Tootfinder

The security industry is somewhat unique. It's probably the only industry created by the worker as a threat. If you talk to hackers who were in the scene before Operation Sundevil, you'll realize that it's always been a Bullshit Job.
Folks in L0ft and cDc were hacking companies and basically blackmailing them into paying for their services. Operation Sundevil "straightened up" the industry. Some people went to prison, some people build security services companies. Pretty much anyone who actually believed in the manifesto was locked up or edged out.
Using the Graeber framework here, hackers are partially duct tapers and partially goons. The critical thing here is that the industry was basically created to give money to people who would otherwise destroy the system.
Neuroatypical folks have always been forced to the margins of society, but computers gave us a super power. Now we were extremely dangerous. Tech, especially hackers, have always been paid a lot to minimize the risk of developing a class consciousness.
Graeber talked about this. Kings and nobles would often find some job or title that they could bestow on potential enemies in order to keep them close, to defang them. What better role than sheriff, a type of goon, for a rebel?
We turned it in to a whole thing. Not only did hackers make their own industry and force everyone else to accept it, we even created a whole parallel box ticker industry of "compliance" as a side effect.
The Hacker's Manifesto was decontectualized and made a fun artifact of the past. We were sold a story of "good hackers" who "protected grandma from the bad hackers." But the whole industry always existed to keep us on a leash. The funny thing is that it was a leash that we made ourselves.
But now we're seeing massive layoffs in tech, even in security. Now that we're this far in, everyone has forgotten the history. Leadership doesn't understand what security people do, so they think that LLMs can replace us. But the people in the industry now, the ones who came to it as a career, don't understand the history.
There was always a split for these weird outsiders, these people who couldn't fit in to the system but now had power over it. Some wanted in and they were willing to use extortion to get in, and others wanted to destroy the system to set everyone free.
Operation Sundevil, and the industry that evolved out of it, existed to neutralize those revolutionary elements by offering extortionists a safe entry. Extortionists trusted the capitalists to not stab them in the back the same way capitalists have stabbed everyone in the back through all of history. Now my LinkedIn feed is full of Meta layoffs, and I wonder if that class consciousness is starting to click for anyone yet.

The DOJ withdraws subpoenas that would have forced three NYT reporters to testify about sources, after a federal judge criticized the DOJ for sloppy legal work (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/usmediatimesair-force-one-42429e4d4da8accc42b6c3…

Government withdraws subpoenas of 3 reporters for The New York Times
The government has withdrawn subpoenas that would have compelled three New York Times reporters to testify about their sources for articles about President Donald Trump’s Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet. The withdrawals in U.S. District Court followed a remarkable back and forth between a visibly irritated Judge Arun Subramanian and government attorneys. They come at a time when the Trump administration is vigorously going after news organizations whose reporting and coverage it doesn’t lik…

“Some things that they were able to have funded in the past — such as sex workers or equine therapy — have not passed the pub test.”
Sex workers were never covered, though *transport* to visit sex workers—who clients paid for at their own expense—was, the same as if they required transport to shop for groceries.
But don't let mere facts get in the way of sticking the boot into our society's most vulnerable, will ya?

The NDIS gave participants their lives back. Now they fear what's to come
NDIS participants set up their lives around the scheme's rules. But now the rules are changing and they fear what lies ahead.

Q&A with Sundar Pichai on the future of Google Search, Google's place in the AI race, public skepticism toward AI, AI agents, AI safety, TPUs, and more (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/podcasts/sundar-picha…

Sundar Pichai Understands Why People Are Anxious About A.I.
After a busy Google I/O, the company’s chief executive sits down with the hosts of “Hard Fork” to discuss the future of Google Search, how he’s using A.I. agents and his advice for college graduates.

The attack on a girl’s elementary school in the Iranian town of Minab was one of the US military’s deadliest civilian bombings in decades.
But nearly four months on, the Pentagon has produced no answers about why the military fired a Tomahawk cruise missile into a school on the first day of the war,
killing at least 175 people,
mostly children.
Some critics doubt that the Pentagon ever will, or will bury the results under classifications to keep the worst mistakes se…

Has anybody tried this thing? My fear is that increasing the air humidity is not particularly a good idea when it's hot?
https://www.klarstein.fr/Climatisation/Raf

Logistics in the technical sense (part of supply chain management) is a subset of logistics in the vernacular sense ("the handling of the details of an operation"). You can explore this second and more general sense, and thereby build an understanding of the first and more technical sense, by iteratively asking the question, "how does one make that happen" and follow questions from there.
A big part of organizing is figuring out the (vernacular) logistics (and helping others figure it out). You want to organize a seed swap? Ok. How does one make that happen? Well, you need seeds, people, a place, and perhaps a time. How does one make that happen? You can forage seeds or you can buy seeds for a garden and swap extras. How do you get people to come? Well, figure out where you want people to come from and choose an accessible place. What's the easiest thing to do? Get people from your neighborhood. How does one make that happen? Well, maybe put up flyers. How does one make that happen? Well, print them on your printer if you have one, or at a library, then go post them up. Etc.
Keep asking questions until you either find a roadblock that you can't find a way around, or you find things you can do yourself (one of those things you can do yourself is asking friends to help).
If you practice the exercise of thinking about how things happen, you can start to find things that you can do yourself. You can start to understand what exists now, and you can imagine what's possible. By thinking about logistics, you can figure out how to replace things when they collapse or are dismantled. You can also identify things that can't easily be replaced, and try to figure out alternatives.
This practice is good for figuring out how to build, but it can also be a valuable practice for figuring out how to resist. Concentration camps and ethnic cleansing also require logistics. Mass displacement means moving people. How does one do that? People are generally going to be moved in planes or buses. How does one do that? Well, people get loaded on to planes or buses in specific places. Planes and buses need fuel. Planes are fueled at their airports, which may well be the same places where people are loaded on to them. There is a fuel depo and a fuel truck that makes flying people out of a specific place possible. How does the fuel get to that fuel depo? Well, that fuel is probably also delivered by truck. Someone drives those trucks. Someone fuels those planes. Someone clears the planes for takeoff. Someone fuels those busses. Someone drives those busses. And so on.
Logistics networks can be highly complex. The more complex the operation, the more possible points of failure and more possible points where pressure can be applied, where operations can be disrupted. Ethnic cleansing is a complicated operation. The logistics of disrupting complicated things tend to be much less complicated than the logistics of the complicated things themselves.
The Right has exploited this fact for a long time. Centralized social services are logistically complex. Public infrastructure is logistically complex. By destroying these things, they can loot public resources by privatizing the infrastructure and functionality.
But the things that support the Right are even more logistically complex. Oil, cars, AI data centers, internal paramilitary, these are extremely complicated and fragile. There are numerous pressure points, all of which can respond to numerous strategies.
If we want to win, we should reduce the influence of politics over the things we care about. We should focus on building distributed mutual aid networks that don't rely on state funding and aren't subject to the whims of politicians. This is also known as "dual power." That is, creating counter-institutions outside of the dominant political system. The Right already does this in the form of churches and corporations.
As we reduce our complexity, we can then press our complexity advantage against the things for which the Right *needs* the state: the apparatus of violence needed to maintain capital and enforce the dominant order.

Israel and Hezbollah Are Still Fighting, Several Cease-Fires Later (Euan Ward/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/world/middleeast/israel-hezbollah-fighting-cease-fire.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/260620/p44#a260620p44

Apple releases iOS 26.5, introducing end-to-end encryption for RCS messaging in beta with supported carriers; the setting is enabled by default (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)
https://9to5mac.com/2026/05/11/ios-26-5-adds-end-to-end-encryption-for…

iOS 26.5 adds end-to-end encryption for RCS messaging, rolling out now - 9to5Mac
iOS 26.5 is now available to everyone after six weeks of beta testing. The update adds fresh wallpapers, new features...

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116713587055769588
I was actually using LLMs a couple of years ago for text classification. Before that I pushed hard for resources to support automation. I helped build an automation team where none existed. I pushed to use transformer models to solve problems before LLMs existed. I used simple ML to make predictions and classify issues. I've been on the cutting edge for a long time.
I *should* be an early adopter of the modern LLM thing. But tech oligarchs transformed themselves into reverse ouroboros (infinitely shoving their heads up their own asses). The oligarchs never really believed that other people had free will, but I think they had been too scared to let that slip. After the lockdowns, I think they just snapped and here we are.
As much as I trash LLMs, I've had a nuanced critique for a while (wiring about this now). The lack of consent is so huge. The oligarchs have plans for us, and it doesn't involve our consent.
Under different conditions, I do actually think there could be revolutionary elements to this tech (not so much LLMs themselves as LLM MCP, and not for the things they think). But without consent, I think (and hope) the friction will overcome the momentum.
"AI" is already more expensive than humans. It will never be profitable as long as people resist. There are multiplying problems, and I don't see those being fixed without collective effort. I have a lot of thoughts, but "consent" (or the real or implied lack thereof) is central to so many aspects of LLMs.
The oligarchs want to force LLM tech onto all of us without our consent. Ultimately, they want to replace us all with obedient machines. The mistake they made was assuming we would be as obedient as the LLMs with which they have become so obsessed.