@JulianOliver@mastodon.social
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

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.

JulianOliver, to random
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On the curious thing of Mastodon unknowingly DDoS'ing websites, dubbed the 'fediverse effect' https://news.itsfoss.com/mastodon-link-problem/

JulianOliver,
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@fnwbr Agreed.

JulianOliver,
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@neoluddite Sort of. There is an inherent network inefficiency here. With the Slashdot effect it's GETs in individual browsers that generate that traffic, so corresponding to views. With Mastodon, it's federated servers and end point clients combined generating that traffic. In the case of the former, within a very short period of time.

JulianOliver,
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@neoluddite But I agree that with sufficient nominal resources, sane site optimisation, and proper tuning at the webserver, there is no reason a site in 2024 cannot stand straight during all but the most severe of blizzards.

JulianOliver, to random
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Learned a few things, OK more like 8, calibrating the MPU9250 accelerometer and magnetometer package for a new artwork. Was wondering why I was getting spurious compass drift, and remembered that the big speakers in the studio are errm giant magnets. So I built it up on a tripod, took it outside, ran the calib routine and it's tracking perfectly. Just needed that isolation.

Thoroughly recommend this sensor package btw, for any proj needing North and a gyro. Thanks for reading my shameless ad!

Closeup of the MPU9250/6500 accelerometer and magnetometer sensor package

JulianOliver, to random
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Good piece on the so-called 'dumphone boom', alongside the challenges of offlining in a world now so dependent on smartphones.

"Three in five gen-Zers say they’d like to be less connected to the digital world"

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/27/the-boring-phone-stressed-out-gen-z-ditch-smartphones-for-dumbphones

JulianOliver, to random
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Took the bus to town, everyone's on their phones. Got to town, everyone's on their phones.

I want to see a photography exhibition of people waiting for the train, vaping on the back porch, in a queue at a concert, friends sitting opposite at a cafe - all of them looking at their hand as though holding an invisible phone.

JulianOliver,
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@undltd @markusreuter @aramba Obsolete Presence is a great piece for sure!

JulianOliver,
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@markusreuter love it. TY.

JulianOliver, to random
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A short video of a person generously expressing how they feel about self-driving cars.

(via @w0bb1t )

Video of a person standing on top of a Waymo self driving car, supposedly in San Francisco, repeatedly trying to kick on the windscreen. It is shot by another person from a car travelling in the other direction.

JulianOliver,
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@w0bb1t However we feel about such acts of resistance, it is important to understand the backstory, where that anger comes from:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/self-driving-cars/

And since that article was written, regulators opened the floodgates for the likes of Waymo to do business city-wide on SF streets. Many residents and essential service workers (like fire and emergency responders) are understandably a bit grumpy about this.

JulianOliver, to random
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Notes from The Sixth Mass Extinction:

"When I was a teenager in the 90s, I used to sneak out a lot to go to raves. I used to get back home at like six in the morning and always hated the noise the birds made outside my window. [...]

I’ve just temporarily moved back to that same childhood bedroom in the commuter belt of Munich having spent 15 years working as a photographer in the US. Now, there is literally no noise when I have my window open. No birds at all."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/22/readers-on-changes-to-the-natural-world-around-them-aoe

JulianOliver, to random
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Look I do think it's worth mentioning that the Moon is drifting away from the Earth 3.8cm each year and that this just so happens to be around about the amount our fingernails grow in the same period.

JulianOliver, (edited ) to random
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Some incredible Late, Late Anthropocene grimness, researchers found that ocean spray along the North South transect of the Atlantic emits more PFAAs ('forever chemicals') than any sole industrial source. So, standing on the Atlantic coastline (presumably elsewhere too), enjoying the ocean breeze, you are loading up on PFAAs. The ocean is now skinned with the stuff, its primary transporter.

What have we done?

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adl1026

JulianOliver,
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Guardian piece on it here https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/19/ocean-spray-pfas-study

JulianOliver, to random
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If you were wondering why dietary shift as a recommendation for emissions reduction was barely tabled at COP28, this is probably why. Seems the UN's own Food & Agriculture org was distorting research & playing it down.

Two misquoted scientists are hitting back, demanding retraction:

"The FAO’s errors were multiple, egregious, conceptual and all had the consequence of reducing the emissions mitigation possibilities from dietary change far below what they should be."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/19/un-livestock-emissions-report-seriously-distorted-our-work-say-experts

JulianOliver, to random
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The ISS gets a major battery upgrade, 2.6 tonnes of hardware dumped.

Everything wasn't fine:

Nasa: "The hardware was expected to fully burn up during entry through Earth's atmosphere on March 8, 2024. However, a piece of hardware survived and impacted a home in Naples, Florida,"

Father: "It almost hit my son. He was two rooms over and heard it all"

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/514480/nasa-says-part-of-international-space-station-crashed-into-florida-home

JulianOliver,
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@yngmar Umm, that seems like an important thing to not ignore. Reading now.

JulianOliver, (edited ) to infosec
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If you use PuTTY, versions .68 to .80 (FileZilla, WinSCP, TortoiseGit all wrap it).. https://securityonline.info/cve-2024-31497-critical-putty-vulnerability-exposes-private-keys-immediate-action-required/

JulianOliver, to random
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Last night I opened up YT in a private window, & clicked on an unrelated video to that of the one I had just watched. It was a video on arctic ice melts that turned out to be 100% denialist.

One click & there I was in endless fetid scroll of Jordan Peterson, climate change denial, 'what is woke' explainers, 'lol snowflakes' shorts, Trump propaganda, knife fights, & misogynistic, racist garbage.

Don't tell me Big Tech aren't culpable for the hate out there. They're farming it, on a vast scale.

JulianOliver,
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@roze I know of Wayne's work and agree that no line can be drawn to the toxic sludge of Peterson's voice, other than Peterson being violently opposed to veganism.

Put another way, would a fan of Peterson's views on that particular topic be recommended content from or about Hsiung?

I think not, and there lies the crux of the siege.

JulianOliver,
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@derickr Great thought.

JulianOliver,
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

@JMMaok Good read, thank you!

What I find especially interesting is the zealous recommendation of right wing content even when starting from a blank slate (new cache, history and cookie free), without any prior expression of political leaning. Some of the commenters to this thread have also noted how Peterson and similar content has been injected into their streams, despite having no related right wing viewing history.

Relatedly, here is a screenshot of a cache-less search on "climate"

JulianOliver,
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

@JMMaok Very interesting. I suppose in that case, topologically speaking, neighbours would need to have static IPs, or dynamic IPs on routine rotation, a wheel. I am almost always tunneling through one of my own VPN's but with geographic setting to that of my country and language. My exit nodes are not in the domestic IP space, rather datacenter managed subnets on the public Internet.

JulianOliver,
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@JMMaok Yikes! A bad joke about targeted content in there somewhere. Enjoying thinking about this neighbour/context/content framing, regardless. I would like to test for it somehow one day.

JulianOliver, to random
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US lawmakers voted 273–147 to reauthorise the FISA law, allowing for far-reaching and warrantless monitoring of foreign communications, alongside collection of US citizens’ messages and phone calls.

Controversially, the Biden administration has long pushed for this, supposedly as a tool to fight terrorism. In a vaguely comedic left/right political reversal, Trump is railing against it, claiming it was used to spy on him.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/12/fisa-surveillance-act-reauthorized

JulianOliver,
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

Important to understand this is not only an amendment allowing warrantless surveillance of US citizens at home, but also non-US citizens abroad.

"The Turner-Himes amendment [..] would permit federal law enforcement to also force “any other service provider” with access to communications equipment to hand over data. That means anyone with access to a wifi router, server or even phone – anyone from a landlord to a laundromat – could be required to help the government spy"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/16/house-fisa-government-surveillance-senate

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