log entry ID: ..a.....m 2026-09-14 22:58:40 EESTThis is something I have been preparing for for a while, and now, the time has come at last. AI has made the internet too filthy, and it is time to leave.
AI has made it easier than ever to automatically break into millions of computers over the internet. The same AI has also made it easier than ever to find the very security flaws that the aforementioned AI is using to do its break-ins. If this sounds like extortion to you, you would not be wrong. “That is a nice website you’ve got there. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.” Invent the sickness, sell the cure. Classic Silicon Valley.
This isn’t about Big Tech’s brand new trillion dollar protection racket, though. Big Tech is greedy and ruthless, but their minds are not bent on the total destruction of the internet. They really think that their AI security guards are going to work better than anybody else’s AI hackers.
Guess, what.
There is no guarantee that the good AI fixes the flaws before the bad AI has had the chance to exploit them!
Maybe you think that the AI hacks will be pretty rare in the first place, and that once everything has calmed down, and all of the flaws have been detected and fixed, things will go back to normal. Boy, do I have bad news for you.
First of all, the hacks, when they happen, will not be rare. They are now automated. That means they will affect hundreds of millions of peoples' computers before the problem can be fixed. These kinds of things used to only happen to high-value targets, like whistle-blowers, journalists, and civil servants working for the International Criminal Court. Now, they will happen to everybody.
Second of all, the internet runs on open source software. That means anybody can submit new software products and new features for inclusion into existing software. Including the AI hackers. If the new software passes review, it gets adopted by everybody. This is going to set off a never-ending arms race, where increasingly clever AI hackers make modifications to the world’s software that will require increasingly clever AI to detect and reject.
The only long-term solution is to destroy the AI!
The only short-term solution is to get your ass off the internet, fast!
If you only have one laptop, disconnect it from the internet indefinitely! Remove its wi-fi card and its bluetooth card, if it’s easy. Just settle for disconnecting the antennas and disabling them in the BIOS, if it’s not. If you have two laptops, thank God, because that means you can disconnect just one of them, and leave the other one connected, so you have a dirty laptop and a clean laptop. That’s what I did, and that’s how I am still able to post this log entry.
Don’t forget contamination through USB, HDMI, thunderbolt, firewire, and other digital connections. The peripherals that connect to the laptop through these connections contain computers themselves, which run their own software. This software can have vulnerabilities, which a dirty laptop (or public USB charging port!) can exploit, to install malicious code onto the peripheral. This malicious code can then be transferred to a clean laptop when the peripheral is plugged in. Even the monitors can harbour malicious code. HDMI is not just a unidirectional AV connection. It also supports bidirectional networking. Speakers, headphones, and microphones connecting with analogue audio cables to headphone jacks are fine.
Separate clean peripherals from dirty peripherals. Colour code them with stickers. Never use a dirty peripheral in a clean computer.
I remember when I left Facebook, in 2016 just after the Trump election, when the enshittification began in earnest. I left, then a few seconds later, realised that I would have to come right back again to tell my friends where I had gone, and to get their contact info so that we could stay in touch. Then, I left forever. Well, that was trivial compared to this.
The internet is not just a source of information, but a source of software. On one hand, the offline computer will no longer need any security updates. On the other hand, usability bugs aren’t going to get fixed either, and all of the software you might ever want to use, you will have to download before disconnecting. If you want to fix usability bugs yourself, you’re also going to need all of the source code, and all of the documentation and development tools needed to use the source code. What if there is a usability bug in the development tools? You’re going to need the source code for the development tools as well. This generates a massive dependency tree. I know, because I did it.
I used the Archlinux build system to systematically download PKGBUILDs and the source code for all of the software I use, along with all of the make and build dependencies. Here is the result. It is a huge software archive, 167 GB in size. It is nothing less than the sum total of three wonderful decades' worth of volunteer work from the opensource community. Thank you so much, you guys! I also included an archive of the Arch wiki from the utter mensches at kiwix. Thank you to you as well!
The archive is missing a bunch of stuff because I don’t use it, and the archive is already huge. Notably, I just couldn’t manage a working version of GNOME or KDE. They are just too chonky. Still, I hope this archive is useful to somebody, because it took a lot of work just to download all of this source code.
Good luck, stay safe, and stay clean.
And strap yourselves in, because things are about to get weird.