flock out of Atlanta

Ahead of the conference there was a rally outside flock’s building in Atlanta, while I didn’t land early enough for that, the email that promoted the rally was a reminder that much like Seattle, my every move in Atlanta is probably being watched by a private company aligned with fascism.

That realization didn’t change much for the plan though, just a deep sigh of determination as I tell myself “at least they don’t have a socialist mayor”

Keynote

Opening had a depressing interview with Naomi Klein, not sure if it’s because I had just arrived from a long flight during which I vomited many times or because of how heavy the excerpt she read was. No “new” revelations from the talk other than the fact that tech broligarchs are concentrating power and that Gaza was one stop at the genocide train they are determined to ride.

the data-center fight

Another panel featured organizers fighting against data-centers in their community, the panel members had a mix of sarcastic, inspirational, optimistic, and entertaining tones.

Optimism was refreshing but didn’t seem to be supported by much when they would follow-on to explain it. the victories they achieved are of-course a source of pride, it is amazing to see communities come together and force the powers that be to yield to any of their demands at all.

My skepticism comes from the scale, for every win there are dozen loses. Yes people are waking up to the crisis and fighting back, but how much power, money, and influence does these tech broligarchs have still and how much more power do we need to build to stop them for succeeding and enslaving us or failing and taking down the economy with them. We seem to be in a lose-lose situation right now fighting to make sure we have a chance to rise from the ashes!

“AI” debate

One of the events features a debate between an AI abolition team, and an AI reformist team, or in other words, pro “people’s AI” team.

Mid debate my friend made a joke saying “why not also have people’s slavery, people’s police, ….” and you and I get the point. I stole the joke and told it to few people, but in a more playful style where I say “I was convinced by the arguments presented by the debate”, observe the shook or focused listening for a second then follow-up with the joke. I wonder why my friends like to pick on me *sigh*.

I’m not sure if it’s more impressive that vast majority of the attendees were cheering for the AI abolitionist arguments or that some people cheered for the “People’s AI” arguments at all. I’m also not sure if the debate is staged or if the two sides had an actual agreement, as the “People’s AI” side seemed to be cheeky and playful. They distributed free candy on people and jokingly I asked if it was a bribe, prompting them to tell everyone after me “We promise it’s just a gift not a bribe”. Once again, anybody knows why my friends like to pick on me?

While the debate was 4 rounds of alternating 3 minutes speeches without a chance for opposing teams to respond or provide a rebuttal, It was still helpful to hear some of the famous well crafted arguments. Was some of the arguments misleading? yes, like a pro-AI argument claiming LLMs are not all bad giving an example of some tech collective developing a local LLM that helped develop a plugin to block offensive content.

That is genuinely impressive, no doubt, but is that what people mean when we use the word “AI”? or are we talking about Clause’s cutting edge models sucking up all the water and energy so Peter Thiel can masturbate to the idea of machines executing his genocides? Keep doing all the cool math and engineering work you do bestie, we are talking about chat bots that can generate synthetic pornographic movies here, remember those?

Stickers and zines

One table that was purposed for registration got repurposed for free stickers, I did get myself some fun new stickers and RTM had a bunch of our own that we put there and as you can see from the picture quickly gone, perhaps it’s the beautiful design donated by our friend, or maybe the conference was full of anarchists as famously anarchists love cats.

At one point I wrote a thank you message on the back of the stickers and started handing them out as gifts to translators (did I forget to mention the conference was bi-lingual? both Spanish and English translations were available).

We also brought zines, all of which can be found on the RTM website, shared and/or printed and distributed with or without modification!

We wanted to run one of our disco-tech events but Detroit Community Tech, the organization that was the inspiration for these style of events, beat us to it and generously gave us a table to run!

Coop-cloud meetup

Zines and stickers weren’t the only thing that can pleasantly surprise you to see, one thing that even surprised us to see was fliers to the coop-cloud meetup.

At coop-cloud (a federation of tech collectives of which RTM is a member) we submitted a proposal for a workshop, one that was not accepted so while we have a bunch of us traveling to Atlanta where more members of our federation exist, namely the Movement Infrastructure Research, we all co-hosted a meetup in the city that lasted 6-10 PM on the evening of the 2nd day of the conference.

The fliers were there first day at the same table with the books, I asked everyone I know who printed them and everyone said “not me and I have no idea”, person who printed the fliers and put them there, thanks, would you satisfy my burning curiosity and message me? I will be ready to die in peace right after this.

The meetup featured two important highlights:

1. A 1v1 competition between me and 3wc during which we competed to deploy coop-cloud apps using coop-cloud tools and recipes on rented servers we got from capsul.org, we figured since we are in Atlanta we will use an Atlanta provider for the temporary machines. It should not come as a surprise that I’ve lost. An attendee told me the next day they were feeling at the edge of their seat, and I can’t be happier to hear it felt exciting.

2. A never seen before demo of coop-cloud’s new website, and that was super amazing! Coop-cloud’s community prides itself in moving slow and leaving no-one behind, but that is a true صبرت ونلت moment (ask an Egyptian friend or an Arabic speaker to explain this, if you don’t find one maybe ask on the fediverse?)

And remember, if you are in Atlanta, you must visit the Sandbox hackerspace and tell them how cool they are!

Portable network kit

One of the sessions was run by “Community Network NY”, they demonstrated their portable network kit, a go bag companion for the end times.

The kit is basically a wifi router connected to a raspberry-pi with some self hosted applications like a matrix server, a cinny web application, and an own cloud instance.

They also promoted meshtastic nodes but I wasn’t sure if that was a side-note or meant to be part of the kit.

I liked the idea, I suggested they check out merri-bek’s project lores.tech since they already use a rspberry-pi and recommended they maybe also check out coop-cloud (merri-bek tech is another fellow member!)

I noticed they are using Mikrotik’s RouteOS for the router and I wanted to say “why not openwrt” but I’ve already suggested few stuff and at this point I was afraid someone would snap and tell me “Why did you come to the workshop if you think you know it all”. My question on why not openwrt is genuine though (as in, open source > less open source) so maybe I’ll email them about it at some point.

Bud, thorn, and rose

If this is usually presented in a different order pardon me, I learned about the concept at the airport on the way back. but if you don’t know it, a bud is something I’m looking forward to, thorn is something I didn’t like, and rose is something that made me blush (I’m pretty sure my friends were teasing me and it is supposed to be something that I liked, no time to look it up, you and I are stuck not knowing for now)

My bud is the connections I made (pretty cliche, but maybe the question is to blame :p) and the energy we all collected that will power our push for a liberated technology that servers our needs instead of our self-proclaimed lords for sometime to come.

My thorn is that blusky dominated the conference and people either didn’t know about fediverse or just gave in to the popularity of blusky. why is this a thorn for me you ask? I’m maybe just brain-washed by social.coop/@cwebber blog posts (fine, here is the link if you insist I share it with you: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/; there is a response to her by someone from blusky and a response to the response article and that’s how far I followed that thread before making a strong judgement that you can never change my mind about /s).

My other thorn was the use of zoom, surely we could contract a coop/collective like meet.coop or mayfirst.org to provide a jitsi or big blue button server. Mayfirst even has a jitsi fork that supports bi-lingual calls, so f*ck zoom really.

My rose was the bonding and collective growing experience we had, seeing people I’ve been working with online for a couple of years in person for the first time, and the beautiful picture taken of me by an event photographer (If you are my friend, you can ask me to see it in a DM, if not, better luck next life).

The incidents are plenty, one of which is the council approving an SPD budget to buy CCTV and RTCC cameras, more than a hundred people showed up to talk against it and it all fell on deaf ears.

At the time Katie Wilson was running against Harrel and urged the council against approving this. Quoting from the urbanist's article.

“Turning on more cameras won’t magically make our neighborhoods safer. But it will certainly make our neighbors more vulnerable,” Wilson said. “As the Trump administration escalates its attacks on immigrants, trans people, and big cities in general, we need to prioritize safety, not surveillance.”

Wow, what an inspiring leader, is this what being a self-proclaimed socialist is like? taking strong stances and fighting for the people? I was definetly “moved” by her “commitment” to the safety of marginalized people.

After Wilson became the mayor

Come March 2026, in her early tenure as a Mayor, Wilson argued that cameras are now magically safe and that she was shown evidence of that.

She claims conversations with victims of gun violence moved her, but it's interesting that she didn't have those conversations before elections when she had a clear stance on the issue.

I was wondering why the new evidence magically appeared, what is it and where it came from? huh, SPD showed her this evidence you say? well, that does certainly change things.

Said evidence seems to be that there are more arrests when there are more Cameras, nothing new or inspiring here, yes there are more arrests when there is more policing, that's what police do, if you just learned that now then your position against cameras was misinformed, maybe it was made up to appeal to people who would knock on doors and advocate for you to be elected.

In her announcement today (March 19th 2026) Wilson said CCTV cameras will be installed in the Stadium district but not turned on unless there is a credible threat. Knowing that FBI has previously manufactured threat to allow use of force by SPD.

What makes this specially terrible?

Wilson will not have to see her daughter abducted by ICE, Immigrant parents will. She won't be racially profiled by an AI system, Immigrants will.

She has capacity to be moved by listening to victims, that's allegedly what changed her mind, so I'm wondering, were the stories of Immigrants not moving enough or did she not hear them at all? either is terrible news.

This not a simple policy disagreement, this is a betrayal to me, my community, and lots of others.

This is a heart break, and Wilson, you were right when you said this is our city, but you act like it's yours. shame on you!

Well, this seems to be harder than I thought it would be, if you have the energy and the time, dive with me into one of the problems.

So let’s start the story from the beginning.

I had a wifi module working, it connects to my network and gets an ip address from dhcp, and it can send an HTTP request to some random website successfully, hooray!

I change the url to be my caldav’s server (It’s a radicale instance behind a traefik reverse proxy), and voila… nothing happens.

After accidentally realizing that I can log panic information in rust in the `#[panic_handler]` (duh!), I see it’s a handshake failure, not sure if I felt frustrated or excited, I need to ask my therapist about this!

My first assumption was a certificate issue, so I looked up the documentation of the crate I’m using (reqwless) and I found that the code I copied from the book already disables certificate verification (note to future self, spend few more minutes understanding the config you copy from tutorials).

I also found that reqwless is using `embedded-tls` which only supports tls1.3 (It can be made to use `esp-mbedtls` which supports tls1.2 and tls1.3 but I didn’t try that yet).

My next assumption is that my traefik instance doesn’t support tls1.3, life would have been simple if that was the case but a simple openssl command proved me wrong

openssl s_client -connect <domain>:443 -tls1_3

As we see, life isn’t fair, and now I have to figure out how do packet capture to get more information, urghh.

My router runs openwrt, so I looked up how to do packet capture and found this pretty cool guide.

So what was the situation? A client hello packet followed by a tls alert, the alert is handshake failure (40), no certificate exchange so that confirms it is not a certificate verification issue, so why the server didn’t like my client hello?

Luckily openssl has the option `-trace` which shows exchanged packets so I can compare them, and here is what we found!

First, the low hanging fruit, the cipher suites, my esp32 was sending a single one(TLSAES128GCMSHA256) so adding `-ciphersuites TLSAES128GCMSHA256` option to the openssl command immediately ruled this out.

Next, “Extension: supported_groups”™ was different, my esp32 was sending a single value for secp256r1 and openssl was sending that plus other values.

Using the option `-groups secp256r1` reproduced the issue, this is great, I go to the Coop-cloud’s traefik recipe I use, and I modify it to support the supported group (https://git.coopcloud.tech/coop-cloud/traefik/pulls/73).

I use openssl to verify and now handshake works fine with `secp256r1` so I do another cargo run and guess what? It’s still a handshake failure!!

Okay, that was enough to take in for today I guess, I will stare at client hello packets and compare their bytes again on another day.

map battle was supposed to be that project, but after the pilot game without another game scheduled there was not much motivation to continue.

I still plan to get back to map battle but I wanted to keep learning rust and I wanted another project.

I found myself with an esp32-s3 board and a couple of 64x32 led matrix, and with a [quick] online search I found Embedded Rust (no_std) on Espressif and impl Rust for ESP32.

So what do I do? I start making esp-visualize!

What does it do? not much yet :D

The idea is to have it query my tasks list from my caldav server and display different types of messages that act as a reminder.

Maybe I’ll allow it to be configured and managed using BLE? I’ll keep getting more ideas as I go I guess, figuring out how to connect to wifi and send HTTP requests took me longer than I thought it would and I’m not fully sure I understand every line of code I have in there, so there is a lot for me to learn about the chip, no_std rust, and how to debug low-level implementation of modules like BLE and WIFI.

I expect this to be a pretty fun and maybe a useful project!

The internet is full of amazing communities, forums, video tutorials, and sub-reddits. The problem is not how little information are there but rather how much.

My open tabs are in the hundreds, some duplicates for sure but so many of them are stack-overflow answers, tutorials, documentations, GitHub issues and such.

I look at these and quickly lose the appetite to work on something, I end up looking for a new exciting thing or work on the thing that is really bothering me at the moment like getting my Raspberry Pi to connect to my wifi.

What are hacking nights?

I invite a group of friends to hang out once a week where we work on shared or unrelated projects. I print out a signup sheet where everyone states their goals for that night and later review if the night went according to plan or took a different turn. WiFi and maybe some tea and snacks and voila, magic happens!

Motivation

I don’t get tons of work done at a hacking night, I end up chatting a lot! But getting to have this nerdy conversation motivates me to do more stuff on my own. I always want to text my friend two days later saying “I figured it out; I just needed to do X and Y”.

Help

When I run into a problem hacking by myself I start feeling pain in my head, the pain intensifies the longer I have no clue what’s going on.

At hacking nights, I just scream “Why is this so stupid?” and someone leans over while I tilt the screen towards them signaling consent for them to peek at my screen and say “oh, I know this error, you might need to disable your VPN”.

Discussions

You bet I don’t say “you’re right” and move on, I ask “Why?”.

Whether the friend knows why or we just start reading about it together, there is a decent chance we have a wonderful discussion and we learn a thing or two out of it.

Community

Let’s face it, we are all lonely, and we go to house parties or social gatherings because our therapist said we need to meet people but we are daydreaming about all the shell scripts we want to write after we get home that will make your productivity 1000x better and save the world.

Hacking nights is getting to work on that script while socializing, I bet your therapist didn’t think of that, but if they say anything less than “this is brilliant” you pretty much need to change therapist /s

Security

We all have some messy stuff left around on our devices and networks. SSH port open to public because you didn’t think of tunneling into your home network to access your home server, router admin password left as default, a vulnerable upstream DNS server, the list goes on.

Hacking nights is a place to point those out to each other and to come up with solutions that you can share with your less tech savvy friends, family, and community.

In conclusion, you owe it to yourself and the world to have a night every-week or so where you tinker socially.