Trump's "the people ICE kills are just left wing terrorists", is Putin's "the Ukrainians we kill are just nazis".

It is a complete disregard for truth, for logic, and for the laws of the land.

And that is the point — to establish a parallel reality in which no truth, no logic, and no laws create any friction while the dictator’s tanks plow on down the road to unfreedom.

With all my heart I hope the American people save their democracy in November.

2026 is the last chance.

Ten years ago, if someone had told me that tech policy bloggers would be calling for ICE to be abolished, I would have thought it very unlikely.

"Abolish ICE" is an increasingly mainstream and extremely correct position.

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/08/abolish-ice-before-they-kill-again-impeach-trump-noem-before-they-incite-more-murder/

Callenson had the courage and conviction to stay with the scene and keep filming. Not to run away, but instead to follow the scene. To continue documenting what was unfolding.

I’d like to think I’d have done the same. I’m not sure at all that I would have.

https://daringfireball.net/2026/01/lets_call_a_murder_a_murder

A few days ago, a client’s data center (well, actually a server room) "vanished" overnight. My monitoring showed that all devices were unreachable. Not even the ISP routers responded, so I assumed a sudden connectivity drop. The strange part? Not even via 4G.

I then suspected a power failure, but the UPS should have sent an alert.

The office was closed for the holidays, but I contacted the IT manager anyway. He was home sick with a serious family issue, but he got moving.

To make a long story short: the company deals in gold and precious metals. They have an underground bunker with two-meter thick walls. They were targeted by a professional gang. They used a tactic seen in similar hits: they identify the main power line, tamper with it at night, and send a massive voltage spike through it.

The goal is to fry all alarm and surveillance systems. Even if battery-backed, they rarely survive a surge like that. Thieves count on the fact that during holidays, owners are away and fried systems can't send alerts. Monitoring companies often have reduced staff and might not notice the "silence" immediately.

That is exactly what happened here. But there is a "but": they didn't account for my Uptime Kuma instance monitoring their MikroTik router, installed just weeks ago. Since it is an external check, it flagged the lack of response from all IPs without needing an internal alert to be triggered from the inside.

The team rushed to the site and found the mess. Luckily, they found an emergency electrical crew to bypass the damage and restore the cameras and alarms. They swapped the fried server UPS with a spare and everything came back up.

The police warned that the chances of the crew returning the next night to "finish" the job were high, though seeing the systems back online would likely make them move on. They also warned that thieves sometimes break in just to destroy servers to wipe any video evidence.

Nothing happened in the end. But in the meantime, I had to sync all their data off-site (thankfully they have dual 1Gbps FTTH), set up an emergency cluster, and ensure everything was redundant.

Never rely only on internal monitoring. Never.

#IT #SysAdmin #HorrorStories #ITHorrorStories #Monitoring

The #UNFCCC treaty for global cooperation on climate change serves the survival interests of everyone on this planet.

Every country in the world has agreed to it.

Trump withdrawing the US because it “no longer serves American interests” is not just ‘embarrassing’, it’s dangerous.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/07/trump-international-groups-un