Italy fined Cloudflare 14.2 million euros for refusing to block access to pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, the country’s communications regulatory agency, AGCOM, announced yesterday. Cloudflare said it will fight the penalty and threatened to remove all of its servers from Italian cities.

There is a saying in Trinidad and Tobago: “Cockroach should stay out of fowl business.” It captures a hard truth. Small states that stray into great-power conflicts rarely emerge unscathed. They are not players; they are expendables.

For small states, geopolitics is not a theatre for bravado but a discipline of diplomacy, restraint and survival. That discipline has now collapsed. Trinidad and Tobago will pay the price of auctioning off its sovereignty to its neocolonial master, the US. The nation now sits dangerously exposed, economically, diplomatically, and potentially militarily, after the US attack on Venezuela and the extraordinary kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro.

With Delcy Rodríguez now installed as Venezuela’s president and Diosdado Cabello still embedded, the Maduro regime remains largely intact. Trinidad and Tobago now faces an openly hostile neighbour whose senior leadership has denounced the dual island state’s prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, as a complicit enabler of US aggression and designated her persona non grata. This is not misfortune. It is the price of strategic misjudgment.

This crisis did not arrive overnight. Through rhetorical excess, Persad-Bissessar has steadily narrowed our country’s room for manoeuvre. What is now unfolding is the predictable outcome of decades of amateurish improvisation masquerading as governance. Successive administrations have failed to articulate a coherent foreign policy for what was once the wealthiest country in the Caribbean.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei calls protesters ‘vandals’ and ‘saboteurs’ and blames US for instigating the unrest

Iranians took to the streets in new protests on Friday to press the biggest movement against the Islamic republic in more than three years, as authorities sustained an internet blackout as part of a crackdown that has left dozens dead.

Iran’s supreme leader vowed that authorities will not back down in the face of the rapidly growing protest movement, setting the stage for an intensified violent crackdown.

Protests have raged in cities and towns across the country in recent days, posing a threat to the authority of the regime, which has been significantly weakened since the last large protest movement in the country in 2022.

Asked in a funny way, but what do you think legitimately? Why do people kiss? Is it evolutionarily advantageous? Why not just touch ears together or something? Why do you personally kiss? Do you also wonder why is kissing?

Republicans dont need a reason to be authoritarian. One will be manufactured if need be.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/6579933

Archived version

...

Today, the biggest news comes from Northern Europe.

...

After months of unexplained damage beneath the Baltic Sea, Finland has moved into action by intercepting a vessel directly linked to the cable cuts. For the first time, a Russian operation that relied on distance and unclear responsibility has been exposed through enforcement rather than inference.

Finland intercepted and exposed a Russian-linked civilian vessel connected to the cutting of underwater cables between Finland and Estonia, marking the first time one of these grey-zone operations has been confronted directly at sea.

Footage released by Finnish authorities shows a controlled interception unfolding step by step in open waters, starting with Finnish patrol vessels pulling alongside and ordering the ship to slow and hold its course.

...

This incident fits into a broader Russian campaign targeting underwater infrastructure across the Baltic Sea, where power cables and data lines form the backbone of everyday life. Over recent months, multiple fiber-optic and power cables linking Nordic states have been cut or damaged under suspicious circumstances, often near known shipping lanes.

...

While there was broad agreement that these incidents were not random, the lack of direct attribution prevented authorities from acting beyond repairs and diplomatic warnings. The aim has created disruption that creates uncertainty, repair costs, and political hesitation without triggering a direct military response.

The method is simple and hard to counter, because civilian vessels move slowly along established shipping routes, blend into dense maritime traffic, and operate in areas where cables are known to run.

...

The breakthrough came when investigators confirmed not only that the vessel was operating along sensitive seabed routes during the cable damage, but also that it was carrying sanctioned steel products.

This turned a pattern of suspicion into a provable violation, allowing Finnish authorities to move immediately from monitoring to action using existing law. Instead of another case of accidental damage in busy waters followed by statements and quiet inquiries, Finland now had clear grounds to act openly and decisively.

By anchoring the response in documented violations rather than intent or attribution debates, Moscow's usual escape route of denial and ambiguity collapsed the moment the cargo was recorded.

...

For years, grey-zone operations have thrived because responses stopped at warnings, investigations, or diplomatic pressure. This case establishes a different precedent, as intelligence collection tied to legal preparation and immediate enforcement, allowing states to act publicly without escalating militarily.

Operationally, it lowers the threshold for boarding and inspection, politically it removes the need to argue intent, and legally it shifts the burden onto Russia to explain documented violations rather than deny them.

...

This case shows another path, as it shows that intelligence gathering, legal preparation, and enforcement can be combined into a response that exposes the operation without turning it into a military confrontation. Once a ship is boarded and its cargo documented, the shield that protects hybrid warfare disappears.

...

As an addition: A recent report exposed how Russia wants to drain Europe's investigative resources with its sabotage campaign, according to officials

Looks like that's the end of Sendle? Bit of a shame, they were very convenient for sending small parcels. Couriers on the whole are a pain in the proverbial to deal with normally.

Summary:

Last-mile delivery provider FAST Group, formed through the August 2025 merger of Sendle, FirstMile, and ACI Logistix, is currently facing a severe financial crisis that has led its primary private equity backer, Sydney-based Federation Asset Management, to freeze its $100 million investment fund. Just months after the merger intended to create a logistics powerhouse, the entity is reportedly struggling with significant financial red flags and "due diligence lapses" that have brought it to the brink of a potential U.S. bankruptcy filing. The meltdown has raised serious concerns regarding the firm's risk management and the stability of its underlying assets, leaving the future of the e-commerce logistics venture in doubt as it seeks urgent financing to avoid a total collapse.

Email received today:

Earlier on Saturday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio reiterated Washington’s support for the people of Iran after the Iranian authorities cut off internet access as they sought to curb the protests.

“The United States supports the brave people of Iran,” Rubio wrote on X.

The post came hours after Trump issued a new warning to Iran’s leaders, saying, “You better not start shooting because we’ll start shooting too.”

Trump said it looked like Iran’s leaders were “in big trouble” and repeated an earlier threat of military attacks if peaceful protesters were killed. “It looks to me that the people are taking over certain cities that nobody thought were really possible just a few weeks ago,” he said.

The deal will be phased in over 15 years.

Right-wing Trump supporters in Central and Southeastern Europe have operated in a legal gray area for years. After the US attack in Venezuela, there's a growing awareness that Trump could pose a threat to them too.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/45242789

...

Russian Railway, which operates approximately 85,000 km of railway, is going through a crisis that has prompted Russian authorities to consider exceptional measures to avoid default, according to an analysis published by Europa Liberă. ...

Russian Railways’ total debt has reached approximately 4 trillion rubles (equivalent to about USD 50–51 billion, EUR 43 billion), at a time when revenues have been affected by the slowdown in the war economy and the highest interest rates in two decades.

The company, which has approximately 700,000 employees, is heavily exposed to state-owned banks, particularly VTB, and its inability to meet its financial obligations could have a knock-on effect on the Russian banking system, several analysts warn.

“This crisis at Russian Railways is one of the factors contributing to accelerating inflation in the Russian economy,” said Russian economist Igor Lipsiț, quoted by Current Time. According to him, falling revenues, rising tariffs, and inflationary pressures directly affect the population and companies dependent on rail transport.

The war in Ukraine, a systemic shock for the rail operator

The invasion of Ukraine was a systemic shock for Russian Railways. The prioritization of military transport, imposed by the government starting in 2024, has seriously affected trade flows and the punctuality of civilian deliveries.

...

In an attempt to stabilize the financial situation, the Russian government has ordered the sale of the Moscow Towers office complex, a 62-story building in the Moscow City financial district, purchased by Russian Railways in 2024 for approximately 193 billion rubles (about USD 2.4 billion), according to the Ukrainian portal UNN.

...

The Moscow authorities are considering several options to support the company, including:

• increasing freight transport tariffs;
• increasing state subsidies;
• tax cuts;
• using reserve funds;
• converting part of the debt into shares, which would give state banks direct stakes in the company.

...

Web archive link

TL; DR; it will take many years.

Swedish producer is trying to to accelerate the process of extracting the elements vital for hi-tech products. The LKAB iron ore mine at Kiruna in Sweden is close to one of Europe’s largest-known deposits of rare earths (..).

The 17 rare earth elements – all found in Kiruna – include neodymium and praseodymium, critical materials for the powerful permanent magnets needed for everything from electric cars to household appliances and military jets. From mine to refined end production could take 10 to 15 years, say experts.(..)

“I think people often miss the point. They say ‘why don’t we just produce rare earths in Europe?’. But you have to have the entire supply chain to do that,” says Nigel Steward, a professor at Imperial College London, a materials scientist and a former executive in the US mining industry."(..)

The experience in Kiruna shows just how challenging it is to reduce the EU’s dependency on China, which is now the core supplier of rare earth magnets and willing to choke supplies, as it did last year, if politically desirable.(..)

State-owned LKAB is now trying to accelerate the process of mining, extraction, and separation of the crumbs from the ore, to help the EU de-risk as quickly as possible.(..)

"I’ve been talking in Brussels the past two or three years about the huge disadvantages we created in the 1970s and the 1980s when we closed the mining industry and started importing metals from South America, Africa, Australia,” he says.(..)

Asked why it has taken the EU so long to wake up to the dangers of dependency on China’s rare earth supply, he is blunt: “Politicians will never be more courageous than the voters.”

I can't understand how people were allowed to believe this.

I got this on my Youtube Recommendations, and I gotta say, good one, Youtube. For once, the algo hit me with some bangers. This video is in Spanish, but the Autotranslate is spot on, you can trust it, and I highly recommend it. This goes into the mentality of ''vendepatrias'' from a Mexican context but also in general.

Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu has revealed that Israeli agents are currently active in Iran.

In an interview with Israel’s army radio, Eliyahu discussed Israeli operations in Iran over the past year and claimed that activities are ongoing, according to Israel Hayom newspaper.

He said, “When we struck Iran last year, we were on their territory and knew how to prepare the ground for the attack. I can assure you that our people are working there right now.”

For almost 27 years, the Venezuelan military – formally known as the National Bolivarian Armed Forces (FANB) – was a firm ally to presidents Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, as they systematically drifted from seeking an alternative to Western liberal democracy, and towards authoritarianism.

The FANB helped the Venezuelan government dismantle the institutions of the previous political establishment and persecute its most fervent opponents. In exchange, the governments of Chavez and Maduro, respectively, gave more and more power to the military within Venezuelan politics, offering them ministerial positions, governorships, embassies and other leadership roles such as mayoralties or the administration of state-run enterprises.

Now, with the abduction of Maduro by United States special forces last Saturday, the military’s image as a protector of the Venezuelan state has taken a hit: The deposed president was kidnapped from the largest Venezuelan military complex, Fuerte Tiuna, in an operation that exposed the deficiencies in the FANB’s military technology and defence protocols.

The military faces a crucial dilemma – make changes and serve as the guarantor of the deals fronted by the Donald Trump administration in the US and interim president Delcy Rodriguez in Caracas, or risk further US attacks and erosion of its power and status.

I used to self-host because I liked tinkering. I worked tech support for a municipal fiber network, I ran Arch, I enjoyed the control. The privacy stuff was a nice bonus but honestly it was mostly about having my own playground. That changed this week when I watched ICE murder a woman sitting in her car. Before you roll your eyes about this getting political - stay with me, because this is directly about the infrastructure we're all running in our homelabs. Here's what happened: A woman was reduced to a data point in a database - threat assessment score, deportation priority level, case number - and then she was killed. Not by some rogue actor, but by a system functioning exactly as designed. And that system? Built on infrastructure provided by the same tech companies most of us used to rely on before we started self-hosting. Every service you don't self-host is a data point feeding the machine. Google knows your location history, your contacts, your communications. Microsoft has your documents and your calendar. Apple has your photos and your biometrics. And when the government comes knocking - and they are knocking, right now, today - these companies will hand it over. They have to. It's baked into the infrastructure. Individual privacy is a losing game. You can't opt-out of surveillance when participation in society requires using their platforms. But here's what you can do: build parallel infrastructure that doesn't feed their systems at all. When you run Nextcloud, you're not just protecting your files from Google - you're creating a node in a network they can't access. When you run Vaultwarden, your passwords aren't sitting in a database that can be subpoenaed. When you run Jellyfin, your viewing habits aren't being sold to data brokers who sell to ICE. I watched my local municipal fiber network get acquired by TELUS. I watched a piece of community infrastructure get absorbed into the corporate extraction machine. That's when I realized: we can't rely on existing institutions to protect us. We have to build our own. This isn't about being a prepper or going off-grid. This is about building infrastructure that operates on fundamentally different principles:

Communication that can't be shut down: Matrix, Mastodon, email servers you control

File storage that can't be subpoenaed: Nextcloud, Syncthing

Passwords that aren't in corporate databases: Vaultwarden, KeePass

Media that doesn't feed recommendation algorithms: Jellyfin, Navidrome

Code repositories not owned by Microsoft: Forgejo, Gitea

Every service you self-host is one less data point they have. But more importantly: every service you self-host is infrastructure that can be shared, that can support others, that makes the parallel network stronger. Where to start if you're new:

Passwords first - Vaultwarden. This is your foundation. Files second - Nextcloud. Get your documents out of Google/Microsoft. Communication third - Matrix server, or join an existing instance you trust. Media fourth - Jellyfin for your music/movies, Navidrome for music.

If you're already self-hosting:

Document your setup. Write guides. Make it easier for the next person. Run services for friends and family, not just yourself. Contribute to projects that build this infrastructure. Support municipal and community network alternatives.

The goal isn't purity. You're probably still going to use some corporate services. That's fine. The goal is building enough parallel infrastructure that people have actual choices, and that there's a network that can't be dismantled by a single executive order. I'm working on consulting services to help small businesses and community organizations migrate to self-hosted alternatives. Not because I think it'll be profitable, but because I've realized this is the actual material work of resistance in 2025. Infrastructure is how you fight infrastructure. We're not just hobbyists anymore. Whether we wanted to be or not, we're building the resistance network. Every Raspberry Pi running services, every old laptop turned into a home server, every person who learns to self-host and teaches someone else - that's a node in a system they can't control. They want us to be data points. Let's refuse.

What are you running? What do you wish more people would self-host? What's stopping people you know from taking this step?

EDIT: Appreciate the massive response here. To the folks in the comments debating whether I’m an AI: I’m flattered by the grammar check, but I'm just a guy in his moms basement with too much coffee and a background in municipal networking. If you think "rule of three" sentences are exclusive to LLMs, wait until you hear a tech support vet explain why your DNS is broken for the fourth time today.

More importantly, a few people asked about a "0 to 100" guide - or even just "0 to 50" for those who don't want to become full time sysadmins. After reading the suggestions, I want to update my "Where to start" list. If you want the absolute fastest, most user-friendly path to getting your data off the cloud this weekend, do this:

The Core: Install CasaOS, or the newly released (to me) ZimaOS. It gives you a smartphone style dashboard for your server. It’s the single best tool I’ve found for bridging the technical gap. It's appstore ecosystem is lovely to use and you can import docker compose files really easily.

The Photos: Use Immich. Syncthing is great for raw sync, but Immich is the first thing I’ve seen that actually feels like a near 1:1 replacement for Google Photos (AI tagging, map view, etc.) without the privacy nightmare.

The Connection: Use Tailscale. It’s a zero-config VPN that lets you access your stuff on the go without poking holes in your firewall.

I’m working on a Privacy Stack type repo that curates these one click style tools specifically to help people move fast. Infrastructure is only useful if people can actually use it. Stay safe out there.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/45242833

Russian oil companies significantly reduced their production of crude oil in December due to the impact of US sanctions on export sales, Bloomberg reported on Friday.

Last month, the total amount of Russian oil extracted fell by over 100,000 barrels per day, to 9.326 million barrels, a source familiar with the official statistics, which have been classified since 2022, told Bloomberg.

The drop in output is the greatest since mid-2024, when Russia cut production under an agreement with the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Bloomberg continued. Now, however, Russia is at liberty to increase oil production, yet December’s output showed an unexpected fall and is now 250,000 barrels below the daily quota agreed with OPEC and its allies in November.

Russian oil companies are finding it increasingly difficult to sell Russian crude overseas, as although Russian tankers shipped 3.87 million barrels a day of crude in the four weeks to 21 December, Bloomberg said, there were increased delays in offloading cargoes “with a build-up of vessels anchored off the coasts of India and China”, the Kremlin’s two largest customers.

...

Web archive link

The study by the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM) found that 21% of respondents reported thinking about emigration. Among Germans without a migration background, the share was 17%. Those who themselves immigrated to Germany were twice as likely to consider leaving (34%).