Everyone’s mind is on electricity right now. Don’t forget the cooling system.

All that water has to go somewhere and porky loves to make polluted water and chemical waste “not his problem” by exiting his wastewater on public land. Probably on a riverbank or the side of a gully.

Merry pranksters day dream about finding a way to get in and do some work during construction, contributing their labour subtly enough that the modifications pass testing but fail catastrophically later, long after the hero has vanished to laugh online.

The odds of someone being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with the right set of skills and tools are pretty slim though.

Apparently what these jonklers do instead that gives them way more room to breathe and time to plan is they find the pollution pipe outlets and follow them as deep as they can safely and reasonably go and then they start building with whatever materials they’re comfortable with. Often a wooden dam and some concrete, but depending on skillz and circumstance apparently there was/is at least one person who likes to weld them shut. (Apparently experienced pipe smokers don’t usually like to use found materials from the area as that tends to leave telltale signs that will later lead a survey crew directly to the pipe.)

One profitable factory that had been dumping chems into critical waterways had their entire site shut down FOREVER because they couldn’t find the blockage. Many many millions of dollars of sunk capital locked up on a site that I imagine would have been very hard to sell to anyone if it ever did. They didn’t even depend on moving water to stop the most valuable on-premises assets from cooking instantly.

None of this is original thought, except realising the significance of pipe plugging for hot running data centers. Chapter 3 of the Ecodefense Monkeywrenching manual has some pages on pipe plugging which is why I feel so qualified to write this post.

BUT if you ever see someone like a friend or even just another human soul planning to go fucking around in stormwater drains and other pipes, make sure they understand that YOU MIGHT DROWN SUDDENLY. Make sure they do a lot of very thorough research and lots of due diligence and observation to record the times during the day and/or night when waste tanks are emptied and keep a real good eye on the weather. Flash floods kill urbexers and cavers all the time. Rain that lands “upstream” can find its way to you without warning if you’re unlucky so if you know anyone silly enough try do real life tunnelmaxxing make sure they are capable of very methodical planning and lots of patience.

The good news is the book I mentioned has waaay more info about how to maximize your chances of living a long life of liberty while becoming a reasonably advanced persistent threat to high dollar assets in your preferred areas of buffoonery.

The even better news is that nobody gives a fuuuuck about the pipes! This is a major fucking freebie waiting to be taken. Nobody’s patrolling that shit.

Remote surveillance is likely to be an issue which is why one might develop a keen interest in bird watching so they can get in there and have a reeeeal thorough look around. It’s 2026 so a really paranoid jester might think about getting a nerd to provide them with their own suite of gadgets and doohickeys to set up early warning perimeters so you can leave expeditiously if you’re about to be interrupted by company men.

Don’t let your friend get too cocky but although it would be hot and heavy and tiring work, it will often be low risk from a running into the opp’s perspective. Like so low risk as to almost be zero when compared to the potential upside of hearing such a ridiculously loud laugh track.

nato instantly dissolves

tankie kills a dozer.

Bit of a long shot, but I’ve been trying to find info about acetone pranks ever since someone told me tantalizingly that you can disable solenoids with it easily.

I don’t suppose you’d know if this is approximately right? It’s my current understanding:

Acetone is deployed mainly to attack the rubber seals in solenoids and also has the effect of speeding up metal corrosion, so it might also be destructive to electronics generally. Presumably also very effective and annoying to deal with on hydraulic and pneumatic systems including seals on actuators etc. You’d expect to deploy the acetone and for it to do most of its work unnoticed causing various points of failure to accelerate rapidly, but not so soon as to pinpoint when you were pulling off your comedic hijinx and not all at once, so you might get lucky and knock it out of commission on back to back projects if some of your jokes don’t get noticed during repairs or an expedited service.

More or less the whole story or am I off in the weeds with this?

I am once again asking you to buy some of my many tulip bulbs.

They’re like a thousand years old and grew up wrifing like fhis

I suspect it’s so they can prosecute abusers who film unequivocally bad things, since this removes any room for interpretation or coaching the victims so the abuser can get off on a technicality.

That’s my best guess as to why it would be written like that. We might be getting primed by the headline to interpret it uncharitably.

How will Albo respond to this one?

Will he let England overtake Australia with its oddly specific seeming porn microgenre legislation or will he find a way to come from behind and backdoor australia’s parent country, perhaps with a brand new law against depictions of sodomy? One thing is for certain, I’m volcel and I believe pornographix should be drawn by the consumer then burnt.

Sounds like a classic case of not tying the wick to the bottle of the molotov.

Probably for the best though, I’m not sure burning down some of Sam’s fence would achieve anything and they’d just get in more trouble.

The Trot newsletter is the original weird twitter post.

I have mixed successes with Mint but when it works and when it’s on well supported hardware it is a nice convenient distro. I hesitate to suggest it because I’ve recommended it to people who had a horrible time with it.

It’s so hard to recommend distros.

I dunno I’ve never seen any valid criticism of slackware.

Feels weird to keep recommending it, but https://www.opensuse.org/ OpenSuse Tumbleweed is regularly updated (rolling release) and nicely packaged for end users.

Suse is another old linux consulting powerhouse so you can expect a similar level of polish to Red Hat stuff.

Its default settings include a good modern filesystem that supports taking snapshots and rolling back, which is very useful if you run into a problem after updating a lot of software and you just need to revert to your system’s previous state instead of fixing the issue immediately. Or if you’re about to do something weird with your computer and you want to save a snapshot for whatever reason.

AI something something idk what he is up to

Don’t worry about it, you won’t even notice him in the NPU, it wasn’t doing anything else anyway. He’s helpfully sitting there on the bus making sure you’re being a good poster.

As far as traditional style distros, I have always been impressed with OpenSuse Tumbleweed when I’ve needed like polished “corporate ready” distro.

They build and maintain the distros and build tools etc. In particular OpenSuse was the first distro I used that offered to set up BTRFS filesystem snapshots and rollback support as part of the GUI installer. A lot of corpo / consultancy money goes into keeping it competitive and fairly slick. Same as Redhat really.

Solus

I had no idea this is where Budgie came from. How long have you been using Solus?

more like uhhhh 1993 Windows 3.1 for Workgroups. you weren’t bringing people together on windows before that. ;D

edit: wait shit I forgot to do something snarky about win 10 ah fuck it.

Do you use your computer for anything obscure or interesting?

Are you trying to do enthusiastic linux nerd stuff or do you want something that just works and is (relatively, hopefully) easy?

Oh and when I say "“i have been saying” I mean since the early 2000s btw.

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-Hats-decade-of-collaboration-with-government-and-the-open-source-community

And older archive of that page, but I don’t think much has changed in the text since its an old blog post from 2012: https://archive.ph/7GBl4

accusations / discourse from 2014: https://fossforce.com/2014/01/red-hat-working-nsa/

systemd

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/

(lol redhat’s consultancy wing’s gitlab instance got pwnt by a crew called Crimson Collective at the end of last year - I’m guessing there are some really interesting clients in the data set. lol based they just found leaked auth tokens with trufflehog. that’s so funny)

Thank you!