Posts on MycoSystems co-op

Workshopping Rayhunter: the EFF's new Cell-Site Simulator Detection Tool

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you saw our last post, then you know that we helped to organaize the first ever CounterSpy conference at our new hackerspace in Atlanta! This article is an adaption and retrospective on the Rayhunter workshop that I put on for this event.

What is (a) Rayhunter?

Rayhunter is a new project by the EFF to make the detection of Stingrays (and cell-site simulators more broadly) significantly more accessible. It is an open-source application for the Orbic Speed wireless hotspot which turns it into a hyper-portable, easy-to-use piece of countersurveillance equipment.

To avoid confusion, “Rayhunter” (proper noun) refers to the software project itself, while “a rayhunter” (common noun) refers to a device built for detecting Stingrays and cell-site simulators. Rayhunter turns the Orbic Speed wireless hotspot into a rayhunter.

The Rayhunter project is all about accessibility; the Orbic hotspot can be bought on Ebay for only $20-$30, and the user interface is a dead-simple binary status bar: green means all’s good, red means something suspicious is going on. This is all towards the EFF’s goal of putting these decives into as many hands as possible, crowdsourcing as much data on the usage and functionality of modern cell-site simulators by police and intelligence agencies, a topic which we currently know relatively little about.

What is a Stingray/What is a Cell-Site Simulator?

Simply put, a cell-site simulator simulates cell-sites. More specifically, it’s a surveillance tool that pretends to be a real cellular base-station, tricking people’s phones into connecting to it in the hopes of sniffing out user data such as IMEI/IMSI numbers, location information, and sometimes even call/SMS content. A Stingray is a very specific model of CSS (cell-site simulator), which at this point is pretty out-of-date and has largely been phased out. However the word “Stingray” has in itself become a colloquialism for CSSs more broadly.

The rabbithole of CSSs and Stingrays goes pretty deep, espeically when observing all the varients of these technologies in use today. Brooke Clarke over at prc68 has an excelent writeup compiling all the various forms of Stingrays, CSSs, IMSI catchers, and much more that are in use by various government and private entities today. The technology has evolved a lot since the original Stingray, with modern varients even able to work over LTE and 5G. But the specifics of how these devices are used, where they’re deployed, and what exploits they utilize still remain largely a mystery.

Our friend “Irene” put together a phenomenal talk for CounterSpy on the intricacies of CSSs which goes into far more detail than I will in this article. If you didn’t catch her talk live or in-person, then you can watch the recording over in the CounterSpy Archive. It’s certainly worth the watch if you are interested in this subject.

While there’s a lot we don’t know, the biggest question on our minds is how these devices are being utilized for political repression. With novel surveillence technologies deployed against political movements and activists at an ever-increasing rate (such as the historic repression we have seen by the Atlanta Police Department against the movement to Stop Cop City, including our friends at the Atlanta Solidarity Fund), we need to know what we can do to better protect ourselves. And this is where Rayhunter comes in.

How to Setup and Use Rayhunter

As we’ve mentioned, you’ll need yourself an Orbic Speed RC400L wireless hotspot. So long as you’re on a flavor of Linux or MacOS, the installation process is incredibly simple (the Windows install script is still under development); just download the release from the Github repository, extract it, plug in your hotspot, and run ‘install.sh’ as root. (I know… dont run random scripts as root on your machine, but this is straight from the EFF so I promise it’s fineeee. Compile it yourself if you’re concerned, the instructions are in the README.)

The script will run, your hotspot will reboot, and you should be greeted with a “success” message in your terminal. Congratulations! You now have your own Rayhunter! You should see a (hopefully) green bar at the top of your hotspot’s display. If it turns red, then your rayhunter has detected a likely CSS, and if it’s grey, then it’s not actively recording.

To access your rayhunter’s dashboard and download its logs, just connect to the wifi hotspot and navigate to http://192.168.1.1:8080. You’ll be greeted by an interface like this:

Image credit

From here you can start or stop recording, view info and warnings from previous recordings, and download any of the recorded packet logs for analysis or for sending to the EFF.

An open question at this point is whether or not an activated SIM card is needed for detection of CSSs. This is an open issue on the Github, and nobody has an answer to this yet (namely because we dont yet know how modern CSSs really work). It certainly needs a SIM card to connect to any kind of cellular base station, but maybe not an activated one. We can collectively answer this question simply by getting more people with rayhunter out into the field detecting CSSs, using both activated and inactivated SIMs.

What we Learned from Workshopping Rayhunter

At CounterSpy 2025, we gave away 50 Orbic Speed hotspots to the audience for them to setup Rayhunter themselves and learn how it works. This ended up being pretty successful! In the end, we only had about seven left, and everyone ultimately left with fully-functional rayhunters.

The audience all shared six Linux Mint computers between themselves to conduct the installs. There were a few small issues with the install process resulting from running multiple device installations from the same download. This might pose a problem for others trying to mass-install Rayhunter as we were, but we got past this easily by just running the install script multiple times, which eventually resulted in a successful installation.

One of the bigger takeaways I had from putting on this workshop had to be the sheer amount of interest I received from the audience on this topic. I found this interest to be universal regardless of whether any given person had a technical background or not. Maybe it was just that they were excited to go home with a cool device, or maybe Stingrays and CSSs are particularly notorious and subject to hearsay, or maybe people were just vibing with the event. I think it was likely a comination of all of these factors, but either way, this is a promising sign that the EFF is seeing success with their goal of getting as many people as possible out into the field conducting data collection on CSSs.

Time will tell if people actually use their rayhunters to conduct countersurveillence, or if they’ll just end up lost in a dusty drawer. I know that I’ll personally take mine to do some casual reconnaissance, and we’ll also be setting up a permanent rayhunter mounted to our server rack at Sandbox to be constantly gathering data. If we end up finding anything, we’ll make sure to post an update about it.

Rayhunters and You

If you’re involved in political organizing or mutual aid work at all and you’re considering picking one of these up, I’d say it’s probably worth getting one to throw in your bag just in case. That being said, you should know that these shouldn’t be relied on to tell if you’re under suveillence or not. There will almost certainly be false negatives, because the EFF only built their detection methodology around CSS attacks that we currently know about. There are likely many exploits used by modern CSSs that are currently unknown, which is yet another reason we need to be gathering more data to improve our detection capabilities.

Police and intelligence agencies are constantly utilizing newer, higher tech ways of conducting illegal surveillence on social movements and on the broader population. We need to be dynamically responding to this ever-changing threat, and Rayhunter is a very enticing project to help us accomplish this with regards to a very specific form of surveillence technology. Ultimately though, the state surveillence apparatus certainly has plenty of additional means to monitor people’s cellphones beyond just CSSs, many of which are more straightforward and can derive more thorough information. After all, why would police set up such a complex and expensive piece of equipment for political repression when protestors will self-identify through personal social-media accounts or through location data gathered by Apple or Google?

Your rayhunter is just one piece of a much larger security model and posture. I’ve made a point in this article to stress that it is a data-collection tool first, and a security tool second. I think Stingrays/CSSs have gained a certain notoriety among activists, so the idea of a “Stingray detector” is a particularly enticing tool for many people who’ve become scared from stories about this technology. But CSSs at protests wouldn’t be a problem if people just didn’t bring their phones. They wouldn’t be able to read your text messages or listen to your calls if you exclusively use Signal for your communications. And they can’t check your phones DNS queries to see what webpages you’ve been visiting if you use a secure proxy for all your network traffic.

So use your Rayhunter to go out and collect some useful data for the EFF and their amazing team of security researchers (or for yourself if it happens to be your field). It’s not going to give you any additional security or privacy in itself (If you want to know how to properly protect yourself from state and corporate surveillence, the EFF has some invaluable resources for you), but it might gather some vital data that will lead to better protection for us all in the long run.

I’m excited to see how this project develops and what data people manage to collect. I would love for Rayhunter to result in a better collective understanding of CSSs and better protections from their various attack methods, and I love that regular, non-technical people are now able to help forward that goal themselves.

Special thanks to everyone that came to CounterSpy and to those that took part in my Rayhunter workshop, and thank you to the EFF for developing and maintaining this tool! If you’ve gathered any interesting data with your Rayhunter you want to share, if I’ve made a mistake in this article, or if you have anything you want to share, feel free and reach out via email, signal, or on Mastadon!

We're at CounterSpy!

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone!

Quick update for y’all which I definitely should’ve written earlier than the night before, but we’re helping to facilitate the first ever CounterSpy conference this weekend!

Counterspy is a conference around digital security and infrastructure for movement happening at Sandbox, our new Anarchist hackerspace in Atlanta. Saturday will feature a day full of presentations around everything from autonomous digital infrastructure to cell-site simulators to GrapheneOS. Sunday will feature a number of hands-on workshops, including a tutorial for Coop Cloud and a Rayhunter install party!

If you want to watch the talks, they will be livestreamed here: https://tv.sandboxatl.org

Hope to see you there!

Where have we been and what have we been doing?

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone!

If you happen to be following us, you might have noticed we havent posted much recently. There are a few reasons for this, namely that we have taken on far too many projects than we probably should have, and writing articles and updates has been low on our list of priorities. I figured that y’all probably deserve a bit of an update at this point, because quite a lot has happened pertaining to MycoSystems and other related projects. To keep things orderly, here’s a list of all the individual updates that I’ll be outlining in this update:

MycoSystems is now an actual legal entity (a cooperative LLC), and it was a major pain to do this in a way that didn’t open us up to doxxing
We’ve helped to start Movement Infrastructure Research (MIR) along with some comrades, got a grant, and used it to spearhead some local infrastructure projects
We helped found a new anarchist community hackerspace in Atlanta
Not much has happened with Squat the Planet yet and I’m sorry about that
More misc stuff is happening that’s cool and interesting, and maybe you’ll think it’s cool too!

MycoSystems is officially a worker cooperative!

After a lot of deliberation, MycoSystems is finally established as a cooperatively-run LLC. As much as we detest legitimizing the so-called “United States’” authority to declare who is a legitimate entity and who isn’t, doing this opens up many options to us than wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Namely, we can legally operate as a worker cooperative to bring in income to support ourselves & fund projects, we can finally open a collectively controlled bank account, and we can also open other various online accounts without using our personal information. This means we’ll also be able to start taking donations soon and opening up merch stores for both MycoSystems and Squat the Planet.
While starting an LLC is generally not particularly difficult, we had some requirements that made this process kinda painful. The biggest difficultly was doing this in a way that doesn’t open us up to easy doxxing. In most US states, owners of LLCs and other legal entities are placed on a public registry which showcases their full legal names. Luckily, there are four states which allow you to set up an “anonymous LLC”, concealing personal information from the public. We went with Delaware (we do not live in Delaware), and that led us down a rabbit hole of registered agents, virtual mailing addresses, and many other random legal mechanisms needed to do business in a state you have no business in. The IRS still knows who we are, but at least we’re a bit safer from prying eyes. Sometime in the future, we’ll publish the full process we used once we’ve worked out more of the legal kinks, as I’d imagine that info will be useful for other organizations that are at risk of fascist targeting.

MIR: Movement Infrastructure Research

(https://mirnet.org/)

MIR is an initiative we’ve helped to get off the ground over the last year-ish. MIR was born out of a project we took on with some comrades here in Atlanta to build an anonymous and open-source jail support phone system built from existing FOSS PBX components. This is a project that has largely been successful and has been deployed for Atlanta Solidarity Fund as a trial system while we work out various kinks and issues. This is a project that we’ll release a full article on in the future (probably when we release a packaged version of this system). With this project in the works we were able to get a grant and formalize the group, now Movement Infrastructure Research, and absorb the jail support PBX project.
MIR exists as a container to conduct research and development work on radical open source projects and infrastructure for use by activists and social movements. Today, MycoSystems is now a formalized contractor of MIR, we are continuing to work on the jail support PBX project, and we have also started working with Autonomic to contribute to Coop Cloud, a radical open-source infrastructure deployment application. Without getting too into the technical weeds, I think Coop Cloud has the potential to radically change how social movements engage with private cloud technologies and evade the modern surveillance state. If you’re interested, check out the Coop Cloud website.

Sandbox: Atlanta’s new anarchist hackerspace

(https://sandboxatl.org)

Sandbox is a new anarchist hackerspace we’ve opened up with some comrades in Little 5 Points, Atlanta. It’s taken about a year to negotiate a lease due to various issues, but we’re finally open as of January! Sandbox was created to bring technology skills and resources to the local community and to social movements. We’ve been sourcing equipment through donations and dumpster diving, and we already have 3D printers, a server rack with multiple servers, CNC routers, an electronics prototyping station, video synthesizer equipment, and much more!
We currently have about 20 official members, and membership dues are how we pay for the lease in addition to some grant money. We are fundamentally a community space, and anyone is welcome to come visit, hang out, and use the resources (so long as a sandbox member is supervising). Members are already starting a plethora of initiatives and projects, so the space is getting even more dynamic and interesting every day.
From Sandbox, we are planning to host conferences, repair days, skill-sharing sessions, community infrastructure projects, and many other events. In April, we will be hosting a movement digital security conference with some great speakers and several workshops. We’ll be posting information on this event here on our blog fairly soon, and we’d love to see you there!

Squat the Planet: Sorry we’re slow :(

Not much has happened lately with Squat the Planet, as you’ve probably noticed if you follow the forum. I posted over there a few months ago about a lot of our plans, most of which we havent gotten around to yet. If you’ve been particularly looking forward to those developments, I’m legitimately sorry we’ve been so slow. If you’ve read up to this point in the article, you probably have an idea now as to why we’ve been so occupied.
At the moment, MycoSystems is still just the two of us. Now that we’re an actual LLC with a bank account, we’re looking at adding some more members so we can contribute more to projects like StP, as well as allocating some funds to prioritize the work that itself doesn’t bring in much income.
So I promise we will get around to making the improvements and additions we’ve talked about, just bear with us and we’ll get to it. I can’t give a specific time estimate, but hopefully StP work will ramp up soon. Thanks for y’all’s patience (: Even more cool stuff!

In addition to everything above, we also have a few other noteworthy projects and initiatives to add! Many of these will get their own dedicated posts whenever we get around to it.

Brooke and I have been building out our personal camper-van project, which still needs a lot of work but has been coming together quite nicely so far.
I’ve been rebuilding CrumpetNode, which is one of our two primary physical server nodes we host both personal and MycoSystems infrastructure on. The form factor of the second-hand server rack we acquired is quite small and odd, which has posed some fun design challenges. I’m using as much dumpster-dived, ewaste, and second hand hardware as possible in this build.
We’ve found all sorts of fascinating (and valuable) e-waste! Most notably, we found a large quantity of industrial lithium batteries for solar energy storage, as well as grid connected inverters, and a few solar panels. The vast majority of all this is either working or only needs minor repairs. Some of the batteries were even new in-box. We’ll be building out solar energy setups with some of this equipment, and we’ll probably repair and sell the rest of it.
Sandbox had a kickoff event back in the beginning of February. I did a talk on dumpster-diving e-waste and utilizing it for building digital infrastructure, and Brooke did a talk on DIY invisilign and how invisilign might actually be poisoning everyone. We’ll soon be publishing the slides and notes from these talks

Y’all can probably expect more content on here soon about any of these projects/topics I’ve outlined in this update. We tend to take on projects faster than we write about them, but we’ll be trying to catch y’all up as best as we can. If you’re interested in this, feel free and subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow us on Mastadon!

Introducing the Van-Go Project!

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introducing the Van-Go Project!

The Van-Go project is our mission to build an off-grid vehicle that we can live and work out of to more effectively pursue MycoSystems and other open-source/activism related projects. The idea is to build a powerful mobile platform for building and deploying digital infrastructure by combining a typical off-grid van conversion project with a variety of power-efficient open-source technologies.

In addition to the typical off-grid technologies used in conventional van projects, we hope to integrate a complete workstation, equipment for electronics tinkering and prototyping, a miniature low-powered server for self-hosted applications, as well as radio equipment for experimenting with SDR and sub-GHZ radio transmissions. Brooke and I are planning on living out of this thing full-time, so it will need to be fully-featured to allow us to continue pursuing our projects.

So why on Earth do we want to live and work out of a van?

Well, aside from the fact that housing in any desirable part of the city would require a couple of black-market organ sales to afford, there are a few major reasons:

We hope to minimize our living expenses in order to expand our capacity for taking on more not-for-profit projects.

We hope make it easier to build relationships with people and organizations all across the continent by maximizing our freedom-of-movement.

We want to enhance our overall self-sufficiency to decrease our reliance on our capitalist overlords and on money in general.

A mobile hacking station would let us bring our tools and equipment with us so we take on bigger projects in other geographic regions.

The project itself can act as a platform for exploring all sorts of open-source projects and technologies that we can then share with the world.

It’s fun!

Throughout the project, we’ll post a number of build logs documenting our progress. As we experiment with and implement relevant open-source technologies throughout this process, we’ll make sure to post detailed write-ups documenting what we learn, as well as any relevant code/files over on our Gitea.

This is going to be a very big project on a far-to-small budget. We will need to DIY the vast majority of this build to even remotely afford it. But after doing a lot of planning over the last several months, we have a few -unconventional- strategies in mind for how we’re going to accomplish this task…

Building the ultimate mobile camper for living & hacking through scavenging and mutual aid

Now if you know anything about van builds, you may be aware that ambitious, self-sufficient builds like this are expensive. Fancy van builds can easily reach $30,000+ with many going as high as $100,000, and we certainly don’t have that kind of money. Instead, we’re going to try to keep this build under $10,000 total. We have two primary tricks up our sleeves that should both be familiar to the anarchists in our audience: dumpster diving and mutual aid!

How mutual aid can facilitate bigger projects for less money and work

This consists of a bit more than just asking some friends for a hand here and there, although that is something we will certainly be doing for this project. The key component of mutual aid is that it’s mutual, meaning it provides benefits to more than just one party. A large project such as this van actually presents quite a few opportunities to give back to those that would help out!

skill sharing: everything from auto maintenance to woodworking to electrical work can be taught to those who want to learn are willing to lend a hand.

materials trading: if anybody our network has spare building materials, they can be traded for something in return. Trades I’ve done in the past have included home-cooked food, spare computer hardware, custom built websites, random odd-jobs, and all sorts of other things.

services trading: if anyone in our network has a skill needed for the project, such as welding, their services (or even lessons in the skill) can be traded for something they need.

tool sharing: why should everyone in a trusted network individually buy every tool that they might need, even if it’s just for a small job? Better to inventory all of the tools within the group and share them around whenever and wherever they are needed.

These types of mutual aid can certainly be done to great effect on the small scale with friends, family, and neighbors. But the beauty of mutual aid really shows itself when orchestrated across much larger networks of people. Here in Atlanta, communities of anarchists, activists, and otherwise cool people around here have created a number of Signal group chats to orchestrate decentralized mutual aid on the scale of hundreds of people. In these groups, people are encouraged to request, gift, trade, barter, or otherwise distribute resources, services, skills, and more, with only one rule: no monetary transactions (except financial mutual aid requests). As the groups get larger, it becomes easier and easier to find anything you might need.

(Side note: If you want to take part in something like this but don’t have access this kind of network, that’s okay. You will likely be able to find some public “buy-nothing” groups on various online platforms, which usually operate as local gift-economies for physical items. Alternatively, don’t be afraid to talk to your friends and neighbors to pursue building a mutual aid network within your own community.)

Brooke and I have already accumulated many of the materials and resources we require for this build through these same mutual aid networks; for example, we traded a file server (built from salvaged components) for a nice pile of lumber, we received a water pump from someone trying to downsize their things, and we even made some home-made banana bread in return for a large roll of fiberglass insulation! Throughout our build logs we hope to document the ways in which we utilize mutual aid like this to assist us in this project.

How we’re turning trash into functionality

If you’re a weirdo like me who likes to spend their free time rummaging through trash, then you certainly know that dumpsters are effectively loot-boxes. This horrible societal wastefulness is something we can take full advantage of while the price of construction materials like lumber are through the roof and our van budget is too small to buy a semi-new Prius.

If you know what you’re doing, I believe that dumpster diving can eradicate 75%+ of the total cost of building materials for projects like this one. In future build logs, we will analyze just how much money worth of materials we were able to scavenge, and see how my estimate stacks up.

For now, let’s talk a bit about strategy!

1. Dive construction dumpsters for generic building materials

These are the big steel bins that you’ll often see outside of construction sites, renovations, or other kinds of trash-producing work sites. They are very commonly completely full of surplus construction material: hardwood planks, stone countertop off-cuts, wooden floor panels, building hardware (doorknobs, latches, buckets of screws/nails, etc), cuts of metal (sheet metal, aluminum extrusion, etc), and even usable tools!

2. Locate e-waste dumpsters to find electronics, screens, electrical equipment, radio gear, buttons & switches, cables, and more

One of my favorite dumpsters to dive is an ewaste dumpster underneath a major building in Midtown. It is a goldmine for usable electronic devices; from it we’ve salvaged entire servers, network switches, expensive wireless access-points, desktops, vintage consoles, heavy-duty electrical switches, 10+ Raspberry Pis (3B+), and so much more. Dumpsters like this one will be a vital resource for the equipment we’ll need to turn this van into a mobile workstation and hacking space.

3. Explore suburbs on big-trash pickup days to snag furniture parts

All of the seemingly inconsequential items we’ll need for a basic interior, such as cabinet doors, door handles, drawers, knobs, shelves, etc, really do add up in cost if we were to buy them all outright. Luckily for us, people throw these kinds of items out all the time! Big trash pickups dates (the days where all the suburbanites put their unwanted furniture on the curb to be picked up) are almost always public information, and if you live in a large population center, there will usually be one happening weekly somewhere in the area.

4. Grab scrap metal and sellable items while on scavenging runs to make additional money and offset overall cost

This one’s pretty self-explainitory; there will be plenty of useful and valuable items that we’ll find in the trash that we will not need. Construction dumpsters are often full of metals that can be hauled to the local scrapyard for reasonable profit. In addition, practically all types of dumpsters will have all sorts of items from electronics to antiques that have resale value through platforms like ebay. While we’re scavenging for the things we need, there’s no reason not to pick these items up to recoup some of our overall project cost.

5. Take full advantage of Hippie Christmas

Hippie Christmas is the dumpster diver’s term for college move-out day. It’s honestly astounding what rich college students throw out when they’re trying to quickly get out of their dorms for summer break. Macbooks, espresso machines, flagship phones, valuable textbooks, iPads, and so much more. Big-ticket items worth hundereds or more are not uncommon if you get the location and the timing right.

All of these dumpster diving strategies become especially powerful when complimented with the mutual aid strategies we discussed previously. Easily over half of the useful items we find while dumpster diving will not be applicable for our purposes. However, they will likely be useful to somebody within our network, so they can instead be gifted or traded to those who need them, often in return for items or services we will need, or just for building valuable relationships with people in the community.

We’ll make sure to document the successes and failures of these strategies in future project build logs and budget analysies. I have high hopes, since we’ve already managed to scavenge much of what we need over the last few months, so I’m confident we’ll acquire much more as the project goes on.

Lots of updates coming soon

This project has been incubating for quite a while at this point. While waiting for the perfect (in-budget) van to pop up on used marketplaces over the last few months, we have been creating CAD models, planning out various systems, and gradually acquiring materials.

After a long wait, I am proud to announce that we have finally acquired our van! I mean, it’s not exactly a van, but still, I think it is the perfect vehicle to build this project out of! In the next post for this project, we will talk about our process designing the interior of the van in CAD, show how we determined our criteria for shopping, and finally show off the vehicle we ended up with! See you there :D

— eyes

GSplat Demo

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What is all of this?

I’ve been interested in photogrammetry and projection scanning for quite a while, but I’ve never really had a good way of capturing scenes in a way that is akin to “archiving” your surroundings. GSplatting, or 3D Gaussian Splatting, is a form of capturing scenes in a way that preserves the visual quality but doesn’t provide an actual polygonal model.

Unlike photogrammetry, GSplatting provides a fairly realistic gaussian of the captured scene that can be viewed using very little computational resources, this is a big reason why NVidia is investing time into NeRF (actually something completely different but they’re similar in output).

Anyways, here’s a quick demo that allows you to view models in a browser, I may add a few different gaussians that I’ve been working on, but currently I’m borrowing bonsai-7k-mini.splat. Note, this will not work on static browsers, “hardened” browsers (including firefox with arkenfox user.js), or any other browser that might limit javascript in any way. You can check out the code here, and here.

gsplat.js left click rotate, right click pan

Bringing New Life to the Squat the Planet Community

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hi everyone!

A few weeks ago of exploring around travel forums I stumbled across Squat the Planet (abbreviated StP), an old anarchist travel forum created over 20 years ago. I was absolutely delighted to see that this was an old-school, web 1.0 style message board that still has a relatively active community. The content of the forum is right up our alley too; the site boasts categories of all sorts of anarchist/punk travelling methods and topics ranging from train hopping to vandwelling to squatting and so much more. Since Brooke and I are currently in the middle of getting ready to be vandwellers full-time, StP seemed like a complete gold mine of resources, information, and cool, knowledgeable people.

To my dismay, I read the banner at the top of the site stating that the forum is to be shut down by the end of the year. Apparently the owner and founder of the site, Matt Derick, was moving on from the site for extremely valid reasons, namely that he did not have the time nor energy to maintain the site any further.

It was at this point that I decided to reach out to Matt to offer our services to maintain the infrastructure and management of the community. A few email exchanges and Signal calls later, and we were collaberating on a plan to move forward, and he agrees to let us take over the backend of the site! From there we proceeded to start the migration process onto our infrastructure.

The website as it currently stands runs on a proprietary platform called Xenforo. This is a php-based application that is, tbh, quite dated, and its development has stagnated significantly over recent years. Our first goal is to migrate the forum to a fully open-source platform. Discourse seems to be the likely candidate for this, however Flarum is another possible option. We plan on rolling out this change gradually and with close feedback from the StP community. After the platform migration, we are planning on running two additional instances of the server on our other nodes using either docker-swarm or kubernetes to attain hyperavailability, making the site significantly more responsive and reliable.

We have also chatted with Matt about expanding the StP community onto fediverse platforms such as Mastadon and/or Peertube. These would serve to be companion communities to the StP forum, rather than be a replacement. While these plans are a bit far off at this point, we have also volunteered our services and infrastructure to host any possible future StP Fediverse nodes. Ideally we will work close with the community to flesh out these possibilities in a way that everyone is happy with.

I have also been thinking about possible features we could add to the StP forum to encourage more community engagement. Some ideas I had in mind include an improved event-planning interface to encourage more irl meetups and events, an aggregation feature for member-written how-to guides to make useful info more accessible, a mutual-aid tab so members can send/request resources and funds to each other, and a post-tagging system coupled with an improved search system to make content more accessible. Again, these are all just ideas and not concrete plans. I’m looking forward to collaborating with the community to hear additional suggestions and to implement features that people will enjoy and benefit from.

As of today we have migrated the Xenforo application to our Chicago server; so it looks like StP is going to be here to stay for a while. We will post updates on this project within the ‘Projects’ tab of this site (still under construction as of October 21st, 2023) where we will document the software stack, the platform migration procedure, as well as any future infrastructure changes and feature implementations.

It’s been a delight collaborating with Matt on this; he’s a very cool person and a seasoned traveller and anarchist, and he even sent me a copy of his book, An Anarchist’s Guide to Travel, which I am gleefully reading as Brooke and I work on our van project. We can’t wait to collaborate more with everyone at StP and help bring some new life into this community!

Hello Friends!

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hello comrades and welcome to the start of MycoSystems! We’re developing an online hub to empower people to use open-source software & services at home and for business.

MycoSystems Co-op is where we post blogs and updates to what we do, as well as using it to spread resources that help people start the switch to open and free software.

We hope you will join us in helping make the free software ecosystem a little less treacherous by committing to blog posts through our gitea, or just by spreading this website around to others! 🍄

Posts on MycoSystems co-op

Workshopping Rayhunter: the EFF's new Cell-Site Simulator Detection Tool

What is (a) Rayhunter?

What is a Stingray/What is a Cell-Site Simulator?

How to Setup and Use Rayhunter

What we Learned from Workshopping Rayhunter

Rayhunters and You

We're at CounterSpy!

Where have we been and what have we been doing?

MycoSystems is officially a worker cooperative!

MIR: Movement Infrastructure Research

Sandbox: Atlanta’s new anarchist hackerspace

Squat the Planet: Sorry we’re slow :(

Introducing the Van-Go Project!

Introducing the Van-Go Project!

So why on Earth do we want to live and work out of a van?

Building the ultimate mobile camper for living & hacking through scavenging and mutual aid

How mutual aid can facilitate bigger projects for less money and work

How we’re turning trash into functionality

1. Dive construction dumpsters for generic building materials

2. Locate e-waste dumpsters to find electronics, screens, electrical equipment, radio gear, buttons & switches, cables, and more

3. Explore suburbs on big-trash pickup days to snag furniture parts

4. Grab scrap metal and sellable items while on scavenging runs to make additional money and offset overall cost

5. Take full advantage of Hippie Christmas

6. Share the dumpster wealth using our mutual aid strategies to take full advantage of our recovered treasures

Lots of updates coming soon

GSplat Demo

What is all of this?

Bringing New Life to the Squat the Planet Community

Hello Friends!