Cyberpunk on TAZ

// grapheneos: the ungoverned phone

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every phone ships with a remote. Pre-pointed, from the factory, at your data, your location, your habits and your wallet, held by people who paid for the access. It decides what the device records, who it reports to, what it gets up to while you sleep. You were given the handset. Someone else kept the remote, by design, and it was never going to change hands on its own. This guide is about taking it. Not throwing the phone away. Picking up the control that should have been yours from the first day.

// no black boxes

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 1980, at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, a printer jammed.

This was not unusual. Printers jam. What was unusual was the man it annoyed, and what he decided to do about it.

Richard Stallman was a programmer in the lab, and the lab had recently been given a new laser printer by Xerox. A good machine. Fast. It also had a habit the old one shared: it jammed quietly, on a different floor, and left people waiting on pages that would never arrive. The old printer had the same flaw, but Stallman had fixed the social half of the problem. He had the source code, so he rewrote it. He made the machine send a message when it jammed, and tell you when your job was done. A small thing. A neighbourly thing.

// how I got here

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The very first thing I remember about computers was how they smelled. Something new, completely alien, but welcoming. Inviting. Like a door I didn’t know existed had just swung open, and whatever was on the other side already knew my name. It was 1990. I walked through. I never came back out.

The room wasn’t much to look at. Cracked concrete walls, paint peeling in sheets, heavy wooden tables that had probably been there since before I was born. My mum worked at the national mining institute, the kind of place that sat at the very heart of what a communist country valued most. Metals. Output. The collective. But sitting on one of those wooden tables, humming quietly to itself, was something that didn’t belong there at all. A PC. The only one I’d ever seen. Possibly the only one anyone in my world had ever seen.