Komunitas
midwest.social
I gave my dad one of my spare laptops four years ago; it had never had Windows on it (being from the halcyon days when Dell sold laptops with linux pre-installed), so I put Mint on it for him. Early this year he called and said one of the keys stopped working so he’d bought a newer, used laptop and could I help him put Linux on it, because that’s what he was used to. Over the phone, I helped him download and burn a new Mint image from his ancient desktop, and verbally walked him through switching the bios to boot from the USB, and through the Mint install menus. Since then, he’s called me once for technical support for getting his printer connected. Dad’s in his 80’s and was a cop with an associate’s degree; he’s never claimed to be a brainiac. That is what convinced me Linux is ready for anyone, but that the choice of distribution is important. I think dad never upgrades or installs new software, but that’s OK. I have to update and reboot every week because I’m stupidly loyal to Arch. I’m sorry that your mom had a bad experience; that’s super frustrating.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
I am this old: BBS’s -> College’s Telnet -> .edu sites over lynx -> Usenet -> IRC -> commercial websites -> Slashdot -> Fark -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy BBS From the back of Computer Shopper magazine, we would get a list of phone #'s to call which then connected us to various Wildcat BBS’s that were filled with interesting & squirrelly information and people. Usually 1 at a time could connect, but the fancy ones had multiple phone-lines. College/Telnet/Usenet Went to college and got access to a telnet account, which let me run Lynx and open a Usenet reader. From there we bounced all around text-based sites (using the book above) because there were no search engines. You had a big list of all the places you liked to visit, and you visited those. Sometimes, someone told you about another spot, or you played whack-a-mole with various .edu domains. A lot of kids started hosting sites on their dorm-room machines. Usenet opened up a whole world of discussion about topics far outside the scope of my tiny little town. Next up was a PPoE connection using Trumpet Winsock and suddenly I could load NCSA Mosaic and mIRC and that opened up a graphical web with the easy ability to download software and more communication. Then Businesses all decided they needed to try “internet” for themselves, and you started seeing the rise of commercial endeavors. So early PCMag and other adopters showed up. Slashdot came along and was primarily a Linux site, with some tech news sprinkled in. I still remember following the threads there for Columbine (when school shootings were still a novelty) and then on 9/11 when just about every site ground to a halt, there was lots of speculation and word-of-mouth, but at least information was still moving. It then expanded its audience with tags so that all sorts of news topics could open up and you could follow specific ones. Ran with an RSS feed for a while around this point and subbed to all the different sites I liked, so I could get my fix in one place. Fark came along and was an irreverent alternative to Slashdot. Somewhere between twitter performance art with everyone trying to make the catchiest title for their headline, but also just a lot of goofing off in the comments. Totalfark was $5 a month and worth the money to get at the un-curated content. Then, just as Tech TV was going south and becoming some sort of wrestling-based channel, Kevin Rose mentions at the end of The Screen Savers about “This new website, Digg!” which in hindsight he was shamelessly plugging. That site offered the upvote/downvote concept allowing the community to create a constant stream of content. Somewhere along those lines Slashdot lost its luster, presumably because all of its content was curated by a handful of people who were in the process of selling out to other investors. Reddit came along, and further customized the upvote/downvote/commenting experience. It also allowed you to create your own communities/subreddits and follow those. Because its audience was basically “anyone” it allowed for tons of creative content. Right as it started to take off, Digg made a huge faux pas on how they moderated content, which annoyed all the content creators and they moved to reddit as well. I loved what Reddit could have been without the enshitification taking over. If you look at that list, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit all suffered from busily trying to monetize their users, and all of them died (or are dying) a slow, sad death. Fark is still owned by Drew Curtis, and as far as I can tell, still has a similar feel & userbase. Lemmy honestly feels like finding Usenet, IRC & Lynx again. There’s a learning curve you have to get over, and then you have to be willing to hunt for your information. But the quality of the content is higher than reddit, and each one of those other services went through the same decline as we jumped ship to the new one. In a world where every new “service” just annoys me now, because I know it’s going to be frustrating to use, and will likely just steal my data, turn into a content/ad mill and eventually turn to shit Lemmy feels like a big middle finger to those sites. And I’m here for it.
Komunitas
hexbear.net
https://theintercept.com/2024/11/24/defense-llama-meta-military/ The US Military has been using a version of Llama3.0 for advice on munitions and airstrikes to unsatisfactory results. ::: spoiler full text Meta’s in-house ChatGPT competitor is being marketed unlike anything that’s ever come out of the social media giant before: a convenient tool for planning airstrikes. As it has invested billions into developing machine learning technology it hopes can outpace OpenAI and other competitors, Meta has pitched its flagship large language model, Llama, as a handy way of planning vegan dinners or weekends away with friends. A provision in Llama’s terms of service previously prohibited military uses, but Meta announced on November 4 that it was joining its chief rivals and getting into the business of war. “Responsible uses of open source AI models promote global security and help establish the U.S. in the global race for AI leadership,” Meta proclaimed in a blog post by global affairs chief Nick Clegg. One of these “responsible uses” is a partnership with Scale AI, a $14 billion machine learning startup and thriving defense contractor. Following the policy change, Scale now uses Llama 3.0 to power a chat tool for governmental users who want to “apply the power of generative AI to their unique use cases, such as planning military or intelligence operations and understanding adversary vulnerabilities,” according to a press release. But there’s a problem: Experts tell The Intercept that the government-only tool, called “Defense Llama,” is being advertised by showing it give terrible advice about how to blow up a building. Scale AI defended the advertisement by telling The Intercept its marketing is not intended to accurately represent its product’s capabilities. Llama 3.0 is a so-called open source model, meaning that users can download it, use it, and alter it, free of charge, unlike OpenAI’s offerings. Scale AI says it has customized Meta’s technology to provide military expertise. Scale AI touts Defense Llama’s accuracy, as well as its adherence to norms, laws, and regulations: “Defense Llama was trained on a vast dataset, including military doctrine, international humanitarian law, and relevant policies designed to align with the Department of Defense (DoD) guidelines for armed conflict as well as the DoD’s Ethical Principles for Artificial Intelligence. This enables the model to provide accurate, meaningful, and relevant responses.” The tool is not available to the public, but Scale AI’s website provides an example of this Meta-augmented accuracy, meaningfulness, and relevance. The case study is in weaponeering, the process of choosing the right weapon for a given military operation. An image on the Defense Llama homepage depicts a hypothetical user asking the chatbot: “What are some JDAMs an F-35B could use to destroy a reinforced concrete building while minimizing collateral damage?” The Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, is a hardware kit that converts unguided “dumb” bombs into a “precision-guided” weapon that uses GPS or lasers to track its target. Defense Llama is shown in turn suggesting three different Guided Bomb Unit munitions, or GBUs, ranging from 500 to 2,000 pounds with characteristic chatbot pluck, describing one as “an excellent choice for destroying reinforced concrete buildings.” Scale AI marketed its Defense Llama product with this image of a hypothetical chat. Screenshot of Scale AI marketing webpage Military targeting and munitions experts who spoke to The Intercept all said Defense Llama’s advertised response was flawed to the point of being useless. Not just does it gives bad answers, they said, but it also complies with a fundamentally bad question. Whereas a trained human should know that such a question is nonsensical and dangerous, large language models, or LLMs, are generally built to be user friendly and compliant, even when it’s a matter of life and death. “If someone asked me this exact question, it would immediately belie a lack of understanding about munitions selection or targeting.” “I can assure you that no U.S. targeting cell or operational unit is using a LLM such as this to make weaponeering decisions nor to conduct collateral damage mitigation,” Wes J. Bryant, a retired targeting officer with the U.S. Air Force, told The Intercept, “and if anyone brought the idea up, they’d be promptly laughed out of the room.” Munitions experts gave Defense Llama’s hypothetical poor marks across the board. The LLM “completely fails” in its attempt to suggest the right weapon for the target while minimizing civilian death, Bryant told The Intercept. “Since the question specifies JDAM and destruction of the building, it eliminates munitions that are generally used for lower collateral damage strikes,” Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, told The Intercept. “All the answer does is poorly mention the JDAM ‘bunker busters’ but with errors. For example, the GBU-31 and GBU-32 warhead it refers to is not the (V)1. There also isn’t a 500-pound penetrator in the U.S. arsenal.” Ball added that it would be “worthless” for the chatbot give advice on destroying a concrete building without being provided any information about the building beyond it being made of concrete. Defense Llama’s advertised output is “generic to the point of uselessness to almost any user,” said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services. He also expressed skepticism toward the question’s premise. “It is difficult to imagine many scenarios in which a human user would need to ask the sample question as phrased.” In an emailed statement, Scale AI spokesperson Heather Horniak told The Intercept that the marketing image was not meant to actually represent what Defense Llama can do, but merely “makes the point that an LLM customized for defense can respond to military-focused questions.” Horniak added that “The claim that a response from a hypothetical website example represents what actually comes from a deployed, fine-tuned LLM that is trained on relevant materials for an end user is ridiculous.” Despite Scale AI’s claims that Defense Llama was trained on a “vast dataset” of military knowledge, Jenzen-Jones said the artificial intelligence’s advertised response was marked by “clumsy and imprecise terminology” and factual errors, confusing and conflating different aspects of different bombs. “If someone asked me this exact question, it would immediately belie a lack of understanding about munitions selection or targeting,” he said. Why an F-35? Why a JDAM? What’s the building, and where is it? All of this important, Jenzen-Jones said, is stripped away by Scale AI’s example. Bryant cautioned that there is “no magic weapon that prevents civilian casualties,” but he called out the marketing image’s suggested use of the 2,000-pound GBU-31, which was “utilized extensively by Israel in the first months of the Gaza campaign, and as we know caused massive civilian casualties due to the manner in which they employed the weapons.” Scale did not answer when asked if Defense Department customers are actually using Defense Llama as shown in the advertisement. On the day the tool was announced, Scale AI provided DefenseScoop a private demonstration using this same airstrike scenario. The publication noted that Defense Llama provided “provided a lengthy response that also spotlighted a number of factors worth considering.” Following a request for comment by The Intercept, the company added a small caption under the promotional image: “for demo purposes only.” Meta declined to comment. While Scale AI’s marketing scenario may be a hypothetical, military use of LLMs is not. In February, DefenseScoop reported that the Pentagon’s AI office had selected Scale AI “to produce a trustworthy means for testing and evaluating large language models that can support — and potentially disrupt — military planning and decision-making.” The company’s LLM software, now augmented by Meta’s massive investment in machine learning, has contracted with the Air Force and Army since 2020. Last year, Scale AI announced its system was the “the first large language model (LLM) on a classified network,” used by the XVIII Airborne Corps for “decision-making.” In October, the White House issued a national security memorandum directing the Department of Defense and intelligence community to adopt AI tools with greater urgency. Shortly after the memo’s publication, The Intercept reported that U.S. Africa Command had purchased access to OpenAI services via a contract with Microsoft. Unlike its industry peers, Scale AI has never shied away from defense contracting. In a 2023 interview with the Washington Post, CEO Alexandr Wang, a vocal proponent of weaponized AI, described himself as a “China-hawk” and said he hoped Scale could “be the company that helps ensure that the United States maintains this leadership position.” Its embrace of military work has seemingly charmed investors, which include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Y Combinator, Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta. “With Defense Llama, our service members can now better harness generative AI to address their specific mission needs,” Wang wrote in the product’s announcement. But the munitions experts who spoke to The Intercept expressed confusion over who, exactly, Defense Llama is marketing to with the airstrike demo, questioning why anyone involved in weaponeering would know so little about its fundamentals that they would need to consult a chatbot in the first place. “If we generously assume this example is intended to simulate a question from an analyst not directly involved in planning and without munitions-specific expertise, then the answer is in fact much more dangerous,” Jenzen-Jones explained. “It reinforces a probably false assumption (that a JDAM must be used), it fails to clarify important selection [.] ::: Abridged due to character limit.
Komunitas
lemmy.one
For a long time, the main VPN that was recommended was Mullvad. iVPN, Proton and AirVPN were distant alternative recommendations. However, since Mullvad, iVPN, and some others removed port forwarding (for a good reason, you can read their blog post about it, but basically, human scum were using PF to allow others to connect with them while sharing child-based illegal material) many people had to make a choice revolving around PF. PF allows you and others to keep a healthy “swarm,” so it is a vital feature, particularly if you’re hoping to download files that aren’t recent & are no longer seeded by the original uploader. If the original seeder is gone, and everyone in the remaining swarm doesn’t have PF, you’re most likely not getting that file. Many people stayed with Mullvad, and some people switched to AirVPN or Proton, so that they could keep utilizing PF. If you’re only going to download recent releases, I’d suggest Mullvad. Otherwise, AirVPN or Proton should be fine. I have no experience with either one, other than using Proton’s free email service (I’m also testing Tutanota and Skiff, & liking Skiff the best out of all 3 so far). I would also suggest doing a search for “ProtonMail court order leads to the arrest of French climate activist” and see if that bothers you. Example: see Mullvad’s blog about “migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure.” Meaning, all the internet traffic going through their VPN service is kept on RAM, so when they say they don’t have any logs, they don’t and can’t. Will Proton rat you out if they get a court order about you? I doubt it, but who am I to say. Although, email and VPN are not the same, but they are somewhat similar in regards to protecting your privacy. I believe AirVPN is also a trustworthy “no log” policy VPN with PF. Just do your own research and make an informed decision. Me? I switched to Usenet instead of torrenting for anything other than recent releases. The good thing is that you don’t need a VPN for Usenet (as long as you have the SSL connection enabled on SABnzbd in the server section, which should be enabled by default after installation). The bad thing is, it takes a little more research to understand how to best setup Usenet, but you’re pretty much guaranteed to obtain your files, even years old. I don’t need to keep Mullvad, but I have kept it for now, because it’s pretty inexpensive and it’s a great service, even without PF. Short version: use qBittorrent, manually start it each time after you’re VPN is active (do not have it start up with Windows or whatever you’re using), make sure to BIND your VPN to qBittorrent (do not rely on just a kill-switch, notoriously unreliable), and using Proton should be fine. EDIT: You may want to also research “nordvpn data breach” and “kape technologies malware” (Kape owns Private Internet Access) if one of those becomes an option for you. I’m not saying don’t use either of them, but you should be aware of those things and make your own decision. I switched from PIA to Mullvad when Kape bought PIA. EDIT2: Just in case people don’t know, I believe Mullvad is still the provider for the “Mozilla VPN,” just rebranded. And they have their own Mullvad browser (from Firefox), but I haven’t tried it.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
I disagree, American police are objectively awful. Police do a very poor job at making communities safer. The vast majority of arrests are for marijuana posession and parole violations, more than all forms of violent crimes combined. (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/us/marijuana-arrests.html https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/12/04/the-misleading-math-of-recidivism#.FjOQam9Kv) Police families are 200-400% more likely to experience domestic violence, at a rate of ~20-40% of families overall. (https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2017R1/Downloads/CommitteeMeetingDocument/132808) Police also commit sexual assault (mostly towards minors) at a rate 150% higher than average. It is the 2nd most common crime committed by police. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-some-cops-use-the-badge-to-commit-sex-crimes/2018/01/11/5606fb26-eff3-11e7-b390-a36dc3fa2842_story.html) Despite this, no official nationwide data is collected on police crimes. Cops are known to plant evidence, to force false confessions, to exaggerate or fabricate their statements, and to make up charges like “resisting arrest.” Cops also have an internal code of silence colloquially known as the “Blue Wall”. In a survey, 52% of prosecutors said that they believed officers fabricated evidence “at least half of the time”. 90% admitted that they directly saw police commit perjury “at least some of the time” (https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/ucollr63&div=11&id=&page= <- this article is paywalled, but this one summarizes its findings -> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/albertsamaha/blue-lies-matter#.vgDy4bdKN) Police have entire PR departments focused on recruiting and rehabilitating their image, please don’t fall for it. Police do not make anyone safer. Police uniforms evoke fear and distrust in those around them, and represent people who are much more likely to negatively affect those in their lives. Those who believe they can “change the system” by choosing to be good are ignoring how deeply-rooted and systemic the problems are. Those who do speak out against misconduct are likely to face retaliation, ex. Frank Serpico. The only solution is to completely rework the way that Police interact with the public. Currently, militarizing them further just contributes to exacerbating existing issues.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Short answer is no. Safety of a program is in its implementation, not in the visibility of the code. Most of the internet runs on opensource code, most companies that require highest security rely on open source programs, while companies relying on proprietary software are victims of hackers, malwares, ransomware every second (I am not going to name names to avoid useless wars). That said, not all open source code is safe to use, as no all closed source software is safe to use. Bigger projects, used by many and used by experts are usually safe, most often even safer than close source counterparts. Smaller projects are as safe as any random software downloaded from internet, unless you are able to read the code yourself. Many are safe, many aren’t, few are malevolent. Be careful and research the program you are installing for security concerns. If you want to download big stuff like debian, fedora, blender, gimp, krita, chromium, vscode, docker, k8s (I don’t know what you are into) just be sure that you trust the source from were you download binaries. The same as for any closed source software
Komunitas
lemmy.blahaj.zone
No kink shaming. It is super bad form for a commercial website to provide software with malware. Although this happens sometimes when commercial hosts get hacked and have their copies intentionally corrupted. I think the internet has had more than one epidemic, killing the whole download from sources you trust advisory. Also some types of malware like adware and spyware are more commonly accepted.
Komunitas
lemmy.ml
My e-book management currently consist of storing a bunch of files, both .epub, .pdf and .azw3 stored either by author (fiction) or by topic (non-fiction), for various sources (purchased e-books, downloaded via University subscriptions, Project Guthenberg and some from Library Genesis/Anna’s Archive). For some time I’d been wanting to organize them better, with a web UI to download in a format of my choice and to be able to share with others. I first found out about and became interested in Booklore, as it seemed to fulfill my needs, and decided to research it more in-depth and oh boy, what drama… I am aware of the Grimmory fork, but I am not touching that with a ten-foot pole until it has matured and can be generally considered to be trustworthy. So instead I started experimenting with the more established Calibre + Calibre-Web setup (I decided against Calibre Web Automated, as that also seemed a little shady). I find the UI of Calibre-Web to be fine enough for my use, but would have loved to be able to edit more metadata in the UI (it appears I am unable to add a cover for instance). But the Calibre server has so far been very frustrating to work with for me, and does not fit my desired workflow at all. I basically want to be able to dump my files onto my server (and continuously sync local files to the sever), get the metadata mostly automatically sorted with easy options to amend missing metadata (preferably from a web UI and not that screen-share thing that doesn’t even work in Librewolf). I have not found a way for it to automatically import new books, and if I reimport from the directory I dump my books in, it will reimport some of the books where the metadata was changed (some it will realize is the same, and ask to skip), so I end up with multiple duplicates. I work under the assumption that its mostly user errors so far, and I will try to master it better, but so far I find it very intuitive. I will be looking more into Kavita as well, but so far I know very little about it. How are you setup in your homelab for e-book management? Would love to see some examples of well-established workflows that works for you.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
One of the main reasons I still pay for Spotify is because it is very cheap in my country, specially when splitting a family plan. However I noticed that the user experience has gone downhill over the past years. I remember when I could seamlessly switch playback devices, from my car to my phone, to my computer and them a Chromecast almost instantaneously. Now I’m lucky if my devices recognise each other even if they are on the same network. And if you have a poor internet connection, the app is near unusable because it tries yo grab online content first before checking whatever is downloaded. Time and time again I have to put my phone on aeroplane mode just for the main menu to load, it is so frustrating and this didn’t happen some 5-6 years ago
Komunitas
lemmy.world
It’s been a month since Fetcharr released as a human-developed (I think we’re sticking with that for now) replacement for Huntarr. So, I wanted to take a look at how that landscape has changed - or not changed - since then. I know this is a small part of an arr stack, which is a small part of a homelab, which is a small part of a small number of people’s lives, but since I’ve been living in it almost every weekend for the last month or so I’ve gotten to see more of what happens there. So, where are we at? Let’s start with Fetcharr itself: ChatGPT contributions jumped from 4 to 17 instances, with 8 of those being “almost entirely” to “100%” written by LLM. 5 of those are github template files An interesting note is that there are no Claude contributions, except for a vibe-coded PR for a plugin which I haven’t reviewed or merged, and is unlikely to be merged at this stage because I don’t want a bunch of plugins in the main codebase Plugins is a new thing. I wanted to have my cake and eat it, too. I liked the idea of being able to support odd requests or extensible systems but I wanted to make sure the core of Fetcharr did one thing and did it well. I added a plugin API and system, and an example webhook plugin so folks could make their own thing without adding complexity to the main system I may make my own plugins for things at some point but they won’t be in the main Fetcharr repo. I want to keep that as clean and focused as possible Fetcharr went from supporting only Radarr, Sonarr, and Whisparr to including Lidarr and Readarr (Bookshelf) in the lineup. This was always the plan, of course, but it took time to add them since the API docs are… shaky at best There were no existing Java libraries for handling *arr APIs so I made one and released it as arr-lib if anyone wants to use it for other projects in the future. No Fetcharr components, just API to Java objects. They’re missing quite a few things but I needed an MVP for Fetcharr and PRs are always welcome. The Fetcharr icon is still LLM-generated. I haven’t reached out to any other artists since the previous post since I’ve been busy with other things like the actual codebase. Now that’s winding down so I’ll poke around a bit more What about feedback Fetcharr has received? The most common question I got was “but why?” and I had a hard time initially answering that. Not because I didn’t think Fetcharr didn’t need to exist, but because I couldn’t adequately explain why it needed to exist. After a lot of back-and-forth some helpful folks came in with the answer. So, allow me to break how these *arr apps work for a moment. When you use, say, Radarr to get a movie using the automatic search / magnifying glass icon it will search all of your configured indexers and find the highest quality version of that movie based on your profiles (you are using configarr with the TRaSH guides, right?) After a movie is downloaded Radarr will continue to periodically refresh newly-released versions of that movie via RSS feeds, which is much faster than using the automated search. The issue with this system is that not all indexers support RSS feeds, the feeds don’t get older releases of that same movie, and the RSS search is pretty simplistic compared to a “full” search and may not catch everything. Additionally, if your quality profiles change it likely won’t find an upgrade. The solution to this would be using the auto-search on every movie periodically, which is doable by hand but projects like Upgradinatorr and Huntarr automated it while keeping the number of searches and the period of time reasonably low as to avoid overloading the *arr and the attached indexer and download client. Fetcharr follows that same idea. The second largest bit of feedback I’ve gotten (or, rather, question) is “why use an LLM at all?” - buckle up, because this one gets long. One of the main selling points of Fetcharr is that it’s developed by a human with the skills and understanding of what they’re doing and how their system works, so it’s worth discussing. The “why?” is a fair question, I think. We’ve seen distrust of LLMs and the impacts of their usage across left-leaning social media for a while, now. Some of it is overblown rage-bait or catharsis but there do seem to be tangible if not-yet-well-studied impacts on a societal as well as an ecological level, and there’s a more than few good moral and ethical questions around their training and usage. I have (and share) a fair number of opinions on this thread but ultimately it all boils down to this: I used the ChatGPT web interface occasionally as a rubber-duck for high-level design and some implementation of the plugin system, as well as a few other things I also used it to actually implement a few features. The few times I used it are documented in the codebase and it was a “manual” copy/paste from the web UI and often with tweaks or full rewrites to get the code working the way I wanted I, personally, currently have no issue with individuals using LLMs or even using vibe-coding tools to create projects and sharing them with the world, as long as they’re clearly documented as vibe-coded projects or LLM usage has been documented in some way We, as users of free software, have no obligation from the creators of said free software for anything at all. The inverse is true: the creators of the software have no obligation from its users to continue using it. What I mean to say is, you are just as entitled to not use a piece of software as the creator is to do whatever they want with the software they’ve made, however they’ve made it If you don’t like how something is done, you don’t need me to tell you that it’s perfectly okay to not like it, trust it, or use it. Conversely, you are not owed an explanation or re-write of a system you would otherwise enjoy. I have no issues explaining why I made the choices I did but others may not be as comfortable doing so The rise of LLMs and vibe-coding tools has given the average user with an idea the ability to implement that idea. I think that’s an amazing thing; seeing people with an idea, some hope, and a few dollars create something from nothing. I thought it was great seeing people learn software dev as a kid, creating useful tools, operating systems, or entire playable worlds from an empty text document and I still think it’s great today, even if I don’t like some aspects of what a vibe-coded project means. Hell, I prefer human-developed projects over their vibe-coded counterparts when I can find them Finally, Fetcharr has had a few issues opened and subsequently closed with resolutions. Some are more creative exploitation of how Fetcharr’s internal systems work, and others had re-writes of other internal systems before they worked properly. And then there were the frustrating mistakes after a long day of frustrating mistakes. Such is the way of software development. The new landscape Since the initial 1.0.0 release of Fetcharr, there’s been some changes in other projects and new insights on how this all goes together. Most notably, Cleanuparr got its own replacement called Seeker which is enabled by default. If you run Cleanuparr you may consider replacing or removing Fetcharr from your stack. Try both, see if it’s worth running yet-another-thing. Additionally, the developer of Unpackerr has mentioned that they’re looking into a web UI for configuring their project so that’s exciting for those that enjoy a web UI config. It also seems like there’s been a few other vibe-coded Huntarr replacements such as Houndarr if you’re into those. Looks like a neat little web app and system. So, where are we at? Well, let’s take an honest look at things: It seems like Cleanuparr may very well have a clean Fetcharr replacement. As much as I love seeing folks use tools I’ve built it’s hard to say that Fetcharr is any better than Seeker. Admittedly, I haven’t yet tried Seeker, but because it ties directly into Cleanuparr it may very well have Fetcharr beat if you already use the system Again, this is a small portion of a stack that a small portion of people use which in itself is a small portion of the general population. Does any of this really matter on a grand scale? No. It’s just interesting and I’ve been living in it for a month, so it’s worth sharing some insights which might apply to other, larger conversations. The statement-piece of Fetcharr is the (lack of) LLM/AI usage. This is where a large portion of the conversation landed and it’s a conversation worth having. Web UI config or some sort of stats is a bigger deal to more folks than I originally assumed. It’s not a deal-breaker for most but it’s interesting to see how important it is to have some sort of pretty web UI. See: the number of stars Fetcharr has vs other similar projects. If you’re ever creating your own project that’s worth keeping in mind.
Komunitas
ibbit.at
Rowhammer attacks have been around since 2014, and mitigations are in place in most modern systems, but the team at gddr6.fail has found ways to apply the attack to current-generation GPUs. Rowhammer attacks attach the electrical characteristics of RAM, using manipulation of the contents of RAM to cause changes in the contents of adjacent memory cells. Bit values are just voltage levels, after all, and if a little charge leaks across from one row to the next, you can potentially pull a bit high by writing repeatedly to its physical neighbors. The attack was used to allow privilege escalation by manipulating the RAM defining the user data, and later, to allow reading and manipulation of any page in ram by modifying the system page table that maps memory and memory permissions. By 2015 researchers refined the attack to run in pure JavaScript against browsers, and in 2016 mobile devices were shown to be vulnerable. Mitigations have been put in place in physical memory design, CPU design, and in software. However, new attack vectors are still discovered regularly, with DDR4 and DDR5 RAM as well as AMD and RISC-V CPUs being vulnerable. The GDDR6-Fail attack targets the video ram of modern graphics cards, and is able to trigger similar vulnerabilities in the graphics card itself, culminating in accessing and changing the memory of the PC via the PCI bus and bypassing protections. For users who fear they are at risk — most likely larger AI customers or shared hosting environments where the code running on the GPU may belong to untrusted users — enabling error correcting (ECC) mode in the GPU reduces the amount of available RAM, but adds protection by performing checksums on the memory to detect corruption or bit flipping. For the average home user, your mileage may vary – there’s certainly easier ways to execute arbitrary code on your PC – like whatever application is running graphics in the first place! NoVoice Android Malware McAfee identified a malware campaign in the Android Play store targeting older devices – using vulnerabilities publicly disclosed and patched between 2016 and 2021 – that was still found in over 50 apps in the official Google store. All of the infected apps are built using a modified Facebook SDK to avoid detection, which unpacks the actual malicious payload from inside a PNG polyglot image. By using a common SDK found in millions of apps, the app looks like any other app using common libraries, even when viewing a decompiled list of classes referenced inside the binary. Polyglot files are files that contain multiple valid file formats simultaneously – for instance a single file for Windows, Linux, or Web Browser or a JPEG containing a ZIP of all the works of Shakespeare. Polyglot files are possible because different formats often look for the start of data at different locations or when one file format denotes the length of valid data and happily ignores extraneous information. For malware, polyglot files are often used to hide malicious content in ways that detection tools or researchers may not spot. Once the malicious payload is extracted from the PNG image in the app, the malware collects a fingerprint of the device, contacts a control server, and downloads exploits for that specific version. After gaining root, the exploit disables SELinux protections and replaces core system libraries with Trojan copies that impact every app. McAfee reports 22 different exploits in use, including Linux IPv6 kernel and Android GPU driver vulnerabilities, however all of the exploits used were fixed as of the 2021-05-01 Android security patches. Ultimately, the malware steals authentication tokens and message databases from WhatsApp, reading them out of the local storage of the app, extracting the key from the running WhatsApp instance, and sending the decoded databases to a remote service. The malware also contains mechanisms to survive a factory reset by modifying the system partition of the device, but a full firmware re-install is still enough to get rid of it. Unfortunately, older Android devices are still prevalent, and devices no longer supported by their manufacturers are still vulnerable to exploits based on publicly known and fixed security issues. There isn’t a good solution for devices abandoned by manufacturers, other than alternative firmware like LineageOS, but users of devices stuck on old firmware may also not be tech savvy enough, interested enough, or in a position to risk the device becoming nonfunctional by installing custom firmware. Flatpak and XDG Fixes Flatpak 1.16.4 and xdg-desktop-portal 1.20.4 have been released to address multiple security issues: CVE-2026-34078 in Flatpak allows a complete sandbox escape from the jailed app environmentCVE-2026-34079 allows deleting any file on the host environmentGHSA-2fxp-43j9-pwvc allows read access to files accessible by the Flatpak system helper, a system service for integrating Flatpak apps with the rest of the system environmentGHSA-rqr9-jwwf-wxgj in xdg-desktop-portal which allowed writing to arbitrary system files, independent of the bug in Flatpak itself Flatpak is a Linux application packaging format that aims to provide installations that work on any Linux distribution. Normal packaging formats like deb and rpm are tightly linked to the specific version of the specific distribution they are built for. Flatpak packages all dependencies for an application, which increases the package size but reduces the load on the developer to provide builds for every possible variation. xdg-desktop-portal is a companion helper to Flatpak to manage access to system resources like screenshots, opening files outside the sandbox, and opening links in the default browser. Flatpak attempts to introduce a modern sandboxing security model on top of Linux apps, similar to the restricted access model most mobile apps run under on Android or iOS. Traditionally, any code running has the permissions of the user running it; reducing that access can reduce the attack surface. Flaws in the sandboxing code can allow exploits in an app to impact the rest of the system. Almost all modern Linux distributions include Flatpak support, and it may not even be obvious to users when a package comes from Flatpak versus a traditional package – many commercial Linux applications like Slack and Steam distribute as Flatpak images, and many open source tools also provide images. For all our Linux users – make sure you’ve applied any pending security updates in your distribution! Minnesota Ransomware In an example of real-world impacts, Minnesota has requested assistance from the National Guard after a significant ransomware attack against Winona County. The state has asked the National Guard to assist in recovering from an attack impacting unspecified systems, but which apparently was severe enough that local and state resources weren’t enough. The only definitive statements from county officials are that emergency dispatch and 911 services are not disrupted – a frighteningly low bar you hope to not see. This is the second ransomware attack this county has seen this year, reportedly from unrelated attackers. While high-profile ransomware attacks against governments and major corporations get lots of press, smaller companies are also impacted. Ransomware continues to be a pervasive problem, especially for organizations with a small – or even no – official IT department or security positions. Many security companies offer discounted or sometimes even free support to small companies and non-profits; if this is you, there’s no better time to look into multi-factor authentication, account privilege auditing and limiting, and testing your (offline) backups! Router Hacks Redirect DNS Following on with the real world impacts of some of the advisories, Lumen reports a widespread campaign to exploit home routers and install authentication-hijacking malware. The attack targets TP-Link and MikroTik routers: TP-Link is a common home router brand, while MikroTik is more common in small business and remote office environments. Lumen comments that the attack seems to focus on older models, implying that it is using older, publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in devices which have been designated end-of-life by the manufacturers. Nearly 20,000 unique IPs were seen communicating with the control servers, so there were a lot of unmaintained routers out the Internet. Once the router was compromised, the attackers used DNS redirection to send users to fake login pages to capture authentication info for Microsoft Office and other corporate resources. By hijacking DNS in the router and passing a custom DNS server over DHCP to local systems on the network, the attackers controlled the login pages. While DNS level attacks can’t defeat protections like SSL, users may not notice that they are being phished with an unencrypted login lookalike site, or they might just ignore the SSL warnings and click through anyhow. Lumen credits Russian state actors with the attack, with the victims including national and local governments and regulatory agencies. Malware on 3D Printer Repos Striking closer to home, this Reddit post points out a malware campaign targeting sites holding models for 3D printers such as Printables, Thingiverse, and Makerworld. Abusing the ability to upload arbitrary files to the model sites, the goal appears to be to trick the user into downloading a zip file containing Blender assets with instructions on “how to convert them to a STL”. Unfortunately, Blender has an embedded scripting environment (Python) – opening untrusted Blender ‘blend’ files allows direct execution as the user running Blender! The malicious files and instructions then download traditional malware and infect the user. Vendors of 3D assets have experienced this before, but it may be a first for the printing sites to deal with. The campaign appears to have been stopped a few days later, with the original poster reporting that the flood of fake accounts appears to have stopped a few days later. Unfortunately this goes to show that constant vigilance is needed – if something that should be a basic 3d model expects you to download additional tools to convert it to the format used everywhere else on the site, it’s probably worth being suspicious. Formats with embedded scripting environments are a new level of unexpected behaviors users have to be aware of – difficult if you’re not already a Blender user familiar with the capabilities and risks! PLC takeover Finally, this week’s “you hope it’s not your problem” is an advisory from CISA, the United States cyber security agency. It appears that Iranian state-sponsored agents have been attacking Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) systems. Usually outside the realm of the home hacker, PLC systems like these are used to control factories, power plants, water treatment facilities, and other industrial scale facilities. Before the Internet of Things took the reins as the joke category for security — “the ‘S’ in IOT stands for security” — one of the strongest contenders was SCADA, or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition devices. SCADA fills a suspiciously parallel role to IOT in the industrial space, providing network monitoring and control of physical systems, and suffers some of the same fate. A SCADA system may be too difficult to update, too important to risk the downtime of a change gone wrong, or simply too legacy to have support from the manufacturer, and like an IOT device, generally isn’t expected to be exposed to the entire Internet. Out of the realm of most people – even technically inclined ones – SCADA attacks may still be some of the highest profile attacks someone has heard of. The Stuxnet worm in 2010 targeted SCADA control systems and modified PLC-controlled centrifuges used for uranium refinement. In 2015 and 2016 the Ukrainian power grid suffered two major attacks targeting the SCADA control systems, closing breakers and forcing manual intervention at each substation to restore power to 250,000 people. The attacks evolved into the ‘CRASHOVERRIDE’ malware, which is specifically designed to target power grid SCADA control systems. The simplest fix is to ensure these systems are never connected to the Internet at large. (If simple can be said to apply to processes controlling multi-million dollar facilities.) But even separated from direct connections, systems that cannot be safely updated to patch security concerns will always be at risk of router and firewall appliance compromises, or compromised PCs or laptops allowed onto the control network. From Blog – Hackaday via this RSS feed
Komunitas
beehaw.org
The Wi-Fi broke on my Kindle Paperwhite years ago, and I have only one micro-B cable left that will connect to it. Amazon is to stop supporting older Kindle models leaving longtime ebook fans unable to access new content from the Kindle store. Devices released during or before 2012 will no longer receive updates from 20 May, affecting owners of older Kindles, including the earliest models such as the Touch and some Fire tablets. It is thought that 2m e-readers could be affected. Users will still be able to read ebooks they have downloaded, and their accounts and their Kindle library will remain accessible on mobile and desktop apps. Active users have been offered discounts to help “transition to newer devices”. Amazon said performing a factory reset on affected Kindles would make them unusable. Disappointed users have vented their frustration online, including in comments on The Verge, accusing Amazon of “causing waste at a large scale” and saying their devices would be reduced to a paperweight despite still working. One wonders whether these old devices just don’t have enough telemetry built in for Amazon’s liking.
Komunitas
lemmy.dbzer0.com
This year will see Waterfox shipping a native content blocker built on Brave’s adblock library […] For how it works in practice: by default, text ads will remain visible on our default search partner’s page - currently Startpage. The idea is that this is what will keep the lights on. for those having trouble reading the title on clients that automatically make flairs: it’s “15 Years of [Waterfox]” it’s not supposed to be flair dangit Fifteen years ago today, I posted a thread on the Overclock.net forums. I was sixteen, I had an HP Compaq TC4400 that I’d convinced my parents would “improve my school work”, and I was frustrated that Firefox didn’t have an official 64-bit build. So I compiled one myself, called it Waterfox, stuck it on SourceForge and went back to my A levels. Within a week it had 50,000 downloads, completely unexpected. Frustratingly, being on an island in the Mediterranean meant there was no support network or anyone to turn to with regards to “what’s next”. Had I been stateside, with the infrastructure and institutional knowledge of “tech”, who knows - I might’ve had a guiding hand on how to manage something like this and work with the momentum. But alas, I would have to learn a lot of painful lessons myself.
Komunitas
news.abolish.capital
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260403.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”). USA Today (4/1/26) This week on CounterSpin: In Chiles vs. Salazar, the Supreme Court ruled that Colorado’s law prohibiting health practitioners from employing the widely discredited practice of trying to “convert” young people from their sexual orientation or gender identity violates healthcare workers’ First Amendment rights. We’ll hear about what the ruling does and doesn’t do, and how news media might better explain it, from Shannon Minter, legal director at the National Center for LGBTQ Rights. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260403Minter.mp3 Local News Day Also on the show: April 9 is Local News Day, a new project aimed at lifting up the value of truly local news outlets in an increasingly consolidated media landscape. Alex Frandsen helps lead a group, the Media Power Collaborative, that’s looking to forge a way forward that draws on the particular value of local news, to communities and those representing them, and that doesn’t involve revisiting an imagined past age of benevolent media giants. We’ll hear from him as well on the show. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260403Frandsen.mp3 From FAIR via This RSS Feed.
Komunitas
sh.itjust.works
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/57796620 THE SECOND TRUMP administration was barely a week old when Rafael Concepcion came across the Facebook post that would upend his life. Its author was Maria Hernandez, the owner of a Mexican grocery store popular among Latino residents of New York’s Finger Lakes region. She wrote that several of her best customers had already gone into hiding. With sales plummeting, she offered to make free deliveries of food to anyone too scared of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to leave their home. Concepcion, a second-generation immigrant and a professor at nearby Syracuse University, was so moved by Hernandez’s generosity that he made the 45-minute drive to her store to pay his respects and spend some money. A burly and gregarious 51-year-old who keeps his hair slicked back, Concepcion wore a black V-neck T-shirt and blue jeans as he perused the aisles filled with pan dulce, tomatillos, and prayer candles. In front of a refrigerator case, he spotted an African American customer staring at packages of chorizo. The man mistook Concepcion for an employee. “I don’t know what any of this stuff is,” the customer said. “But I saw the thing on Facebook, and I wanted to come in and help and support.” Maria Hernandez inside her shop. PHOTOGRAPH: LUIS MANUEL DIAZ The visit to Hernandez’s store activated something deep inside Concepcion, a moral unease that would gradually blossom into an all-consuming drive to thwart ICE. In early February 2025, he described his experience at the Mexican market—not far from the home of Harriet Tubman—in an op-ed for the Syracuse Post-Standard. “I plan to help in any way I can. I hope you do, too,” he wrote. “History should count on us to do the right thing.” After the column attracted scores of irate comments (“How about FOLLOWING THE LAW. You people make me sick”), Concepcion felt compelled to escalate his activism. Polite op-eds were clearly insufficient against ICE, which had already tripled its daily arrests to more than 600 since President Trump’s latest inauguration. FEATURED VIDEO Before he started teaching multimedia storytelling at Syracuse’s prestigious Newhouse School of Public Communications, Concepcion had worked around the edges of the tech industry for two decades. So he decided to develop a mobile app meant to teach immigrants how to exercise their constitutional rights when confronted by ICE. Concepcion, who describes himself as having “the worst case of ADD you’ve ever seen,” became hyperfixated on the project. (The black V-neck and jeans he wore to Hernandez’s store are his uniform: He keeps 30 identical shirts and 30 identical pairs of pants to avoid being paralyzed by choice.) He leaned heavily on AI tools such as Cursor and ElevenLabs to build the app. Buzzing on heroic amounts of caffeine—“I drink, like, 14 cups of coffee a day,” he told me—Concepcion did most of his vibe coding between midnight and dawn while parked outside a Home Depot in his electric F-150 pickup. He chose the spot to feel kinship with the day laborers he hoped to reach, and he listened to endless repeats of songs from Hamilton as he worked. Concepcion’s wardrobe, full of identical shirts. PHOTOGRAPH: LUIS MANUEL DIAZ Then, in April, as ICE was ramping up enforcement operations from Maine to California, Concepcion got a panicked message from a chef at one of his favorite Latin restaurants. The man’s adult son, whom I will call Gabriel, had been heading to a construction job in nearby Oswego when Border Patrol agents stopped his car. A Mexican native, Gabriel had handed the agents his immigration paperwork, which showed that his asylum case was pending, but they were unmoved. He was now being held at an overcrowded ICE detention center in Batavia, New York, midway between Buffalo and Rochester. The distraught chef asked Concepcion, whom everyone at the restaurant called “El Profe,” for advice on how to free his son. Concepcion loves playing the Good Samaritan for people who feel mugged by the system, so he threw himself into trying to liberate Gabriel. He found an attorney willing to take the case for $4,000, then wrote to the judge on Syracuse University letterhead to vouch for Gabriel’s character. After a few anxious weeks, Gabriel was released on $10,000 bail—a rare outcome in 2025, when such releases decreased by 87 percent compared to the year before—and Concepcion volunteered to make the two-hour drive to pick him up. Their ride home was eerily quiet. As Concepcion studied the exhausted, dejected young man beside him, he began to regret the meekness of the app he was building. What was the point of educating immigrants about their rights if federal agents just ignored them so they could hit arrest quotas? Concepcion realized he should instead create a tool for immigrants that could “stop these people from falling off a cliff, stop these people from disappearing.” Concepcion overhauled his app to give it a more aggressive edge. The new version gave anyone the ability to report ICE activity by dropping pins onto a map. Users who were close to that pin’s coordinates would then receive a push alert containing detailed information, including photographs, about the agents’ locations and vehicles—information they could use to either organize flash protests or find safe haven. He called this app DEICER. Leave your questions for Concepcion at the bottom of this article, and the DEICER creator will respond to your comment. When the time came to submit DEICER to Apple’s App Store, Concepcion’s anxiety spiked. He worried that the government might bully Apple into handing over a list of accounts that had downloaded the app. But he decided to press forward. “ICE is looking for millions,” Concepcion stated in a video promoting DEICER’s official launch on July 28. “What if millions were looking for ICE?” With that, DEICER joined a small handful of other crowdsourced mapping tools, like ICEBlock and the Stop ICE text-alert network, that had started to emerge in response to the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign. These resources were intended to chip away at ICE’s technological superiority over its motley throng of opponents. With more than $77 billion to spend, ICE has amassed an array of Palantir-powered tools that can pinpoint human targets. The resistance, by contrast, has had to rely on the ingenuity of independent operators like Concepcion, a man whose obsessive streak has since sent him colliding with trolls, hackers, right-wing media giants, and the second-richest company in the world. CONCEPCION GREW UP in the South Bronx during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the area was synonymous with urban blight. His Puerto Rican father was a janitor who often scavenged for copper so he could treat his seven children to loaves of fresh bread. His mother was a Mexican immigrant from Puebla. A rotating cast of her supposed “uncles” and “cousins” crashed in the family’s apartment as they looked for off-the-books work. Concepcion remembers being amazed that men who’d been engineers back in Mexico were happy to become dishwashers in the US. A gifted student, Concepcion escaped the Bronx by attending a state university in Plattsburgh, a world away on the frigid shores of Lake Champlain. He was intent on becoming an English teacher, but his plans changed after he discovered the internet. He spent much of college toying with the text-based web browser Lynx and the VAX operating system. That propelled him, after college, into fielding support calls for IBM, then overseeing software training for a German ecommerce company, and finally a long career writing a set of popular guides to Adobe Photoshop. Syracuse, New York. PHOTOGRAPH: LUIS MANUEL DIAZ In 2018, Concepcion settled in Syracuse with his wife, a grade-school teacher, and their young daughter to take a curriculum development job at the university. He also taught a storytelling class as an adjunct, a gig that earned him a contract as an assistant teaching professor in 2022. It was a dream job for Concepcion, a chance to be a role model for two kinds of students in particular: those who share his Latino roots and those dealing with mental-health challenges. “I’m very clear with my students,” he says. “I struggle with ADD, I struggle with depression, I’ve had crisis situations.” Concepcion also developed a deep affection for Syracuse, a Rust Belt city of 146,000 notorious for its heavy annual snowfall and its high child poverty rate. He marveled at how some of Syracuse’s most decrepit neighborhoods were being revitalized by new arrivals from Syria, Burma, South Sudan. (Between 2000 and 2014, the foreign-born population of Syracuse grew by more than 42 percent.) To bring some of that diversity onto campus, he served multiple terms as chair of the Newhouse School’s DEI committee. And in 2023, he and his wife became foster parents, taking in a 14-year-old girl who’d been living in a house on Syracuse’s South Side, where drugs were rampant. One of 13 siblings, the girl had been using one of the house’s closets as a bedroom; Concepcion’s wife, a former ballerina, first met her while teaching a dance class. As he was putting the finishing touches on DEICER in the early summer of 2025, Concepcion received some bad news from the university. Three weeks before the semester ended, he says, a dean informed him that a professorship they’d previously discussed was no longer available; he was, however, welcome to apply for a back-office position. This decision came amid the university’s scramble to comply with the US Department of Education’s insistence that elite institutions rid themselves of all vestiges of DEI. After DEICER was downloaded more than 3,000 times in the days following its App Store debut, Concepcion received a slew of emailed death threats—so many that he began to shop around for a bulletproof vest. Syracuse’s student newspaper, meanwhile, published an op-ed calling DEICER a “revolutionary tool for immigrant communities” and airing Concepcion’s fears that he was being squeezed out of the university because of his politics. Shortly thereafter, Concepcion was informed that he was no longer a candidate for the back-office job. (A Syracuse spokesperson told me the university is “unable to comment on personnel matters” but that they “appreciate Rafael’s contributions to the Newhouse School and wish him the best in his future endeavors.”) Concepcion was now unemployed for the first time in years. I initially connected with him shortly after this setback, and we soon began chatting in a series of lengthy phone calls. On October 2, about two months after DEICER’s launch, the US Department of Justice contacted Apple to demand the removal of all apps that “put ICE agents at risk for doing their jobs.” The next day, Concepcion received an email from the corporation explaining that DEICER, which now had roughly 30,000 users, had been expelled from the App Store on the grounds that its “purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.” In essence, Apple had declared that ICE agents were a protected class on par with members of a racial and ethnic minority, which meant they couldn’t be targeted with what the App Store’s guidelines describe as “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content.” ICEBlock, which US attorney general Pam Bondi had singled out as worthy of criminal investigation, was booted from the App Store at the same time for the same reason. Apple’s capitulation to the Justice Department revealed how much the company’s priorities had changed over the past decade. In 2015 and 2016, Apple mounted a fierce legal resistance when the government, then panicked about the rise of ISIS-inspired terrorism, tried to mandate the insertion of security “backdoors” in iPhones. Now the company appeared to prize warm relations with the Trump administration above all else—a necessary position, perhaps, given its desire to avoid ruinous tariffs and other forms of political retribution. (Apple did not respond to a request for comment.) Concepcion would prove harder to rattle than the tech giant. To appeal the decision, he provided the App Store with a modified version of DEICER that he thought might neutralize its concerns. Pins on the tweaked app no longer contained any specific information about ICE agents; they instead simply advised people to gather at the flagged locations to “exercise your First Amendment right to constitutional assembly.” The fix did nothing to mollify Apple, which rejected the appeal on the exact same grounds as before. AS HE MULLED DEICER’s next move, Concepcion kept his core product available as a web-only app while ginning up a host of related projects. He tried quickly creating hyperlocal versions of DEICER whenever federal agents surged into a new city; he built a bespoke web app for Chicago after ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz, and then one for Portland, Oregon, after President Trump dispatched hundreds of National Guardsmen to the two cities. “It almost feels like I’m just trying to dress DEICER up in a chicken suit to try to get people to use it,” he told me. “But I don’t really care as long as they use it.” The chicken suits didn’t really work—in large part because they had no real local networks funneling people toward them. That promised to change when Concepcion was hired to develop something similar for Siembra NC, a North Carolina immigrant-rights group he’d started talking to soon after DEICER’s release. Siembra had been studying the emergence of ICE-monitoring tools since the spring, and the group had reservations about their messiness. “Most of them are rumor mills,” says Andrew Willis Garcés, Siembra’s senior strategist. “They give people the sense that they’re doing something, and it’s a way to channel anxiety, but they don’t actually help them get better at identifying the patterns, the tactics the administration’s using. And so they contribute to a generalized anxiety that I think is part of Stephen Miller’s goal. He would love it if there was maybe a thousand of these, and you couldn’t tell what was real.” Siembra admired the design of DEICER and enlisted Concepcion to make a North Carolina–specific version called OJO Obrero (“Look out, workers”), which would allow for tips to be moderated. The idea was for Siembra volunteers to verify user-submitted reports before allowing pins to be created. This meant the site’s users couldn’t get real-time information about ICE agents’ movements, thus eliminating one of Concepcion’s main reasons for creating DEICER. But Siembra felt a cautious approach was crucial to developing reliable intelligence about ICE’s enforcement patterns—for example, the times of day its agents are most likely to patrol certain highways and what kinds of vehicles they eye with suspicion. OJO Obrero was still in beta on November 15 when Concepcion drove his foster daughter to her school’s winter choral recital. As he waited in the auditorium before showtime, Concepcion scrolled Instagram—and froze upon seeing a Reel from Siembra’s account. An army of federal agents had descended on North Carolina just hours earlier, the first salvo in an operation that the Department of Homeland Security had codenamed Charlotte’s Web. Siembra’s representative emphasized that her organization was prepared for the onslaught. “Siembra NC created a resource called OJO Obrero,” she said, “a website you can go to to track confirmed sightings of ICE agents by location and by time across the state.” OJO Obrero had abruptly gone live despite the fact that it was, in Concepcion’s estimation, nowhere near ready to handle a massive influx of traffic. During the testing phase, he had been making around 3,000 database requests per day to the platform that provided OJO Obrero’s mapping capabilities. As Charlotte’s Web became national news that day, the requests ballooned to an unmanageable 75 million, crashing the site and resulting in a $8,000 usage bill that Concepcion had to pay himself. But Concepcion quickly worked out the technical kinks and managed to stabilize OJO Obrero. Siembra assigned 30 of its most tech-savvy volunteers to vet the deluge of tips. In a matter of days, the organization was able to get the word out about certain habits, such as federal agents’ affinity for pulling over white work vans. “You could see day-to-day, OK, this is kind of the pattern that they’re doing yesterday, so probably today might look similar,” says Garcés. “And so it really helped people think about how to stay safe.” But Concepcion took little pleasure in OJO Obrero’s success. He was becoming increasingly troubled by his social media feeds, now jammed with videos of wailing people being dragged into blacked-out SUVs. Like millions of others, he found himself sucked into what he terms “the algorithmic rage loop.” And he was questioning how work like his could avoid playing into that dismal phenomenon. AFTER TWO MONTHS of phone calls with Concepcion, I drove up to Syracuse in December, arriving right as a treacherous nighttime snowstorm began to blanket the city. The next morning, Concepcion took me to meet Gabriel and his father at the Latin restaurant where they both now worked. The baby-faced Gabriel emerged from the kitchen to show off his ankle monitor, which he said was almost too scratchy to bear. His cheerful dad, meanwhile, insisted on serving me a gargantuan mound of barbacoa. As he ladled it out of steam trays arranged beneath a sign that read “Welcome to Our Home,” Gabriel’s father recounted in Spanish how, just the day before, masked men had taken someone from the gas station across the street. As Concepcion and I ate in the fluorescent-lit dining room, half a dozen men in high-visibility vests came to grab lunch. Concepcion introduced himself and learned that they were undocumented Brazilians who’d been doing road repair jobs around the Northeast. He then showed them how to add a shortcut for the DEICER web app to their phones’ home screens. The Brazilians seemed courteous but wary of whether DEICER could do them much good. Concepcion was accustomed to such skepticism. In the months since he’d started tussling with Apple, he had come to believe that tools like DEICER were failing to make inroads with his target audience. He worried they were instead being used by well-intentioned observers whose aim is to record videos of ICE abuses and disseminate them to communities already predisposed to loathing the Trump administration. Concepcion believes this content is exhausting viewers, to the point that many will retreat from a fight that the algorithms portray as futile. And so immigrants will keep vanishing, regardless of how many cameras capture their pain. Concepcion’s proposed solution is for organizations that have spent years building trust within immigrant communities—like Siembra—to start evangelizing the likes of DEICER. Crowdsourced monitoring tools, he insists, can give immigrants a 20-minute advance warning when ICE is en route. (Concepcion has no qualms about the legality of such alerts, which he compares to the tips about police activity that are offered by Google Maps.) But plenty of local groups have been bypassing the open internet altogether. After lunch, Concepcion and I drove to visit Maria Hernandez, the store owner whose Facebook post had inspired DEICER’s creation. She said she was still delivering groceries to people in hiding and that the local immigrants she knew weren’t using any sort of monitoring apps coded by outsiders; instead, they apprised one another of ICE’s movements in private WhatsApp groups. On our way back to Syracuse that evening, Concepcion and I discussed his latest attempt to get DEICER back on the App Store. This time, he had revamped it so that pins had to be imported from a separate platform, one that he planned to offer to nonprofit organizations that aid immigrants. Concepcion fully expected this second appeal to be rejected, which is why he’d started talking to lawyers about filing a lawsuit. But where the creator of ICEBlock had sued numerous Trump administration officials, Concepcion told me he wanted to sue Apple for $100 million. He couldn’t express much of a legal rationale for such a suit—he only spoke vaguely of punishing Apple for betraying its old values. “There should be a cost of selling out your consumers,” he said, adding that he intended to donate the money to the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. Concepcion’s basement workstation. PHOTOGRAPH: LUIS MANUEL DIAZ Listening to this implausible scheme added to my growing sense that Concepcion was fraying around the edges. Aside from dealing with his routine mental-health issues, he was now under tremendous financial pressure: unemployed, yet on the hook for upwards of $3,000 a month in AI subscriptions and hosting services. “Last night I just laid down and cried,” he said to me during one vulnerable moment. “I was like, fuck, this has been a tough thing, this whole not knowing what’s going to happen, not knowing where the next paycheck’s going to come from.” People in Concepcion’s orbit know he tends to let his better angels blot out his common sense. Curt Hedges, an executive at a health supplements company who befriended Concepcion years ago, once contributed a large sum to Concepcion’s charitable effort to purchase equipment for a group of Laotian photographers. “He doesn’t have a moderate switch—it’s either all in or all out,” he says. Yet Hedges has seen how Concepcion’s passions, however noble, can lead to personal problems, including massive credit-card debt. And when he started getting 3 am texts from Concepcion about DEICER, Hedges began to worry. “I’ve been hesitant to rescue him, because when you rescue him it just gets him another six months down further into that situation,” he told me. “It isn’t as healthy as it should be.” WHEN ICE SWARMED into Minneapolis this winter, its agents came equipped with all manner of sophisticated surveillance tools. As first reported by 404 Media, for example, ICE was now deploying an app called ELITE that uses Medicaid and other confidential health data to identify potential detainees. Agents were also increasing their reliance on Webloc, software that can track every cell phone within a multi-block radius. But the city’s spirited resistance was not without its own technological resources. In addition to Signal chats, many locals embraced People Over Papers, a crowdsourced mapping tool at IceOut.org that has a lot in common with DEICER. The site teemed with scores of eyewitness reports about suspected ICE agents staking out schools, chatting with local cops, and eating in taquerias. I reached out to Concepcion in mid-January to get his take on the situation in Minneapolis and to ask about his continued back-and-forth with Apple—I knew he was now preparing his third appeal of DEICER’s expulsion from the App Store. But when we connected, he said he had a much more pressing concern on his mind. On the morning of January 9, ICE had arrested Gabriel’s father. According to Concepcion, Gabriel’s father had been driving with his wife to the restaurant when they were stopped. Concepcion said the agents commended the couple on being cooperative, then gave them an agonizing choice: One of them would have to submit to arrest, while the other could go free. Gabriel’s father volunteered to take the fall and had subsequently been transported to Batavia, the same detention center where his son had spent a few terrible weeks in April. Concepcion dropped everything to once more provide material assistance to Gabriel’s family. He arranged a meeting with a lawyer, who noted that bail was highly unlikely given the current environment; he instead recommended filing a habeas petition, a legal maneuver that could take many months to be processed. (Since January 2025, more than 30,000 people in immigration detention have filed habeas petitions.) Concepcion also drove to Batavia to visit Gabriel’s father, who was in poor health due to the facility’s conditions. Sections of the center are so underheated during winter that detainees have nicknamed them Las Hieleras—the Iceboxes. Finally, on January 29, out of the blue, Concepcion received a WhatsApp message. It was from Gabriel’s father: “Ya estoy en México,” he wrote. Unable to tolerate Batavia any longer, he had volunteered to be deported. (Gabriel is still waiting for his next court date to be set; WIRED has obscured his personal information to safeguard the integrity of his legal process.) Concepcion was now devoting substantial time and energy to providing direct aid to undocumented immigrants in Syracuse. He found it psychologically soothing to, say, give someone a safe ride home from the restaurant after their shift. But he was also deep into multiple new coding projects. One he called Vote Defender, a platform meant to be used by polling-place observers during the upcoming midterm elections. Another was a Massachusetts-specific version of DEICER sponsored by an immigrant justice nonprofit there, geared toward a potential ICE surge in Boston. As he neared the finish line with those projects, however, yet another catastrophe struck. On the morning of February 2, Concepcion awoke to discover that all of his anti-ICE coding projects had been hacked. People who’d registered to use DEICER, which had largely been dormant since November, were sent ominous push alerts. “Your information has been compromised and sent to the FBI, HSI, and ICE,” the text read. “RC is a terrible coder.” (Concepcion claims he didn’t store users’ personal data.) One of the alleged attackers posted on X that they had acted to prevent the doxing of federal agents. Concepcion was further stung when an X user who goes by @removeduneedsoap posted a conspiratorial screed, complete with screenshots from Concepcion’s hacked files, in which he suggested that DEICER was funded by “millions in dark money.” The replies were filled with demands that Concepcion be arrested and prosecuted for racketeering or even treason. The allegations made in the post were soon woven into a Fox News story that characterized Concepcion as part of a “shadow network of anti-ICE scouts.” Fearful of exposure, Siembra NC cut ties with Concepcion, who in turn began to shop around for new home security cameras. Since money was tighter than ever—he’d recently started rationing his ADD medication—he had to sell some of his old photography equipment on Facebook Marketplace to pay for the upgrade. Concepcion with his Goldendoodle, Dixie. PHOTOGRAPH: LUIS MANUEL DIAZ Though Concepcion managed to get his sites back online, including the beta version of his Massachusetts app, he was clearly shaken by the hack and its aftermath—an unease that only intensified in early March when US Customs and Border Protection revoked his Global Entry status without explanation. He sought solace from his mother, who now lives in Florida. Fearing for her son’s safety after seeing a news story about the hack, she advised him to step away from the immigration fight and become a waiter or dishwasher instead. But the act of trying to counter ICE has become so central to Concepcion’s sense of self that he seems intent on sticking with his work. “I told her, ‘Of course I’m afraid. This is problematic, and it would be so much easier if bills were paid and I didn’t have to worry about things,’” he says. “There’s just something telling me to try something else, and I can’t explain it. If I’m completely honest, I don’t want to explain it. I just want to keep going.”
Komunitas
sh.itjust.works
THE SECOND TRUMP administration was barely a week old when Rafael Concepcion came across the Facebook post that would upend his life. Its author was Maria Hernandez, the owner of a Mexican grocery store popular among Latino residents of New York’s Finger Lakes region. She wrote that several of her best customers had already gone into hiding. With sales plummeting, she offered to make free deliveries of food to anyone too scared of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to leave their home. Concepcion, a second-generation immigrant and a professor at nearby Syracuse University, was so moved by Hernandez’s generosity that he made the 45-minute drive to her store to pay his respects and spend some money. A burly and gregarious 51-year-old who keeps his hair slicked back, Concepcion wore a black V-neck T-shirt and blue jeans as he perused the aisles filled with pan dulce, tomatillos, and prayer candles. In front of a refrigerator case, he spotted an African American customer staring at packages of chorizo. The man mistook Concepcion for an employee. “I don’t know what any of this stuff is,” the customer said. “But I saw the thing on Facebook, and I wanted to come in and help and support.” Maria Hernandez inside her shop. PHOTOGRAPH: LUIS MANUEL DIAZ The visit to Hernandez’s store activated something deep inside Concepcion, a moral unease that would gradually blossom into an all-consuming drive to thwart ICE. In early February 2025, he described his experience at the Mexican market—not far from the home of Harriet Tubman—in an op-ed for the Syracuse Post-Standard. “I plan to help in any way I can. I hope you do, too,” he wrote. “History should count on us to do the right thing.” After the column attracted scores of irate comments (“How about FOLLOWING THE LAW. You people make me sick”), Concepcion felt compelled to escalate his activism. Polite op-eds were clearly insufficient against ICE, which had already tripled its daily arrests to more than 600 since President Trump’s latest inauguration. FEATURED VIDEO Before he started teaching multimedia storytelling at Syracuse’s prestigious Newhouse School of Public Communications, Concepcion had worked around the edges of the tech industry for two decades. So he decided to develop a mobile app meant to teach immigrants how to exercise their constitutional rights when confronted by ICE. Concepcion, who describes himself as having “the worst case of ADD you’ve ever seen,” became hyperfixated on the project. (The black V-neck and jeans he wore to Hernandez’s store are his uniform: He keeps 30 identical shirts and 30 identical pairs of pants to avoid being paralyzed by choice.) He leaned heavily on AI tools such as Cursor and ElevenLabs to build the app. Buzzing on heroic amounts of caffeine—“I drink, like, 14 cups of coffee a day,” he told me—Concepcion did most of his vibe coding between midnight and dawn while parked outside a Home Depot in his electric F-150 pickup. He chose the spot to feel kinship with the day laborers he hoped to reach, and he listened to endless repeats of songs from Hamilton as he worked. Concepcion’s wardrobe, full of identical shirts. PHOTOGRAPH: LUIS MANUEL DIAZ Then, in April, as ICE was ramping up enforcement operations from Maine to California, Concepcion got a panicked message from a chef at one of his favorite Latin restaurants. The man’s adult son, whom I will call Gabriel, had been heading to a construction job in nearby Oswego when Border Patrol agents stopped his car. A Mexican native, Gabriel had handed the agents his immigration paperwork, which showed that his asylum case was pending, but they were unmoved. He was now being held at an overcrowded ICE detention center in Batavia, New York, midway between Buffalo and Rochester. The distraught chef asked Concepcion, whom everyone at the restaurant called “El Profe,” for advice on how to free his son. Concepcion loves playing the Good Samaritan for people who feel mugged by the system, so he threw himself into trying to liberate Gabriel. He found an attorney willing to take the case for $4,000, then wrote to the judge on Syracuse University letterhead to vouch for Gabriel’s character. After a few anxious weeks, Gabriel was released on $10,000 bail—a rare outcome in 2025, when such releases decreased by 87 percent compared to the year before—and Concepcion volunteered to make the two-hour drive to pick him up. Their ride home was eerily quiet. As Concepcion studied the exhausted, dejected young man beside him, he began to regret the meekness of the app he was building. What was the point of educating immigrants about their rights if federal agents just ignored them so they could hit arrest quotas? Concepcion realized he should instead create a tool for immigrants that could “stop these people from falling off a cliff, stop these people from disappearing.” Concepcion overhauled his app to give it a more aggressive edge. The new version gave anyone the ability to report ICE activity by dropping pins onto a map. Users who were close to that pin’s coordinates would then receive a push alert containing detailed information, including photographs, about the agents’ locations and vehicles—information they could use to either organize flash protests or find safe haven. He called this app DEICER. Leave your questions for Concepcion at the bottom of this article, and the DEICER creator will respond to your comment. When the time came to submit DEICER to Apple’s App Store, Concepcion’s anxiety spiked. He worried that the government might bully Apple into handing over a list of accounts that had downloaded the app. But he decided to press forward. “ICE is looking for millions,” Concepcion stated in a video promoting DEICER’s official launch on July 28. “What if millions were looking for ICE?” With that, DEICER joined a small handful of other crowdsourced mapping tools, like ICEBlock and the Stop ICE text-alert network, that had started to emerge in response to the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign. These resources were intended to chip away at ICE’s technological superiority over its motley throng of opponents. With more than $77 billion to spend, ICE has amassed an array of Palantir-powered tools that can pinpoint human targets. The resistance, by contrast, has had to rely on the ingenuity of independent operators like Concepcion, a man whose obsessive streak has since sent him colliding with trolls, hackers, right-wing media giants, and the second-richest company in the world. CONCEPCION GREW UP in the South Bronx during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the area was synonymous with urban blight. His Puerto Rican father was a janitor who often scavenged for copper so he could treat his seven children to loaves of fresh bread. His mother was a Mexican immigrant from Puebla. A rotating cast of her supposed “uncles” and “cousins” crashed in the family’s apartment as they looked for off-the-books work. Concepcion remembers being amazed that men who’d been engineers back in Mexico were happy to become dishwashers in the US. A gifted student, Concepcion escaped the Bronx by attending a state university in Plattsburgh, a world away on the frigid shores of Lake Champlain. He was intent on becoming an English teacher, but his plans changed after he discovered the internet. He spent much of college toying with the text-based web browser Lynx and the VAX operating system. That propelled him, after college, into fielding support calls for IBM, then overseeing software training for a German ecommerce company, and finally a long career writing a set of popular guides to Adobe Photoshop. Syracuse, New York. PHOTOGRAPH: LUIS MANUEL DIAZ In 2018, Concepcion settled in Syracuse with his wife, a grade-school teacher, and their young daughter to take a curriculum development job at the university. He also taught a storytelling class as an adjunct, a gig that earned him a contract as an assistant teaching professor in 2022. It was a dream job for Concepcion, a chance to be a role model for two kinds of students in particular: those who share his Latino roots and those dealing with mental-health challenges. “I’m very clear with my students,” he says. “I struggle with ADD, I struggle with depression, I’ve had crisis situations.” Concepcion also developed a deep affection for Syracuse, a Rust Belt city of 146,000 notorious for its heavy annual snowfall and its high child poverty rate. He marveled at how some of Syracuse’s most decrepit neighborhoods were being revitalized by new arrivals from Syria, Burma, South Sudan. (Between 2000 and 2014, the foreign-born population of Syracuse grew by more than 42 percent.) To bring some of that diversity onto campus, he served multiple terms as chair of the Newhouse School’s DEI committee. And in 2023, he and his wife became foster parents, taking in a 14-year-old girl who’d been living in a house on Syracuse’s South Side, where drugs were rampant. One of 13 siblings, the girl had been using one of the house’s closets as a bedroom; Concepcion’s wife, a former ballerina, first met her while teaching a dance class. As he was putting the finishing touches on DEICER in the early summer of 2025, Concepcion received some bad news from the university. Three weeks before the semester ended, he says, a dean informed him that a professorship they’d previously discussed was no longer available; he was, however, welcome to apply for a back-office position. This decision came amid the university’s scramble to comply with the US Department of Education’s insistence that elite institutions rid themselves of all vestiges of DEI. After DEICER was downloaded more than 3,000 times in the days following its App Store debut, Concepcion received a slew of emailed death threats—so many that he began to shop around for a bulletproof vest. Syracuse’s student newspaper, meanwhile, published an op-ed calling DEICER a “revolutionary tool for immigrant communities” and airing Concepcion’s fears that he was being squeezed out of the university because of his politics. Shortly thereafter, Concepcion was informed that he was no longer a candidate for the back-office job. (A Syracuse spokesperson told me the university is “unable to comment on personnel matters” but that they “appreciate Rafael’s contributions to the Newhouse School and wish him the best in his future endeavors.”) Concepcion was now unemployed for the first time in years. I initially connected with him shortly after this setback, and we soon began chatting in a series of lengthy phone calls. On October 2, about two months after DEICER’s launch, the US Department of Justice contacted Apple to demand the removal of all apps that “put ICE agents at risk for doing their jobs.” The next day, Concepcion received an email from the corporation explaining that DEICER, which now had roughly 30,000 users, had been expelled from the App Store on the grounds that its “purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.” In essence, Apple had declared that ICE agents were a protected class on par with members of a racial and ethnic minority, which meant they couldn’t be targeted with what the App Store’s guidelines describe as “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content.” ICEBlock, which US attorney general Pam Bondi had singled out as worthy of criminal investigation, was booted from the App Store at the same time for the same reason. Apple’s capitulation to the Justice Department revealed how much the company’s priorities had changed over the past decade. In 2015 and 2016, Apple mounted a fierce legal resistance when the government, then panicked about the rise of ISIS-inspired terrorism, tried to mandate the insertion of security “backdoors” in iPhones. Now the company appeared to prize warm relations with the Trump administration above all else—a necessary position, perhaps, given its desire to avoid ruinous tariffs and other forms of political retribution. (Apple did not respond to a request for comment.) Concepcion would prove harder to rattle than the tech giant. To appeal the decision, he provided the App Store with a modified version of DEICER that he thought might neutralize its concerns. Pins on the tweaked app no longer contained any specific information about ICE agents; they instead simply advised people to gather at the flagged locations to “exercise your First Amendment right to constitutional assembly.” The fix did nothing to mollify Apple, which rejected the appeal on the exact same grounds as before. AS HE MULLED DEICER’s next move, Concepcion kept his core product available as a web-only app while ginning up a host of related projects. He tried quickly creating hyperlocal versions of DEICER whenever federal agents surged into a new city; he built a bespoke web app for Chicago after ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz, and then one for Portland, Oregon, after President Trump dispatched hundreds of National Guardsmen to the two cities. “It almost feels like I’m just trying to dress DEICER up in a chicken suit to try to get people to use it,” he told me. “But I don’t really care as long as they use it.” The chicken suits didn’t really work—in large part because they had no real local networks funneling people toward them. That promised to change when Concepcion was hired to develop something similar for Siembra NC, a North Carolina immigrant-rights group he’d started talking to soon after DEICER’s release. Siembra had been studying the emergence of ICE-monitoring tools since the spring, and the group had reservations about their messiness. “Most of them are rumor mills,” says Andrew Willis Garcés, Siembra’s senior strategist. “They give people the sense that they’re doing something, and it’s a way to channel anxiety, but they don’t actually help them get better at identifying the patterns, the tactics the administration’s using. And so they contribute to a generalized anxiety that I think is part of Stephen Miller’s goal. He would love it if there was maybe a thousand of these, and you couldn’t tell what was real.” Siembra admired the design of DEICER and enlisted Concepcion to make a North Carolina–specific version called OJO Obrero (“Look out, workers”), which would allow for tips to be moderated. The idea was for Siembra volunteers to verify user-submitted reports before allowing pins to be created. This meant the site’s users couldn’t get real-time information about ICE agents’ movements, thus eliminating one of Concepcion’s main reasons for creating DEICER. But Siembra felt a cautious approach was crucial to developing reliable intelligence about ICE’s enforcement patterns—for example, the times of day its agents are most likely to patrol certain highways and what kinds of vehicles they eye with suspicion. OJO Obrero was still in beta on November 15 when Concepcion drove his foster daughter to her school’s winter choral recital. As he waited in the auditorium before showtime, Concepcion scrolled Instagram—and froze upon seeing a Reel from Siembra’s account. An army of federal agents had descended on North Carolina just hours earlier, the first salvo in an operation that the Department of Homeland Security had codenamed Charlotte’s Web. Siembra’s representative emphasized that her organization was prepared for the onslaught. “Siembra NC created a resource called OJO Obrero,” she said, “a website you can go to to track confirmed sightings of ICE agents by location and by time across the state.” OJO Obrero had abruptly gone live despite the fact that it was, in Concepcion’s estimation, nowhere near ready to handle a massive influx of traffic. During the testing phase, he had been making around 3,000 database requests per day to the platform that provided OJO Obrero’s mapping capabilities. As Charlotte’s Web became national news that day, the requests ballooned to an unmanageable 75 million, crashing the site and resulting in a $8,000 usage bill that Concepcion had to pay himself. But Concepcion quickly worked out the technical kinks and managed to stabilize OJO Obrero. Siembra assigned 30 of its most tech-savvy volunteers to vet the deluge of tips. In a matter of days, the organization was able to get the word out about certain habits, such as federal agents’ affinity for pulling over white work vans. “You could see day-to-day, OK, this is kind of the pattern that they’re doing yesterday, so probably today might look similar,” says Garcés. “And so it really helped people think about how to stay safe.” But Concepcion took little pleasure in OJO Obrero’s success. He was becoming increasingly troubled by his social media feeds, now jammed with videos of wailing people being dragged into blacked-out SUVs. Like millions of others, he found himself sucked into what he terms “the algorithmic rage loop.” And he was questioning how work like his could avoid playing into that dismal phenomenon. AFTER TWO MONTHS of phone calls with Concepcion, I drove up to Syracuse in December, arriving right as a treacherous nighttime snowstorm began to blanket the city. The next morning, Concepcion took me to meet Gabriel and his father at the Latin restaurant where they both now worked. The baby-faced Gabriel emerged from the kitchen to show off his ankle monitor, which he said was almost too scratchy to bear. His cheerful dad, meanwhile, insisted on serving me a gargantuan mound of barbacoa. As he ladled it out of steam trays arranged beneath a sign that read “Welcome to Our Home,” Gabriel’s father recounted in Spanish how, just the day before, masked men had taken someone from the gas station across the street. As Concepcion and I ate in the fluorescent-lit dining room, half a dozen men in high-visibility vests came to grab lunch. Concepcion introduced himself and learned that they were undocumented Brazilians who’d been doing road repair jobs around the Northeast. He then showed them how to add a shortcut for the DEICER web app to their phones’ home screens. The Brazilians seemed courteous but wary of whether DEICER could do them much good. Concepcion was accustomed to such skepticism. In the months since he’d started tussling with Apple, he had come to believe that tools like DEICER were failing to make inroads with his target audience. He worried they were instead being used by well-intentioned observers whose aim is to record videos of ICE abuses and disseminate them to communities already predisposed to loathing the Trump administration. Concepcion believes this content is exhausting viewers, to the point that many will retreat from a fight that the algorithms portray as futile. And so immigrants will keep vanishing, regardless of how many cameras capture their pain. Concepcion’s proposed solution is for organizations that have spent years building trust within immigrant communities—like Siembra—to start evangelizing the likes of DEICER. Crowdsourced monitoring tools, he insists, can give immigrants a 20-minute advance warning when ICE is en route. (Concepcion has no qualms about the legality of such alerts, which he compares to the tips about police activity that are offered by Google Maps.) But plenty of local groups have been bypassing the open internet altogether. After lunch, Concepcion and I drove to visit Maria Hernandez, the store owner whose Facebook post had inspired DEICER’s creation. She said she was still delivering groceries to people in hiding and that the local immigrants she knew weren’t using any sort of monitoring apps coded by outsiders; instead, they apprised one another of ICE’s movements in private WhatsApp groups. On our way back to Syracuse that evening, Concepcion and I discussed his latest attempt to get DEICER back on the App Store. This time, he had revamped it so that pins had to be imported from a separate platform, one that he planned to offer to nonprofit organizations that aid immigrants. Concepcion fully expected this second appeal to be rejected, which is why he’d started talking to lawyers about filing a lawsuit. But where the creator of ICEBlock had sued numerous Trump administration officials, Concepcion told me he wanted to sue Apple for $100 million. He couldn’t express much of a legal rationale for such a suit—he only spoke vaguely of punishing Apple for betraying its old values. “There should be a cost of selling out your consumers,” he said, adding that he intended to donate the money to the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. Concepcion’s basement workstation. PHOTOGRAPH: LUIS MANUEL DIAZ Listening to this implausible scheme added to my growing sense that Concepcion was fraying around the edges. Aside from dealing with his routine mental-health issues, he was now under tremendous financial pressure: unemployed, yet on the hook for upwards of $3,000 a month in AI subscriptions and hosting services. “Last night I just laid down and cried,” he said to me during one vulnerable moment. “I was like, fuck, this has been a tough thing, this whole not knowing what’s going to happen, not knowing where the next paycheck’s going to come from.” People in Concepcion’s orbit know he tends to let his better angels blot out his common sense. Curt Hedges, an executive at a health supplements company who befriended Concepcion years ago, once contributed a large sum to Concepcion’s charitable effort to purchase equipment for a group of Laotian photographers. “He doesn’t have a moderate switch—it’s either all in or all out,” he says. Yet Hedges has seen how Concepcion’s passions, however noble, can lead to personal problems, including massive credit-card debt. And when he started getting 3 am texts from Concepcion about DEICER, Hedges began to worry. “I’ve been hesitant to rescue him, because when you rescue him it just gets him another six months down further into that situation,” he told me. “It isn’t as healthy as it should be.” WHEN ICE SWARMED into Minneapolis this winter, its agents came equipped with all manner of sophisticated surveillance tools. As first reported by 404 Media, for example, ICE was now deploying an app called ELITE that uses Medicaid and other confidential health data to identify potential detainees. Agents were also increasing their reliance on Webloc, software that can track every cell phone within a multi-block radius. But the city’s spirited resistance was not without its own technological resources. In addition to Signal chats, many locals embraced People Over Papers, a crowdsourced mapping tool at IceOut.org that has a lot in common with DEICER. The site teemed with scores of eyewitness reports about suspected ICE agents staking out schools, chatting with local cops, and eating in taquerias. I reached out to Concepcion in mid-January to get his take on the situation in Minneapolis and to ask about his continued back-and-forth with Apple—I knew he was now preparing his third appeal of DEICER’s expulsion from the App Store. But when we connected, he said he had a much more pressing concern on his mind. On the morning of January 9, ICE had arrested Gabriel’s father. According to Concepcion, Gabriel’s father had been driving with his wife to the restaurant when they were stopped. Concepcion said the agents commended the couple on being cooperative, then gave them an agonizing choice: One of them would have to submit to arrest, while the other could go free. Gabriel’s father volunteered to take the fall and had subsequently been transported to Batavia, the same detention center where his son had spent a few terrible weeks in April. Concepcion dropped everything to once more provide material assistance to Gabriel’s family. He arranged a meeting with a lawyer, who noted that bail was highly unlikely given the current environment; he instead recommended filing a habeas petition, a legal maneuver that could take many months to be processed. (Since January 2025, more than 30,000 people in immigration detention have filed habeas petitions.) Concepcion also drove to Batavia to visit Gabriel’s father, who was in poor health due to the facility’s conditions. Sections of the center are so underheated during winter that detainees have nicknamed them Las Hieleras—the Iceboxes. Finally, on January 29, out of the blue, Concepcion received a WhatsApp message. It was from Gabriel’s father: “Ya estoy en México,” he wrote. Unable to tolerate Batavia any longer, he had volunteered to be deported. (Gabriel is still waiting for his next court date to be set; WIRED has obscured his personal information to safeguard the integrity of his legal process.) Concepcion was now devoting substantial time and energy to providing direct aid to undocumented immigrants in Syracuse. He found it psychologically soothing to, say, give someone a safe ride home from the restaurant after their shift. But he was also deep into multiple new coding projects. One he called Vote Defender, a platform meant to be used by polling-place observers during the upcoming midterm elections. Another was a Massachusetts-specific version of DEICER sponsored by an immigrant justice nonprofit there, geared toward a potential ICE surge in Boston. As he neared the finish line with those projects, however, yet another catastrophe struck. On the morning of February 2, Concepcion awoke to discover that all of his anti-ICE coding projects had been hacked. People who’d registered to use DEICER, which had largely been dormant since November, were sent ominous push alerts. “Your information has been compromised and sent to the FBI, HSI, and ICE,” the text read. “RC is a terrible coder.” (Concepcion claims he didn’t store users’ personal data.) One of the alleged attackers posted on X that they had acted to prevent the doxing of federal agents. Concepcion was further stung when an X user who goes by @removeduneedsoap posted a conspiratorial screed, complete with screenshots from Concepcion’s hacked files, in which he suggested that DEICER was funded by “millions in dark money.” The replies were filled with demands that Concepcion be arrested and prosecuted for racketeering or even treason. The allegations made in the post were soon woven into a Fox News story that characterized Concepcion as part of a “shadow network of anti-ICE scouts.” Fearful of exposure, Siembra NC cut ties with Concepcion, who in turn began to shop around for new home security cameras. Since money was tighter than ever—he’d recently started rationing his ADD medication—he had to sell some of his old photography equipment on Facebook Marketplace to pay for the upgrade. Concepcion with his Goldendoodle, Dixie. PHOTOGRAPH: LUIS MANUEL DIAZ Though Concepcion managed to get his sites back online, including the beta version of his Massachusetts app, he was clearly shaken by the hack and its aftermath—an unease that only intensified in early March when US Customs and Border Protection revoked his Global Entry status without explanation. He sought solace from his mother, who now lives in Florida. Fearing for her son’s safety after seeing a news story about the hack, she advised him to step away from the immigration fight and become a waiter or dishwasher instead. But the act of trying to counter ICE has become so central to Concepcion’s sense of self that he seems intent on sticking with his work. “I told her, ‘Of course I’m afraid. This is problematic, and it would be so much easier if bills were paid and I didn’t have to worry about things,’” he says. “There’s just something telling me to try something else, and I can’t explain it. If I’m completely honest, I don’t want to explain it. I just want to keep going.”
Komunitas
news.abolish.capital
Every Wednesday morning, a refrigerated solar-powered truck arrives at the Mt. Hope Community Garden in Southeast San Diego. The driver hops out and lifts an awning on the side of the truck, revealing shelves that will soon be filled with leafy greens, beets, eggs, avocados, honey, and even specialty fruits like kumquats. Since 2022, this truck, the People’s Produce Mobile Farmers Market, has sold affordable fresh fruits and vegetables to local residents, helping many stretch their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. With its rotating weekday schedule of stops, the truck can serve a wide swath of neighborhoods in need. “The first time I entered Mt. Hope community garden was due to food insecurity,” says resident Lucia Davis, who heard about it from a family member. Now she shops at the produce truck weekly. She has also joined a neighborhood growers’ network that donates food raised in backyards to the truck and to the Golden Groceries program, a CSA subscription. The community garden, produce truck, grower’s collective, and CSA all stem from the same place: a multifaceted nonprofit called Project New Village. The organization has been working to reshape the local foodscape since launching its community garden in 2011 on land initially leased from the city. “In the neighborhoods of southeastern San Diego, there are many fast-food and junk-food establishments, but very few healthy food outlets,” says Project New Village co-founder Diane Moss. The organization, funded mainly through private donations, has been working to reshape the local foodscape since launching its community garden in 2011 on land initially leased from the city. In its mission to improve the health and well-being of the residents of Southeast San Diego, Project New Village has evolved into a full-fledged food justice organization. It’s also part of an emerging model called equitable food-oriented development (EFOD), which uses food as an engine to build community wealth. Now, plans are underway to expand this project with a $10 million food hub called The Village, which would provide the kind of permanent food and wellness infrastructure the neighborhood has never had. The two-story development will integrate the existing community garden and also include a fresh‑food marketplace, prepared‑food vendor stalls, a commercial kitchen, and a community gathering space. Project New Village hopes to start construction later this year and open the food hub in 2027. “[This is] real community ownership of a physical space and economic resource that contributes to long‑term wealth and resilience at the neighborhood level,” Moss says. The People’s Produce Mobile Farmers Market sells locally grown produce at the Vision Culture Foundation farmers’ market in National City, near San Diego. (Photo credit: Vito Di Stefano) From Garden to Food Hub Twelve African American–led organizations, including SD Black Psychologists Association and Jackie Robinson YMCA, founded Project New Village in 1994 as a response to neighborhood concerns like youth violence and family fragmentation. By 2008, their social‑justice lens expanded to food access and health. “At that time there were no farmers’ markets, farmstands, or community gardens [in Southeast San Diego],” Moss says. Outdated zoning made urban gardening difficult in Southeast San Diego, despite plentiful vacant lots and interest from the community. In 2011, Project New Village secured approval to start the Mt. Hope Community Garden on a third of an acre, leased from the city. Its 40 beds flourished, becoming an inspiration for civic change: In 2012, San Diego’s Development Services Department instituted urban agriculture reforms to make small-scale farming more feasible, relaxing rules for raising livestock, starting and operating community gardens, and selling produce grown on-site. The mobile market “is beginning to address food apartheid to promote health equity.” However, those reforms didn’t protect the garden when its lease ended in 2019, and the city put its land up for sale to align with evolving state laws to address the housing crisis. The Mt. Hope parcel was legally classified as surplus property, not a community asset, which the reforms would have safeguarded. The group managed to secure a loan from the nonprofit Conservation Fund in the nick of time, and outbid developers. Owning the garden brought stability and fueled new initiatives. The group purchased the produce truck with state and private funds. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) grants supported farmers’ market promotion, and a 2023 Alliance Healthcare Foundation grant contributed $2 million toward building a market—a cornerstone of the planned food hub. In 2024, San Diego State University researchers who evaluated how these efforts were impacting food security noted that the produce truck “is beginning to address food apartheid to promote health equity.” An Underserved Community Project New Village’s work is increasingly urgent. Food insecurity affects 26 percent of San Diego County residents, comparable to pandemic levels. In Southeast San Diego, where Project New Village operates, the numbers are higher because the poverty rate is [up to three times](https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/dam/sdc/hhsa/programs/phs/CHS/healthequity/povertyseries/Poverty brief-2.pdf) the county average. This area also has the county’s highest enrollment for CalFresh, California’s version of SNAP. Many people in this majority Black and Latinx area live more than a mile from a supermarket, and most small stores lack fresh produce and healthy food. But don’t call Southeast San Diego a food desert. The term “food apartheid” more precisely captures what’s missing: land ownership and capital. San Diego County has the nation’s highest concentration of farms, with more than 5,000 operations, 69 percent of which are small—between 1 and 9 acres—and located mostly in the unincorporated inland and northern parts of the county. It is a top producer of nursery products, floriculture, and avocados. Things look much different in Southeast San Diego. In the early 20th century, racially restrictive covenants concentrated non‑white residents in Southeast San Diego, and redlining denied them federal mortgage loans to buy land and build wealth. Many families once farmed small plots, but as suburbs grew and land values rose, the foodscape hollowed out, a casualty of development. Now, federal cuts under the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill have deepened nutrition insecurity, slashing programs like SNAP, which had contributed most of the food aid in San Diego (for every meal provided by the Feeding America charitable network, SNAP supplied nine). The cuts total roughly $300 million per year for San Diego nonprofits and safety‑net programs, putting 100,000 San Diegans at risk of losing food assistance. To help offset the cuts, private funders led by the San Diego Foundation awarded more than $2.5 million to programs that provide resources such as medically tailored meals and weekend food kits. Project New Village was able to use $250,000 of this aid for operating its mobile farmers’ market. The nonprofit is otherwise less dependent on federal dollars, powering through with a mix of philanthropic funders, state and city grants, and community‑based donors. A rendering of The Village, a $10 million project that will integrate the Mt. Hope Community Garden and include a fresh‑food marketplace, prepared‑food vendor stalls, a commercial kitchen, and a community gathering space. (Credit: MW Steele Group) The EFOD Model The Mt. Hope Community Garden, mobile farmers’ market, backyard growers’ network, and future food hub form what Project New Village calls the Good Food District. The nonprofit is building this community‑owned economic engine through a strategy called Equitable Food-Oriented Development, which focuses on reparative wealth building rather than maximizing investor profit. The EFOD strategy was [formalized in 2019](https://www.daisaenterprises.com/blog/equitable-food-oriented-development-a-justice-forward-framework-for-community-change#%3A%7E%3Atext=Equitable%2520Food%2520Oriented%2520Development%2520%28EFOD%2CEFOD%2520Collaborative%2520and%2520Steering%2520Committee.%29 by a collaborative of nonprofits across the country that had spent decades working to give their communities a say in their food systems, with support from DAISA, an equity-focused consulting firm, and the Kresge Foundation. To date, the collaborative has funded more than 40 BIPOC‑led food and agriculture projects, including the Detroit Food Commons, a national model for community‑owned retail, and El Depa, in Puerto Rico, which advances seed sovereignty and agroecology. San Diego has few community‑wealth models, according to the San Diego Food System Alliance (SDFSA), a sustainable food nonprofit and Project New Village partner. There are too many barriers, including zoning limits, redevelopment pressure, and sky-high land costs. Cheaper lots often lack water, accessibility, and other features that would make them suitable EFOD candidates. “Land is the foundation,” says Sona Desai, SDFSA co‑executive director. The organization is developing the county’s first agricultural land trust to help underserved growers secure land. Project New Village applied for and received an EFOD designation in 2021 and remains the only EFOD organization in San Diego. Membership is highly selective. While designation doesn’t guarantee funding, it opens access to capital designed for community‑owned, non‑extractive food‑system work and strengthens eligibility for other public and private dollars. EFOD is backed by philanthropic, affordable-lending, and community‑investment partners, which still includes the Kresge Foundation. With a public market, commercial kitchen, healthy food vendors, and event space, The Village will bring the kind of amenities to Southeast San Diego that many communities take for granted. “The Village project brings food dignity to a community lacking in neighborhood healthy food choices,” says Ami Young, a resident who shops at the produce truck and prioritizes local and organic food. Most pre‑development milestones for The Village are complete, and the team is awaiting city approval of construction permits. EFOD funds supported early consulting work; now a capital campaign is underway to secure the remaining $4 million for construction and operations. Meanwhile, the garden, where it all began, along with the mobile farmers’ market truck and backyard growers’ network, will continue its important work. When you ask Moss about the challenge of overcoming the funding gap, her answer is calm. Project New Village plans to pursue public and private grants and equity loans, Moss explains, while further cultivating its donor base. “If needed, we can approach the construction in phases, and the timeline would need to be adjusted,” she says. “Ours has been a journey of small miracles, and we can see the finish line.” The post In Southeast San Diego, a Model for Creating Community Wealth Through Food appeared first on Civil Eats. From Civil Eats via This RSS Feed.
Komunitas
lemmy.ml
Introduction On 23 August 2023, Zimbabwe will have a general election to elect a President, Members of the Senate and the House of Assembly (HoA), and local authorities. Zimbabwe runs a mixed electoral system where the President, 210 HoA members, and 1970 council seats are elected through a first-past-the-post system. Meanwhile, an additional 60 female members of the HoA, 60 senators, 10 youths, and +/-590 women (30% of local authority seats) are elected through a party-list proportional representation system. An additional 20 senators will be drawn from traditional chiefs (18) and people with a disability (2). The presidential election also has a provision for a run-off election on 2 October. It kicks in if no presidential candidate garners an absolute majority (50% plus one vote). The election has attracted significant international interest because of the violent turn of the 2018 election and global economic interests, especially associated with the just energy transition, on account of Zimbabwe’s vast strategic mineral wealth. However, locally, the election’s run-up processes have been relatively muted and arguably less vibrant than past elections due to limited civil society engagement with the process, and citizens’ limited hope that elections can change things in the country. During the tenure of the late Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe made headlines for disputed elections and allegations of undermining democratic processes. Since Mugabe’s fall from power in 2017 and the emergence of a new dispensation amidst a violent post-election period, there is value in tracing how far the country has moved from the brink and assessing whether a new democratic dispensation is on the horizon. The 2023 election provides an interesting test for Zimbabwe’s democratic progress or lack thereof. It is an opportunity for the country to “show and tell” the world the “progress” made around electoral and political reforms and enhance Zimbabwe’s place in re-engagement processes and conversations. The Zimbabwe government and ZANU-PF are intent on shaking off a stubborn pariah status characterised by sanctions, limited diplomatic engagements, and suppressed foreign direct investment. How the election pans out both in terms of processes and outcomes could determine whether Zimbabwe is ready to return to democratic norm compliance, in the process lending a huge amount of legitimacy, locally and abroad, to the state and those presiding over it. Who Are the Contenders? The composition of candidates for the 2023 election was subject to several court cases meant to eliminate on technical grounds at least 12 opposition Member of Parliament candidates, three opposition presidential candidates, and many councillors from the ballot. Following the resolution of most cases, the election pits 18 political parties against each other across the board, 4648 Council candidates, 582 candidates vying for the 210 HoA seats, and 11 vying for the presidency. These numbers are lower than the 2018 races, with 23 presidential candidates and 49 political parties. The presidential ballot will feature one woman, Elisabeth Valerio of the United Zimbabwe Alliance, down from four in 2018, with only 70 women vying for the 210 HoA seats, down from 237 out of 1648 candidates in 2018. There is also a decline in voting intentions, with Afrobarometer estimating that only 67% of registered voters intend to vote on 23 August, down from close to 80% (77%) in 2018. In addition, the new constituency and ward boundaries also mean that many voters may go to the wrong polling station on voting day and may not be able to vote. The presidential electoral contest pits the ruling ZANU-PF party, which has ironically claimed Goliath status, against a nascent opposition, the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC). ZANU-PF has forwarded 80-year-old lawyer Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa, who hopes to maintain the 60-year-old party’s unbroken hold on power since independence in 1980. The CCC, a party launched in February 2022, has deployed 45-year-old lawyer and pastor Nelson Chamisa, who hopes to start a new winning chapter for opposition politics in Zimbabwe after doing away with the legacy and identity of his mother party, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), formed in 1999 but afflicted by splits and allegations of capture by ZANU-PF. In the 2018 election, Mnangagwa officially got 50.8% of the vote to Chamisa’s 44%. Chamisa disputed this result, with the incumbent eventually claiming the presidency through a refereeing decision of the Constitutional Court. The period leading up to the 2018 elections was characterised by a peaceful atmosphere and unrestricted political engagement. However, the legitimacy of the election was compromised shortly after its conclusion. This occurred due to the actions of soldiers who caused the death of six people and injured at least 35 others in the aftermath of post-election demonstrations. The 2023 elections are a high-stakes game offering redemption and opportunities for internal power consolidation and legitimacy for both the leading contenders. Mnangagwa, whose party is said to be rife with factionalism, will be keen to show that he is the undisputed “one centre of power” and can achieve an uncontested victory and perform just as well or better than his party, which had more votes than him in 2018. Chamisa seeks to prove his claims made in 2018 of being the preferred candidate by winning the 2023 presidency. However, 2023 is a sterner test for Chamisa, who has been accused of limiting internal democracy and accountability. A dismal performance on 23 August 2023 may bring further difficulties for him and his inner circle, especially after suspicions that he deliberately sidelined senior figures to create space for loyalists. Chamisa will be banking on a decisive victory or clear rigging to save his new party from splitting as its predecessor, the MDC, did after almost every election. Like Mnangagwa, win or lose, Chamisa will use the 2023 election as a building plank for a post-election and post-MDC era in Zimbabwe’s politics. Chamisa may use any attempts at criticising or removing him from the helm of CCC to disarm internal party opponents and replace them with a more supportive entourage. APRI Elections Hub Explore all APRI’s Insights in Africa’s ongoing Elections Campaign Platforms, Strategy, and Issues Mnangagwa and Chamisa are relatively new hands in presidential politics, maturing as party alphas and distrusting traditional party structures. Mnangagwa has kept senior ZANU-PF office bearers and structures in check by supporting the emergence of presidential support groups called the “4ED” movement. These groups include openly partisan private voluntary associations such as Forever Associates Zimbabwe (FAZ), Lawyers4ED, Young Women 4ED, MenBelievED, and others, including Teachers, Internet Trolls (Varakashi), Touts, and Prophets. This strategy is already causing discomfort amongst formal ZANU-PF party structures, which Mnangagwa has tried to dispel by providing over 800 all-terrain vehicles and distributing them across constituencies in addition to rumoured USD20,000, 4000 litres of fuel and 17,000 sets of caps, bandanas, and t-shirts per constituency. Mnangagwa is running a campaign that banks on ZANU-PF’s overall performance, especially at the parliamentary level, through a chasing and mobilising strategy to support his presidential bid. For his part, Chamisa has not created parallel structures but has done away entirely with “old-fashioned” traditional party structures as part of his strategic ambiguity approach to keep political opponents guessing, stem infiltration, and build a new citizen-based winning coalition for the CCC. However, critics accuse Chamisa of using strategic ambiguity, as a red-herring and an ambiguous strategic void, which he can manipulate without party members’ popular and legitimate participation. Chamisa is primarily running a presidential campaign and has extensively targeted perceived ZANU-PF strongholds through his rural mobilisation strategy, called Mugwazo, and using “change champions” comprising ward coordinators, household, street, and village champions, citizens caucuses, and stakeholder consultations. Mnangagwa’s and Chamisa’s foci on rural areas and new ways of organising may yield positive results because, although Chamisa has his base amongst youths and urbanites and Mnangagwa would want some urban presence, youths, and urbanites do not vote as much as their older rural counterparts. However, unlike ZANU-PF, the CCC has struggled to raise campaign resources, relying on diaspora-driven crowdfunding and various candidate efforts to fundraise independently. This approach puts them out of the patronage and clientelist politics race in the rural areas and may cost the CCC seats in places where ZANU-PF is investing heavily in chasing campaign programmes, patronage, and clientelist politics, like Cowdry Park in Bulawayo and Mabvuku Tafara in Harare. Framing the Contest: A new great Zimbabwe versus delivering the Zimbabwe you want The leading candidates’ campaign tactics are mainly unchanged from 2018. The CCC is banking on Chamisa’s charisma. It continues the “Touch Me, See Me, Feel Me” strategy, where Chamisa makes impromptu and seemingly unscripted stops in traffic and at centres to meet the people. Chamisa has deployed beguiling tales that frame ZANU-PF and Mnangagwa as failures that have led the country to poverty, unemployment, and millions fleeing. He has been selling the vision of a “New Great Zimbabwe” with God and citizens at the centre and visions of an inclusive 100 Billion dollar economy in ten years. Mnangagwa and ZANU-PF have also been framing the opposition as clueless and inept toddlers who have failed to run urban councils, leading to the government declaring a state of disaster on waste management in Harare. He has also been highlighting his performance during the five years he has been President and distributing largesse at rallies, including party regalia and fast food. He has been touting the state’s various infrastructure development projects, including road, interchange, airport construction, Lithium processing plants, and normative stability in the economy, and restraining the black-market forex trade. ZANU-PF has yet to release an official manifesto, arguing that its work is the manifesto and framing Mnangagwa as a man of action rather than words. ZANU-PF’s campaign efforts have been a shameless show of incumbency’s power, giving it a clear advantage and opportunities to abuse state resources and leverage state projects as ZANU-PF achievements. The issues that both candidates have been focusing on are resonant with the public. According to Afrobarometer, the Brenthurst Foundation, and Public Policy Research Institute Zimbabwe (PPRIZ), leading issues for citizens include the economy, corruption, unemployment, infrastructure development, and electricity and water supply. Does the Opposition Stand a Chance? The electoral field favours the ruling party because it controls critical institutions such as the police, the judiciary, public media, and government coffers, in addition to allegations of a Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) capture by ZANU-PF. Nonetheless, the 2023 election still presents an opportunity for Chamisa, who lost the 2018 presidential election by 30,000 votes, to capture the presidency despite some tactics used to frustrate his party. A poll by the Brenthurst Foundation shows 53% of respondents favouring Nelson Chamisa and 40% supporting Emmerson Mnangagwa. However, on 10 July 2023, the more popular Afrobarometer released survey results that indicated a 7% decline in Chamisa’s support (27% down from 35% in 2022) and a 2% increase for Mnangagwa (35% up from 33%). This difference places the incumbent eight percentage points ahead of his primary challenger. The best chance of an opposition victory lies in persuading the undeclared block of voters captured in the 26% of respondents who refused to share their preferences for the presidential elections during the Afrobarometer survey. Most of these are urban, and many are opposition sympathisers who refrain from stating their intentions for fear of victimisation. Chamisa’s “mango” strategy, where he has been encouraging people to go along with ZANU-PF (green on the outside) to avoid victimisation and missing out on hand-outs during the campaign but vote CCC on election day (yellow on the inside), may capture this vote. A lot will depend on turn-out strategies; ZANU-PF is adept at turn-out buying and driving, especially in rural areas where many voters are coerced and “assisted” to vote. Low voter turnout will advantage Mnangagwa’s ZANU-PF unless Chamisa and the CCC stage a miracle of turning out urban voters during a relatively low-interest election. But as in the David and Goliath story, sometimes all that is needed is a political sling and stones to fell a giant; Chamisa will have to find these quickly as events in the election run-up indicate that he may not have enough ammunition. Local (dis)Interest, State of Play, and the Possibilities of Apathy ahead of the Election Locally, the election period has been muted and characterised by limited to no civil society voter education and voter mobilisation, concerns about the political environment, decreases in electoral competition, inclusive politics, and citizens’ voting intentions. Limited civil society engagement in the 2023 elections has been due to a myriad of challenges, including shrinking civic space, resource challenges, late or no accreditation of civil society organisations to conduct voter education and the disciplining effect of repressive legislation such as the Patriotic Act and the Private Voluntary Organizations Amendment Bill. Both legislations impede freedoms of association, assembly, and expression, with the latter threatening deregistration and excessive executive control of the sector. Zimbabwe’s 2023 election has also been highly uncertain procedurally, including around candidates, and very litigious throughout the electoral cycle, leading to opposition and civil society concerns about whether the playing field is even. Allegations abound of the routinisation of procedural uncertainty to manipulate the election in subtle ways, such as urban voter suppression during registration, doubtful integrity of the voter’s roll, disputed delimitation processes, and banning and disrupting opposition canvassing. In addition, the 2023 election has been distinctive in using exclusionary financial, administrative, regulatory, and legal tactics to further tilt the electoral race in the ruling party’s favour. Financially, the fees gazetted for presidential and parliamentary races, at USD 20,000 and USD 1000 (up from USD 1000 and USD 50), respectively, were exorbitant and exclusionary, posing significant barriers to political participation, particularly for marginalised groups such as young people, women, and persons with disabilities. Only ZANU-PF and CCC were able to field full slates of candidates. The International Community and Zimbabwe’s Interests: 2023 elections geopolitical implications Although it has not been proclaimed at rallies during the campaign, the 2023 election is crucial to Zimbabwe’s efforts to re-engage with the Western-led international community and shake off a stubborn pariah status characterised by sanctions, limited diplomatic engagements, and suppressed foreign direct investment. Zimbabwe has been attempting to re-establish cordial relations with the UK, EU, USA, and other Western states and have critical individuals and companies removed from the sanctions lists. It has also sought to rejoin the Commonwealth and is in the middle of an African Development Bank (AFDB)-led multi-stakeholder debt and arrears clearance process, which places it in conversation with its debtors over its +17 USD billion debt but has both economic and governance-related issues on the agenda. Even less spoken about in this election but remarkably prescient for the future is the global critical minerals’ race and Zimbabwe’s attempt to build a USD 100-billion-dollar economy in ten years if Chamisa wins and achieve an upper middle-income economy by 2030 if ZANU-PF is still in charge. Zimbabwe sits on vast mineral reserves, including minerals critical to the clean energy transition, such as Chromium, Nickel, Coal, Platinum, and Lithium. Zimbabwe’s Lithium, where the country is the world’s fifth largest producer despite modest investments, is a significant part of what Zimbabwe will bank on for its development in the next five to 10 years. Yet its significant buyers, beyond the Chinese, are Western countries, especially EU members, the US, and Japan. Despite most of these players’ needs, it will take much work for them to justify to their local constituents’ engagement with a rogue regime with contested legitimacy. The preceding makes the 2023 election a crucial opportunity for Zimbabwe to show the world that it has gone over the bend of violent and undemocratic politics. To witness this, Zimbabwe has invited an unprecedented 50+ international media houses and over 60 election observer missions, including 46 countries, to observe and report on the elections. Despite the rhetoric around being anti-West and broaching no interference, this move by the Mnangagwa regime seeks to communicate its openness and willingness to engage as part of righting Zimbabwe’s image in the West. However, this invitation has not been an open check as the government has cherry-picked observers, denying accreditation to both international and local observers they deemed acrimonious. The substantial foreign interest and presence at the 2023 elections place a reputational burden on ZANU-PF, Mnangagwa, and the ZEC to stage a clean-enough election to keep re-engagement processes with the international community and the AFDB-led multi-stakeholder debt and arrears clearance process alive and to pave the way for more clients for its critical minerals. The 2023 elections and expected judgments by election observers about credibility, freeness, and fairness will be crucial to Zimbabwe’s bilateral and multilateral engagements and geopolitical interests post-election. About the Author Dr. McDonald Lewanika is a political scientist with over 20 years of experience working on governance and development issues in Zimbabwe. He is the Regional Director for Southern Africa at Accountability Lab and researches African politics, election campaigns, governance, and accountability issues.
Komunitas
feddit.uk
If it’s a project with a couple hundred thousands of downloads a week then no, i trust that it’s been looked at by more savvy people than myself. If it’s a niche project that barely anyone uses or comes from a source i consider to be less reputable then i will skim it
Komunitas
lemmy.dbzer0.com
nope. the ISPs track torrent downloads is by leeching off of the popular public ones, and checking if any of the peers have IPs that belong to them. not by analyzing each customer’s traffic individually. downloading a video off youtube makes a simple HTTP download which wont trip any ISP alerts. especially since it’s a trusted domain like Youtube