Adventures in Digital Sovereignty

Andrew Bednarz has started on his journey to Digital Sovereignty and I'm paying close attention. There are a lot of services he mentions there which cut deep - companies I've long had a great deal of trust in that now pose a treat simply because they are US-based.

Speaking of which, I thought this guide to self-hosting a website was pretty great. There's definitely some great pointers and good basic hygiene stuff in there for those looking to self-host their digital sovereignty. I hadn't heard of GoatCounter before and as I'm keen to transition away from Google Analytics it seems like a good option.

In case you need further evidence of why we should be pursuing digital sovereignty, Wired's account of Musk in the White House is well worth a read. Many have noted, and it's certainly true, that Wired is doing some of the best reporting on the new Trump administration.

James Bell has a great write up of why AI probably isn't infringing Copyright even through it feels incredibly unjust. As I think I've mentioned before, Cory Doctorow has been making this point for a while.

Gergely Orosz is rightly pissed because AI Crawlers are ignoring robots.txt files and using insane amounts of bandwidth for some very humble websites. All of which costs more money and energy consumption, it's just that this time it's an externalised cost for the AI Companies. Wikimedia's bandwidth usage is up 50%. Rude. And it breaks some pretty basic internet etiquette, which I know has always been rough around the edges but the major plays have always operated within the rules... until now.

Oh, and an LLM may have been used to determine who should be tariffed at what rate.

And this article on why 'the far right' love AI is well worth a read. "It's embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right."