Reviving Disinfodrome
Doable, but not for free (fundraiser).
Disinfodrome went down at the end of January, due to a combination of elderly hardware and nobody being willing to cover the $100/month cost of hosting even a single 1U rackmount. The Congressional investigations and FOIA data are safe, as is the curious configuration we used to get Open Semantic Search to run under Proxmox.
Now a journalist is asking about a FOIA that we put a lot of work into, and I’m willing to let someone outside the U.S. put it back online, but it’ll cost a bit more than the system we took down in January.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Given how important this particular FOIA is, even here in mid-2025, it pains me that I can’t simply snap my fingers and make this happen.
Requirement & Solution:
We need a bare metal system, there’s no path to success that involves someone else’s virutalization. OSS is touchy, getting it to run with Proxmox is a well understood process. These are some bare metal Contabo systems that would do the trick. If it’s just this one thing, the DS1 would be fine. If we’re going to keep this up and do additional projects it really needs to be a DS2. I am not married to Contabo, this just happened to be the bare metal I had bookmarked. There are others, but these guys are well known low cost leaders.
I will assist in getting this thing going. Someone in Europe will hold the account, the data will end up on a system there, and it won’t be branded Disinfodrome. I presume it’ll be some random domain name with resources hidden behind Cloudflare ZTNA. Journalism isn’t a crime here (yet) but it is being treated as such.
Conclusion:
The content in this FOIA involves something that should not have ever happened.
This is one of those things I don’t ever get to claim, it’s someone else’s leg work, I just agreed to provide a search engine.
The actual thing would have to remain secret, but I guess I can show some screen shots from the provider and the Proxmox install.
If you and I already talk on Signal I’m willing to mention what the intent is, I’m just not going to broadcast it to the world.
We are merely efficient here, not photosynthetic. Things like this will require external inputs until we evolve the ability to run on nothing more than sunlight.
