I have deployed and run infra since the noughts, through some wild turns in geo/techno-political history, and will say that now more than ever, #selfhosting is an act of resistance.

Depopulate. Defund. Disempower.

Not to sound alarmist, but consider a future where you *must* use #Windows 12 because switching to #Linux is "illegal" thanks to Age Verification nonsense.

It's clear the Corpos are literally trying to remove the ability for anyone to use compute without their gatekeeping. The time to fight that is now.

$1 billion PER DAY for Trump's War with Iran.

A war that he still can't explain why we're fighting or how it ends.

Meanwhile, the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP in history.

Media that speaks with one voice and sells you your own powerlessness back as entertainment.

Algorithms that keep you angry and exhausted.

Police and agents who have more tools each year to surveil and punish you.

A politics where people stop fighting at all

https://husseinhallak.substack.com/p/the-war-on-you

Filing this under Two cheeks of the same ASS...

The Democratic Party is a ship of bought and sold corporate genociders. Leftists should take it over and/or burn it to the ground. It cannot be salvaged:

DCCC Rakes in Millions From Palantir Lobbyists as Protests Target the Company’s ICE Surveillance Tools

"As progressive activists blockade Palantir offices and protest the company’s AI tools used in ICE deportation and surveillance operations, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has continued taking millions from the company’s lobbyists, according to new Federal Election Commission filings.

In January alone, more than a dozen lobbyists with firms representing Palantir bundled a combined $2.9 million for the DCCC, according to a newly filed FEC disclosure. The January haul from Palantir’s lobbying firms represents 38% of the DCCC’s total contributions for the month."

#Democrats #Fascism #ICE #Palantir #Surveillance #Capitalism #Neoliberalism

https://readsludge.com/2026/02/25/dccc-rakes-in-millions-from-palantir-lobbyists-as-protests-target-the-companys-ice-surveillance-tools/

You're paying AI companies a monthly subscription fee to be fingerprinted like a parolee.

I got bored and ran uBlock across Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini simultaneously.

Claude:

• Six parallel telemetry pipelines.
• A tracking GIF with 40 browser fingerprint data points baked into the URL, routed through a CDN proxy alias specifically to make it harder to block.
• Intercom running a persistent WebSocket whether you use it or not.
• Honeycomb distributed tracing on a chat UI because apparently your conversation needs the same observability stack as a payments microservice.

ChatGPT:

• proxies telemetry through their own backend to hide the Datadog destination URL from blockers.
• uBlock had to deploy scriptlet injection — actual JS injected into the page to intercept fetch() at the API level — because a network rule wasn't enough.
• Also ships your usage data to Google Analytics. OpenAI. To Google. You cannot make this up.
• Also runs a proof-of-work challenge before you're allowed to type anything.

Gemini:

• play.google.com/log getting hammered with your full session behavior, authenticated with three SAPISIDHASH token variants, piped directly into the Google identity supergraph that correlates everything you've ever done across every Google product since 2004.
• Also creates a Web App Activity record in your Google account timeline. Also has "ads" in one of the telemetry endpoint subdomains.

When uBlock blocks Gemini's requests, the JS exceptions bubble up and Gemini dutifully tries to POST the error details back to Google. uBlock blocks that too. The error messages contain the internal codenames for every upsell popup that failed to load.

KETCHUP_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MUSTARD_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MAYO_DISCOVERY_CARD.

Google named their subscription upsell popups after condiments and I found out because their error handler snitched on them.

All three of these products cost money.
One of them is also running ad infrastructure.

Touch grass. Install @ublockorigin

#infosec #privacy #selfhosted #foss #surveillance