is animal agriculture & its feedcrops (Living Planet Report, 2022).

In other words, the 6th Extinction event on our home planet cannot be averted wiithout changing what we eat, and how we produce it.

JulianOliver, to random
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Excellent interview with Timnit Gebru on her road to Silicon Valley as a refugee from Ethiopia, her getting the sack from Google for speaking out on how 'AI' implementations in wide public use “overrepresent hegemonic viewpoints and encode biases potentially damaging to marginalised populations”, and plenty of critical insights on embedded racism in the tech sector

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/may/22/there-was-all-sorts-of-toxic-behaviour-timnit-gebru-on-her-sacking-by-google-ais-dangers-and-big-techs-biases

JulianOliver, to random
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Lest the poetry escape anyone.

JulianOliver, to random
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Atmospheric carbon continues to rise, along with potent GHG's CH4 and N2O. Governments the world over are evidently doing whatever they can to avoid addressing it directly as an emergency. UAE, a petrostate, will host the next COP.

Many scientists place ~450ppm atmospheric CO2e to be the point of no return, whereby self-reinforcing feedbacks become so established that any imagined means of reducing carbon beyond this point becomes futile.

It's getting late.

https://permillion.live

JulianOliver, to random
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A fine example of tactical decolonialism implemented in software:

Pikari Mai! is a browser plugin that replaces news and gossip about the UK royals with indigenous news. It was written by Māori artist Hāmiora Bailey to "switch off the toff", quoted (Guardian) as saying:

“People are sick of it – they don’t care about how much a diamond costs and who’s wearing what dress [...] “Across the globe, Indigenous folk are tired of [this] rhetoric around frivolity and class.”

https://www.pikarimai.co.nz/

JulianOliver, to random
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Great piece in the Guardian revealing the US Beef Industry's heavily-funded strategy to mass engineer public opinion into believing that beef isn't the environmental disaster that it is.

To study their game, the author took their training program, learning how to spread disinformation in the form of 'scientific sounding' arguments on behalf of the industry:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/03/beef-industry-public-relations-messaging-machine

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Spot the camera? Digging through my collection of spy tooling I came across this work of innocuous evil, one I studied at length a few years back (wrote code to find them and blind them). 720p video and pics saved to microSD, with a handy 2.4GHz WLAN module (in red, w/ flexi patch antenna) for live monitoring on a phone through the wall.

Seems its still in fairly wide circulation, if the market is any indication.

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JulianOliver, to random
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Liking this photo of 2023

JulianOliver, to random
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"The technology is put out there, and as the system interacts with humankind, its developers wait to see what happens and make adjustments based on that. We would never, as a collective, accept this kind of mindset in any other industrial field" - Valérie Pisano, of the Quebec AI Institute, cited in this good article on the new mind-eating computationally mediated reality we appear to be waltzing into https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/23/pope-jacket-napalm-recipes-how-worrying-is-ai-rapid-growth

JulianOliver, to random
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I think of this tree often. Wonderful to meet again today. Has been too long.

JulianOliver, to random
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Hitachi HDD: Z7K320-250 / 250GB / SATA 3.0Gb/s.
Data erasure method: 50lb Longbow, two arrows at 15 yards.

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JulianOliver,
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Posted this on the birdcage a while back. Just wanted to have it here. Oh, and for any that doubt the reliability of this method, I could pour out the glass substrate (platter completely bent), thousands of tiny shards. Gone baby gone

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