Defensive Measures
Accumulating unused initiative.
During the time between Policy & Prejudice on New Years Day and yesterday’s Perhaps Some Climate Hope this site’s following has blossomed from 1,500 to coming up on 1,900. I guess my declaring lifetime policy defeat, and settling down to observe perhaps four years of making things worse for future generations, is more interesting to you guys than it feels to me right now.
The new normal here is defensive measures, since there’s a blossoming market for that.
Attention Conservation Notice:
An enumeration of safety measures combined with sly insults for various sorts of social media addicted degenerates. Read it for the wise advice, or LOL at the occasional random burns available to those who follow stale drama.
Unsafe Systems:
Did you Get! Off! Windows!?
Did you Get! Off! Gmail!?
Did you Throw Away Your Cell Phone?
Tossing that phone really IS your only hope of Avoiding Salt Typhoon.
Telegram, Twitter & Thee is about two hostile state actor sponsored cesspools you would do well to avoid. This is more about your wetware than the technology in use.
Alternatives:
Elderly Intel gear and generous friends who favor Mac pushed me into a change right after the election. My Apple Conversion Progress reached its high point around New Years, life dropped a couple Raspberry Pi 5 machines on my desk, and people have started throwing radio gear at me via Amazon.
If you just need stuff to work, Apple has a nice lockdown mode for journalists. Make sure any iPhone you run is an XR or later; the A12 Bionic chipset has never been compromised as the older ones were. You turn your phone off at night, you’ll wake up to a fresh new machine every morning. Keeping A Burner Phone is still a good option, for reasons, some of which I leave unspoken. I’ve just learned that there are some things people have to confront in a direct, personal fashion before they take heed.
The trio of single board computers here should diminish shortly; one Pi5 and a MikroTik Lt-AP are being made ready for deployment. I let ChatGPT lie to me for a while yesterday evening, until I became sure my rusty RouterOS knowledge was still better than some stochastic parrot repeating snippets garnered from other confused operators.
MikroTik Lt-AP and its old school DB-9 serial connector.
When the Pi5 goes, the one liter Windows 11 machine that’s on loan returns to KVM position #2. The other Pi5 moved into slot #3 and when $150 in Amazon money accumulates it’ll get demoted to backpack duty and a 16GB Pi5 will take its place. The little Orange Pi Zero 3 lurks in position #4 and there’s a brand new MikroTik RB941 sitting next to it.
MikroTik RB941.
The RB941 is the smallest machine they make but it still has the full featured OS. The default config assumes port one is your cable modem, the other three are wired devices, and it provides WiFi AP service. I have no specific need for this, other than replacing the one I’ve had since 2016, which got stepped on a year or so ago. The reason for owning this is simple - despite its diminutive four port form factor, it runs a proper enterprise operating system. I can attach devices to the wireless AP and then observe traffic in detail using the ethernet “port mirror” function.
There are a lot of dirty tricks that get played on Android and to a lesser degree IOS users. If there’s a watchful man in the middle many of those schemes simply implode as soon as a reporter is shown the particulars.
Human Factors:
Did you notice that one of Elon Musk’s DOGE kids is a member of The Com? This is a loosely connected cybercrime coalition, other keywords associated with it include “ACG” and the simple numeric identifier “764”.
This stuff has gotten really busy, so much so that when I get four simultaneous chat room notifications at 8:01 AM eastern time, I already know what the subject will be. I have recently taken the time to read Paige Adele Thompson’s detailed sentencing motion from the government. Her stupid, cocky behavior was by no means unique; apparently many frantic rats are clustered on the fantail of this sinking garbage scow, eyeing the Goliath groupers circling the scene.
Elon Musk is South African, as are some of the DOGE adults. They have been … concerned … about the level of attention they are drawing. This piece from The Daily Dot has the highlights. I have no personal interest in this, beyond having noticed that Elon Musk bears a striking resemblance to Ernst Röhm. This Beer Hall Putsch veteran came to an unfortunate end during the Night of the Long Knives.
It would not be good for America if the friction I mentioned in Policy & Prejudice were to escalate to similar levels, but I am just a spectator in these matters.
Conclusion:
There are hazards galore out there. Here’s an exciting new one, at least for most of you, in this case revealed via a DeepSeek article from YonHap.
DeepSeek also collects users' keyboard input patterns, which could potentially be used to identify individuals and user data it collects, like chat records, could be sent to certain servers in China.
The sequences of words you use are subject to stylometry, who you communicate with is prey to social network analysis, and your periods of activity fuel temporal analysis. These are all things I have done in the past. The fact that the *sound* of you typing is sufficient to identify you has never been information to which I had access, but this is a well known user validation method. And now all of this is being crammed into nation state AI projects just as fast as it can be acquired.
Musk’s little boys, and the grown men a step behind them, are perhaps not all part of The Com, but their smash and grab raids on various federal agencies will feed America’s answer to DeepSeek.
These things, the watchers, they trouble me, but no more so than they did the day before yesterday. I’ve been the golden jackal for a good long while, snatching bites from between the bigger predators, always ready to dart out of range if I’ve attracted unwanted attention. This stuff is, for me, like your daily commute. You’d recall a notable event, but you slip through the traffic, lost in thought, arriving most days with no real memory of what dangers you avoided on the way.
I talk about some of the changes I’m making, so that those of you who are inclined to pay attention know what to expect, you have some sort of model to work from as you evolve. There are things I don’t describe and the reasons are multifaceted. Things remain unknown because …
They’re soft targets.
They are not broadly applicable.
They’re intentionally presented as mistakes.
I’m OK but people around me are NOT ready to take the heat.
They require capabilities few people have.
We’ve been having talks about this stuff, hours long Jitsi confs on the state of the world, what is thought to be happening, what (if anything) we should do about it. Earlier this morning on one of those confabs I called a halt, and this is from memory, but what I said is close to this mark.
The thing you guys forget is that wild talent is normal in these parts. The person who’s a cog in a big machine looks at what you do just for fun, and they see the machinations some other machine. You are, all of you, singular, and you’re used to drawing attention. Now, thanks to AI, everyone is going to get that all at the same time, and 99% of the world has never been to that place. You’ll duck, you’ll pivot, you’ll call in another set of eyes, you’ll fall back … or we get together like this, and someone (or someTHING) gets an etiquette lesson. Normal people don’t backhand a federal task force to get its attention, order it to make itself scarce, and then have it fold 72 hours later. So please, all of you, stop and think about all the people who would never get an invite to a place like this. I don’t know that we CAN do anything, but we better at least consider the problem.
I hope that somewhere in all of this, some of you are coming away a bit better prepared for a world that shows every sign of going sideways HARD in the very near future.
And did I mention you should throw away your cell phone?
