How 100 #Romanian hospitals switched to #PenAndPaper to defeat a national #CyberAttack

Joe Tidy, June 23, 2026

"One after another the calls came in from hospitals; criminals were infecting computer networks in a mass hack that was putting countless lives at risk.

"At Bucharest's national cyber-security centre (#DNSC) they watched helplessly as the hackers spread across #Romania through a popular piece of medical software.

"Cyber-chief Dan Cimpean had a tough decision to make, but it was the only option they had.

"The order went out to more than 100 hospitals. Disconnect from the internet, now.

"The cyber-attack on Romania's hospitals in February 2024 is one of the worst to target healthcare systems around the world, but these incidents are becoming increasingly common.

"Healthcare is now the most targeted area of critical national infrastructure, the FBI has said recently.

"Cutting off 100 hospitals in Romania from the internet stopped the hackers in their tracks, buying time to work out how bad the attack was.

"But it meant no connected devices, emails or web browsers.

"Medical staff had to switch to pen and paper, improvising workarounds to protect patients while IT teams scrambled and the national cyber response centre tried to find out how the hackers had got in - and how they could stop them.

"Their actions over four days from 10 February 2024, and those of the doctors and nurses, have been widely praised.
How they reacted and how they coped has become a test case for disaster planners internationally, as officials look for advice on responding to a mass hospital hack."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gyk756mzlo

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/4ZOHC

#ThePitt #NoTech #LoTech #Offline #Ransomware #PaperRecords #Hacking

Student #ReadingAbility Spikes After Removing Tech From Class

"Remove all the #distractions and we can get our kids back."

By Frank Landymore
Published Jun 15, 2026

"Would you believe it: a teacher and her students say their reading ability soared after banning tech in the classroom.

"Maureen Mulvaney, an AP Literature and English teacher at Washburn High School in Minneapolis, started the low tech experiment last year after becoming frustrated with plagiarism, distracted students, and plunging literacy rates.

"And so, with the enthusiastic support of parents, she banned phones and laptops, requiring all coursework to be done with pencil and paper. The turnaround was quick and resounding, and despite some initial resistance from students, they quickly fell in love with the old, analog ways of doing things.

"In September, before the experiment started, just 46 percent of Mulvaney’s students said they felt confident about their reading ability. By February, that share shot up to 95 percent.

" 'We’re having a lot of trouble in education and I think what my kids told us was that there is a solution and the solution is to go #LowTech. Go back to the old ways of doing things,' Mulvaney told local TV news station KARE 11. 'Remove all the distractions and we can get our kids back.'

"Mulvaney let her students ease into a tech free environment. First, they started with just ten minutes of silent reading and writing by hand. Still, the first day was 'rough,' she wrote in an essay in The Minnesota Star Tribune. Most students quit after just half a page of longhand composition.

" 'I told the kids this is like lifting weights,' she told KARE 11. 'You don’t go in and you don’t start with 80 pounds.' "

Read more:
https://futurism.com/future-society/students-reading-improves-no-tech-class

#LudditeClub #NoTech #NoPhones #NoAI #Reading #Writing #Humans
#Smartphones are #DumbingUsDown #SolarPunkSunday #Handwriting #NeoLuddites #SmartphoneBan #Longhand

RE: https://mastodon.online/@liilliil/116742811204106612

Tagging for #SolarPunkSunday !

#LowTech #NoTech

Projects From 1900 That Will Help You In The Next Crisis

via the #InternetArchive
Added 2022

"The USA in 1900 wasn’t a backwards country. In fact, it had one of the most advanced economies in the world. The Industrial Revolution might have started in Britain, but by the Great Exhibition in 1851 the British were amazed at the variety and quality of things being made in the USA. Even so, if people could do something themselves they generally did. They didn’t hesitate to take on big jobs, either – many turn of the century DIY projects were a lot more ambitious than putting up some new shelves in the den. In this book we’ll look at some typical projects our not so distant ancestors were familiar with, and which can still improve our lives today."

https://archive.org/details/projects-from-1900-that-will-help-you-in-the-next-crisis/page/3/mode/1up

#SolarPunkSunday #DIY #LowTech #NoTech #FixIt #OnlineBooks
#OnlineLibraries #SelfReliance #Selfsufficiency #Homesteading #Farming #smokehouses #RootCellars #HuntingBow #WaterWells #Snowshoes

RE: https://mastodon.social/@404mediaco/116710755666929467

Now, let's do cars! My car's "smart" heat/air does not recognize solar gain. If it's colder out than in, it turns on the heat. This sunny AM I roasted both from the heating system and the sun, while the air outside was just a degree or two below the inside setting. #NoTech

Demand Is Booming for New #NoTech, #Repairable #Tractor

"There is consumer pressure to back away from technology that is unnecessary to perform everyday tasks."

by Jason Koebler
Jun 3, 2026

"The secondary market for decades old, low-tech #JohnDeereTractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix without having to deal with John Deere’s repair monopoly. A Canadian company has seen that demand and came up with a radical thought: What if they made a new, repairable, 'no-tech' tractor to solve what has become a gigantic pain point for farmers?

"Alberta’s #UrsaAg says that it has been inundated with demand after announcing its tractor, which costs roughly half as much as a Deere and has the benefit of not being a repair nightmare. We have for years covered the frustration that farmers have felt as they have been locked out of their Deere tractors with digital rights management systems that prevent them from fixing their machinery, tractors that won’t run because of minor sensor failures, and crops that literally die on the vine as they wait for an 'authorized' repair person to fix tractors during critical harvesting periods.

"Ursa Ag markets its tractors as '#NoFrills' and 'built to last.' Ursa Ag’s Doug Wilson told me that the company designed the tractor because of a need in the marketplace for a new machine that isn’t loaded with tech and is easy to maintain. The company follows in the footsteps of consumer electronics companies like #Fairphone, which makes a repairable smartphone and #Framework, which makes modular, repairable #laptops. The demand Ursa Ag has seen is part of the backlash to manufacturer repair #monopolies and the injection of #technology and #InternetConnectedSensors and terms of use into even the most basic of gadgets.

" 'I talk to farmers every day and I hear from farmers every day about how they went out and bought machinery from 1987 so that it wouldn’t have a computer on it,' Wilson said. 'All of this came from a simple discussion with a customer who wanted to be able to turn [the tractor] on at the start of the day, to use it, and shut it off at the end of the day. It needed to work, so that’s what we built.'

"Ursa Ag’s tractor has been hyped in agriculture circles after Wilson showed the tractor off at a Canadian farm show and it was featured by Farms.com. Wilson said more than a thousand farmers have contacted him after that show, from roughly 30 countries. 'I got a handwritten letter from a farmer in France who doesn’t own a computer and wanted us to mail him information about the tractors,' he said."

Read more:
https://www.404media.co/demand-is-booming-for-ursa-ag-new-no-tech-repairable-tractor/

#SolarPunkSunday #LowTech #LoTech #RightToRepair #Farmers

Oh look. Our #BigTechOverlords don't want us to diss their #AISucks technology!

US law enforcement warns of “#AntiTech extremism” as #AIHatred grows

The feds are raising the alarm about a new category of threat.

Daniel Boguslaw, WIRED.com – May 27, 2026

Excerpt: "In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: #AntiTechnologyExtremists.

"More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.

"This new effort follows President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding '#AntiAmerican,' '#AntiChristian,' and '#AntiCapitalism' beliefs. Earlier this month, #Trump’s counterterrorism czar, #SebastianGorka, released a public counterterrorism strategy claiming that left-wing extremists are one of the three top counterterrorism priorities facing the United States.

"Taken together, these Trump administration directives have commandeered the domestic surveillance apparatus to surveil and criminalize speech and assembly that challenges the ideology of the White House. A new focus on anti-technology extremism adds an unreported category to already public designations under a presidency that has heavily invested political and material capital in #AI and #datacenter proliferation.

"Among the documents in the tranche obtained by WIRED is a New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report that warns of widespread upheaval in response to AI adoption. Of particular note is a novel term for what the bureau purports to be an emerging extremism threat."

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti-tech-extremism-as-ai-hatred-grows/

#ResistAI #DatacenterMortoriums #SurveillanceState #BigTechBrother #TechnoFascism #PoliceState #USPol #LowTech #NoTech #TrebuchetTime #TechOverlords #AIResistance #ExhumingMcCarthy #SilencingDissent

Good morning! #Pygmysized #GoldenGourami, #luckybamboo, self-grown hair algaes where the gourami grazes. #Notech #aquarium. Only top up water as the waste are #SelfRegulated.

Lucky bamboo is ~168cm now and growing.

These goldens are adults. It just their DNA pulled a prank on them to be guppy-sized while the siblings are standard ~10cm sized. I love them though. Very interactive, no fighting, labyrinth lungs, not as stuckup as the big siblings.