Back in my studies I did a lot hardware interaction prototyping with Arduino and the like. It was fun and I learned wiring sensors and microchips together, to get data out of the environment. It helped me to profoundly understand a very important lesson: hacking becomes more important when governments fail. Fail to protect democracy its citizens.
The US is becoming a failed state in such a fast pace, it makes one dizzy. Trump as the front-figure and his brain slugs of Project 25 do everything to dismantle the administrative state as we know it. One key aspect is targeting the openly available knowledge in books and the internet. The goal is to change history and the common sense.
Offline
Specifically Project 25 is looking to remove the “critical race theory" and "gender ideology" from all public school curricula. Some interpretation pointing to a potential criminalization of librarians who provide access to challenged books. The proposed policies of Project 25 would disproportionately affect books and lessons concerning LGBTQ+ identities, race, and certain historical events, which are already the most targeted books in current book-ban attempts.
Online
As the backbone of humanities collective online knowledge the Internet Archive is a vital part in keeping information free and accessible for everyone. (Waybackmachine is meant, when someone says: “The Internet doesn’t forget).
The Internet Archive digital library was founded in 1996 with the mission of providing "universal access to all knowledge." It preserves billions of webpages, texts, audio recordings, videos, and software applications.In 2024 a group called “Darkmeta” (a hacker collective from Palestine) allegedly made serious efforts to harm the Archive. With several different attacks like DDOS and serious data breaches.
Project B00KM4RK
Through the magazine The Hacker Quarterly I learned about the project B00KMA4RK. It’s basically about decentralizing information to make it harder for hackers and criminal governments to change or censor important data. Even being selective is a special kind of censoring. If the Elong AI Grok works for the Department of War - we all can imagine that this might be a very bad idea. Given the reputation of Grok. And Elong. But it will continue, whether we like it or not.
In project B00KMA4RK there is the initiate that helps individuals to build small nodes in order to store a tiny fraction of the Internet Archives data. This makes it exponentially harder for hostile actions against such institutions. If you like to know more here is a nice slide deck from 2025 Defcon. “Off-Grid Datarunning in Oppressive Regimes: The Pirate Box (and Sneakernet!)”
My ESP8266 just arrived and once I found my breadboard collection in the basement I start building my own node. I am super curious being part of such a good cause. It’s easy to forget or overlook such important projects. But in times like these we all have a voice. (Hand a computer)