@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

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JulianOliver, to opsec
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Test case: You get a voice msg from a friend in the middle of the night. They're in a local park and they need your help right now.

Soon, we will not know whether to act.

Time to work on 'code words' with family and friends, to help filter people from their simulations

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/31/openai-deems-its-voice-cloning-tool-too-risky-for-general-release

JulianOliver,
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

If watermarking is employed the simulation could be detected at the application layer, but unless it is human audible, it would be trivial to filter out in a post process.

JulianOliver,
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

@schneidegger The cool thing is that after getting loaded on the world-eating tech you made, you can retire early and write a best-selling book detailing your regrets and a charity you started, proving that you had a good conscience all along.

JulianOliver,
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@jedsetter I wish

JulianOliver, to random
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"[...] if this year’s rate of warming persists, it would give us two full degrees of extra warming by 2034. Add the warming we have already caused (1.5 degrees), and the average global temperature 10 years from now would be 3.5C higher."

Good piece by Gwynne Dyer on the current crazy warming anomaly, in advance of her new book.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/world-news/350229370/climate-anomaly-making-scientists-scratch-their-heads

JulianOliver, to infosec
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XZ, an archiving utility in broad use across GNU/Linux distributions, has a backdoor in versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 that appears to fiddle with SSH auth and possibly offers an attacker RCE. Debian and Redhat have both released advisories. Thankfully RHEL and Debian GNU/Linux stable releases are unaffected. Testing/Sid are however. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/red-hat-warns-of-backdoor-in-xz-tools-used-by-most-linux-distros/

JulianOliver,
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Bleeping Computer seems to on and off with some outages, so here's another on it just in case https://thehackernews.com/2024/03/urgent-secret-backdoor-found-in-xz.html

JulianOliver, to random
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The newly launched Copernicus Climate Change Atlas puts the chance of my region warming to 5.69C by the end of the century at the 90th percentile. How about you guys?

https://atlas.climate.copernicus.eu/atlas

JulianOliver,
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

@kiilo Unfortunately I see 90% confidence of 9.49C by 2100!

JulianOliver,
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

@hamoid 😭

JulianOliver,
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

@hamoid Yes, if the AMOC stops, then for Western Europe and the Eastern Seaboard of the US it flips brutally the other way.

JulianOliver,
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

@sifr True, not loading for me either rn

JulianOliver, to random
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A UK thinktank looked at 22k different jobs across all types and sectors of employment and found 11% of them at near-term risk of being replaced by automation due to rapid advances in 'AI'.

The impacts would disproportionally affect women, younger workers and those in numerous lower paid jobs, say the researchers, citing a worst case scenario of nearly 8M jobs being taken from the market.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/27/ai-apocalypse-could-take-away-almost-8m-jobs-in-uk-says-report

JulianOliver, to random
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

I have enjoyed spending time with/near/in Serra's huge sculptures over the years, often by chance. Shear ship-sized planes/twists/bends of oxidised metal, proudly raw explorations of pure material presence.

Rust in Peace.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/mar/27/richard-serra-dies-85-american-abstract-sculpture-artist-cause-of-death-pneumonia

JulianOliver,
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

@Subumbral agreed, acoustically too!

phil_stevens, to NewZealand
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This is the end game that the govt wants to execute in Aotearoa. The steps are simple:

  1. Require councils to meet stringent water performance criteria.

  2. Don't provide any funding for them to do this.

  3. When councils become insolvent as a result of 1 and 2, force the sale of water assets to private capital.

Chris Bishop was in the UK meeting with key figures in the privatisation of municipal water systems there. Deals are being made without scrutiny.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/26/4m-hours-of-raw-sewage-discharges-in-england-last-year-figures-expected-to-show

JulianOliver,
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

@phil_stevens yep this is clearly the goal. Seymour's cited hero is Thatcher, he'll be egging Luxon on.

Chomsky:

"That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital"

JulianOliver, to random
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San Jose, California, has taken its foray into the automated detection of homeless encampments - a USA-wide first.

Based on CA's track record with homeless, we can only assume this application of computer vision to study them will not be to their benefit:

"Local outreach workers, who were previously not aware of the experiment, worry the technology will be used to punish and push out San Jose’s unhoused residents."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/25/san-jose-homelessness-ai-detection

JulianOliver, to random
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

I wanted to like the '3 Body Problem' series, I really did, but unfortunately found it to be a soup of awful.

Heard the book is very good however, so may give it a go.

JulianOliver,
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@skry Good to hear! I did not know of the Amazon Prime version.

JulianOliver,
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@skry I have watched a lot of all-Asian cinema so that sounds great. I was weary of the classic white-washing or 'white-bending' of the Netflix adaptation, and it was true unfortunately.

JulianOliver, to random
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Spam in 2024:

'Build a business while you sleep with the all new AI Tentacles'

'Hey, I wanted to reach out to you about our new intelligent dog harness'

'We have hacked your website and stolen your databases'

'Ever feel like you're in an endless battle for traffic, stuck between high-cost ads and the slow burn of SEO?'

'Upgrade Your Living Environment with a Free Sensor Trash Can'

I miss the Nigerian Princes.

JulianOliver,
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@ErnstGucker Sniff. It was never about the mountains of gold for me.

JulianOliver, to random
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Bet the 'Wow! Signal' is the most viewed Wikipedia page rn.

JulianOliver,
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

@skry '3 Body Problem' making it famous all over again

JulianOliver, to random
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In the last 10 years 'delete' has increasingly shifted to mean leave, unfriend or remove, whereas 'cancel' has come to mean delete, block or censor (data or access). So common is this new usage I wonder when dictionaries will begin to reflect it.

JulianOliver,
@JulianOliver@mastodon.social avatar

"I deleted them on Insta" being an example I heard most recently.

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