Rule by list

On 3 March 2001, around ten people in a Milan hacklab assembled a server from hardware a bank was getting rid of and scavenged parts. The least experienced person present was put at the keyboard so that everyone would understand what was being built. The machine was named Paranoia. On its second day, an inverted firewa…

August 28, 2026 · 15 min

DigiD and the rented engine room

The story is, on paper, narrow. Solvinity, the Dutch contractor that operates infrastructure underneath Logius and DigiD, looks set to be acquired by Kyndryl, an American spin-off of IBM’s managed-services arm. DigiD itself remains owned by the Dutch state via Logius, so technically the system is still Dutch. Political…

May 7, 2026 · 7 min

A metadata murder mystery, without the mystery

Once upon a FOIA, a group of researchers got their hands on 2,000 pages of bureaucratic bedtime reading from Serbia’s data protection overseers. Their aim? To expose the country’s surveillance architecture. Spoiler: it’s less Big Brother, more “nosy landlord with a master key to every flat”. Here’s what they found: Me…

November 1, 2019 · 2 min