Full episode:

Showtimes: https://simontv.org/p/broadcast-links

Full episode:

Showtimes: https://simontv.org/p/broadcast-links

Full episode:

Showtimes: https://simontv.org/p/broadcast-links

Full episode:

Showtimes: https://simontv.org/p/broadcast-links

Full episode:

Showtimes: https://simontv.org/p/broadcast-links

SimonTV LIVE on Sundays

Full episode:

Read more

Full episode:

Showtimes: https://simontv.org/p/broadcast-links

The panelists were:

Dr Martin Lally

Dr Alison Goodwin

Dr Guy Hatchard

Alia Bland

Katie Ashby-Koppens

Lynda Wharton

I expect VFF will be publishing the recording to their channels in due course. https://www.voicesforfreedom.co.nz/

360°:

Full episode:

Showtimes: https://simontv.org/p/broadcast-links

In this article I’m going to move up from the transport layer to the application layer, describing the Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK) situational awareness software.

Which is as frightening as it sounds.

ATAK is battlefield software designed by the U.S. military, used by them and allied services in other countries, including the British S.A.S.. Its purpose is Command & Control, providing real-time information to tactical units on the ground within the overarching strategic framework. The communication is two-way, with the members of the tactical units in contested environments sharing information about their immediate vicinity through Cursor-on-Target (CoT) updates alongside messaging, audio and video, the latter supporting UAVs.

Command & Control is provided by a TAK Server component which handles the synchronisation and integrations to create a Common Operating Picture (COP) for the tactical units. At scale, it’s how a country would go about coordinating a full-scale military invasion.

The TAK Server has a client/server architecture. An important point: ATAK devices operate peer-to-peer and are designed in the first instance to do so. While they can integrate with a TAK Server they’re perfectly capable of operating without it.

ATAK devices are designed to communicate with other members of the tactical unit utilising any transport mechanism available, especially where access to telecommunications infrastructure is limited such as within a contested environment. This is where Meshtastic comes in, providing an alternative peer-to-peer communications layer.

So what are the civilian applications? I hear you ask.

There are several variations of the ATAK application with the military and government versions restricted to authorised personnel. The civilian version, ATAK-CIV, was open-sourced by the U.S. Department of Defence in 2020, accepting contributions to mainline from the community and importantly, enabling the development of third-party plugins such as Meshtastic.

ATAK-CIV is broadly deployed for First Response, Search & Rescue and Humanitarian Aid delivery by governments and NGOs, even wildlife surveys and field research. How might private citizens utilise it?

Hunting is a useful hypothetical. Imagine you and your mates have separated to stalk a deer. ATAK allows you to communicate with the other hunters and track their locations.

One of the hunters spots the deer so he drops a cursor on the map at the deer’s location showing its direction and estimated speed.

One of the hunters sends up a drone. You switch to first person view, integrating the drone footage as a real time overlay.

And you’re on your way. The team is coordinating its activities, no-one gets accidentally shot and Mr. Deer is about to have a bad day.

There are of course, other situations where awareness software would prove useful, I leave those to your imagination. A tool which pulls in relevant real-time information from a plethora of sources to present to you a tactical view, and enabling communication with others to accomplishment a shared objective has many applications.

-SRA. Auckland, 27/iii 2026.

This is Part II. In Part I I described off-grid communications with Meshtastic

Full episode:

Showtimes: https://simontv.org/p/broadcast-links

Full episode:

Showtimes: https://simontv.org/p/broadcast-links

Yours is a life of dependency without resiliency, without redundancy. Reliant upon communications services you do not control, operated primarily by telecommunications corporations themselves operating under indulgences afforded to them by governments.

If the network faults or suspends, you’re fucked.

Fortunately Meshtastic exists and offers a solution, providing a messaging capability over radio, unconnected to the telecommunications grid everyone relies upon. Lower down I’ll describe how Meshtastic works but I’ll start with some use-cases describing what you might use it for.

• Emergency communications during power outages or telecommunications network disruptions

• Hunting in the woods, when you need to know the precise location of other hunters and communicate with them

• Informing the homestead you’re on your way from the back of the farm for lunch

• Coordinate Cursor-on-Target operations amongst tactical units

Meshtastic devices are just radios that utilise a part of the spectrum that enables them to exchange messages over vast distances. It’s the same LoRa technology Internet-of-Things devices use to communicate across machine networks. In its simplest configuration communications between two devices can be extended over tens of kilometres. For example down the back of the farm, where cellphone coverage is patchy.

The power of Meshtastic though, comes from its ability to form ad hoc networks on the fly. Your unit will automatically join any Meshtastic network it can see and nodes on that network will forward your messages to its intended recipients.

The utility of this feature is difficult to overstate. With one of these Meshtastic devices on your person you possess a messaging capability independent of telecommunications infrastructure in pretty much every urban centre around the world. While no-one at the concert can make a phone call because the local cell sites are overloaded, your messaging solution operates unimpeded.

Messages exchanged across the Meshtastic network are heavily encrypted and can include GPS location data, including it is the default. Want to know your kid made it to school in the morning or need to tell them to pick up a loaf of bread on the way home? Meshtastic is the device to chuck in their backpack.

Same deal outside of cellular coverage range. Many trampers carry an EPIRB beacon for emergencies: pop the cap and the device sends a distress signal and your location via satellite to emergency services. EPIRBs are a solution of last resort, like you’ve fallen down a crevice and broken your leg. Meshtastic is a solution for problems underneath that threshold, like informing your tramping buddies down the trail that you’ve fallen down a crevice and broken your leg.

Meshtastic devices come in a huge variety of styles. Some are self-contained units with keypads for messaging while others provide the capability to your own cellphone. This works via the free Meshtastic app which provides the messaging interface and network map.

The units I quite like are the Heltec V4 LoRa boards because they’re inexpensive and reliable I can chuck them around. There are some great deals on kitsets if you shop about, here’s two units for $90.

Assembly takes a couple of minutes, comprising three screws and one nut.

In summary Meshtastic is a device everyone should own in my opinion, simply to provide a communications capability in situations where other forms are unavailable. In rural areas where cellular coverage is patchy day-to-day, and urban areas when the shit hits the fan.

-SRA. Auckland, 25/iii 2026.

(This is Part I. In Part II I’ll describe Situational Awareness Software and how it plugs into the underlying Meshtastic comms layer.)

In what I take to be his essential thesis Kahurangi writes:

This is, largely, in my experience, accurate. A combination of algorithmic manipulation and audience preference results in a platform that tracks towards unedifying slop content and equally puerile leftwing biases. Of course this is anecdotal: ByteDance, the operator of Tiktok outside the United States, does not publish its algorithm publicly as enlightened platforms such as X choose to do.

Tiktok’s algorithmic selections for content promotion/demotion are however, obvious. Unlike many of the other social media platforms Tiktok doesn’t practice much subtly, as one might expect from a company accustomed to the constraints of the Great Firewall of China, ByteDance doesn’t much care if Tiktok’s users know they’re getting throttled if and when they are.

Kahurangi includes in his article a screenshot of his first week on the Tiktok platform, showing a view count of one million views. An impressive amount, and a testament to the demand for humorous AI-generated content. In contrast, the sort of content I produce gains nowhere near that amount of traction:

I can offer a broad perspective however. Because the content I produce (livestreams, short clips from those livestreams, diatribes to camera, hyper-local news content from central Auckland) is posted across a variety of platforms I can observe which clips gains traction and where. It is largely a mystery, some clips get picked up on one platform but struggle on others for no apparent reason. Trends can be observed though.

The platforms I post to are X, Youtube, Rumble, Instagram/Facebook, Tiktok, Substack, Telegram and very occasionally, LinkedIn. Typically clips go viral on just one or two platforms and it’s interesting to observe as tens of millions watch on Instagram, hundreds of thousands watch on X, and merely a few thousand watch on Youtube and Tiktok -which is precisely what happened with a clip I published late last year.

There are many factors influencing traction of course but the algorithm plays a significant part. I struggle with Youtube, where I’ve been shadowbanned as a punishment for questioning the veracity of the anthropogenic climate change narrative, watching my livestream viewcounts fall precipitously from thousands to the hundreds. Youtube’s AI heard me question global warming fairy-tales in a livestream and has demoted me since. I know this to be true because I mentioned it again deliberately and watched my channel get demoted further.

As I mentioned above Tiktok’s algorithm is much more blatant and to be blunt, crude. Occasionally I’ve published footage of the Falun Gong marching in central Auckland, a movement proscribed by the Chinese Communist Party. Clips which mention Falun Gong in the title are instantly flagged, those that don’t are often flagged through AI content analysis subsequently though occasionally slip through.

The title matters a lot to Tiktok’s algorithm. I’ve found that if it includes a topic ByteDance is favourable towards it tends to get promoted, even if the content itself is in fact critical. One of my most successful clips on that platform for example excoriates Chloe Swarbrick -promoted because the title includes her name but despite the actual content. I’ve observed the same to be true for other contentious issues with clips including the terms “Green party” “Waitangi” and “Jacinda Ardern.” I’m firmly of the belief that ByteDance has a political agenda tailored for New Zealand that its algorithm encourages.

Consumer preferences matter though. The userbase of Tiktok tracks younger than other platforms. Less educated, less affluent, superficially informed, more ethnically diverse. And of course many are seeking entertainment over edification which is entirely legitimate. In my opinion this userbase is particularly susceptible to manipulation whether practised by ByteDance on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party or domestically by the far-left politicians in New Zealand producing puerile content tailored to their limited attention spans.

In my experience the most unbiased platforms are X and Substack, with Rumble close behind. All platforms practice algorithmic manipulation to some degree and because it’s mostly opaque it’s difficult to assign cause to it or to human nature. And besides, it may be (and probably is) the case I’m not producing content that enough people find interesting.

The pressure for content creators seeking to grow their audience is to comply. Comply with the algorithmic constraints, comply with audience tastes. Doing so can come at the cost of authenticity and the imposition of self-censorship. The creators I admire the most are those who choose not to sully themselves through making that bargain.

-SRA. Auckland, 24/iii 2026.

Her first virtual view, spun in orbit, was from Jane’s Market Forces—a publicly available, but prohibitively expensive, real-time survey of military deployments around the world. 

Myra, long familiar with the conventional symbols and ideographs, took it all in at an abstract level: colour-coded, vectored graphs in a 3-D space, with other dimensions implied by subtle shadings and the timing of pulsations. That photic filigree hung like a complicated cloud-system over the relatively static histograms depicting the hardware and the warm bodies. 

                                                                                                        -Ken MacLeod, The Star Faction

OSINT (Open-Source) Intelligence Tools collate publicly-accessible information to generate actionable intelligence. I don’t know a lot about this field but was tempted to try one.

My motivation was a wish to have a dashboard, a single pane overview of global affairs. Salient information I can rapidly consume in addition to my other information-gathering processes with the facility to drill into the detail of anything I’d like to know more about. The tool I decided to try is Crucix.

Crucix runs locally on my own hardware, pulling in news articles, satellite imagery, radiation levels, conflict events, economic indicators, flight tracking, maritime activity, social media content and market data. It displays this information on a 3D globe featuring fire detections, air traffic, radiation sites, maritime chokepoints, SDR receivers, OSINT events, health alerts, geolocated news and conflict events. Alongside this are risk gauges and news tickers.

Out of the box Crucix provides me with a single-pane overview of world affairs. I could customise it (and probably will) by configuring it to consume other data feeds that are of specific interest to me. For now it suffices, appropriate for a world/regional overview rather than a local news aggregator.

But that is not all Crucix does. Because it plugs into my choice of LLMs it has the capacity to reason and to interact.

One of those reasoning capabilities is financial trading. Right now Crucix is advising me to short Treasury Inflation Protected Securities and go long on U.S. Dollars, and explaining its rationale. A little further down Crucix is evaluating the pricing trends in the gold market. One of the factors it used to reach its trade recommendation is the heat map of detected explosions in the Middle East it pulled from satellites.

Crucix is performing these evaluations in real time and if it thinks it’s urgent, notifies me.

Like many Agentic AI solutions Crucix has a messaging capability through the Telegram platform. In the screenshot above is its response when I’ve asked for a brief summary, and a synopsis of topics it thinks I should know about that it sent me unprompted.

So far so good. I have a tool which aggregates information from a vast array of sources and presents it to me in a readily consumable format. The tool is capable of analysing that data in useful ways and interacting with me when I need it to do something.

But Crucix is not perfect. The code is a little rough and I’d need to get under the hood to adjust its behaviour or integrate it with other tools, for example to perform automated trades based upon its recommendations. It’s no Palantir but it is an incredibly useful tool accessing freely available sources. In a day it’s superseded every other information harvesting process I’ve used previously to provide my global overview.

With the advent of AI, tools such as Crucix will proliferate thanks to the Free Software and Open Source communities building them. They’ll service increasingly specific niches and improve rapidly but in the state they are now, they feature astonishing capabilities. Not so long ago, tools such as Crucix were science fiction.

-SRA. Auckland, 20/iii 2026.

Nota bene: the title of this article is a quote from the novel The Star Faction by Ken MacLeod. Crucix reminded me of the description he wrote 30 years ago. Here it is in full:

Her first virtual view, spun in orbit, was from Jane’s Market Forces—a publicly available, but prohibitively expensive, real-time survey of military deployments around the world.

Myra, long familiar with the conventional symbols and ideographs, took it all in at an abstract level: colour-coded, vectored graphs in a 3-D space, with other dimensions implied by subtle shadings and the timing of pulsations. That photic filigree hung like a complicated cloud-system over the relatively static histograms depicting the hardware and the warm bodies.

The physical locations and quantities of personnel and materiel could provide only a basement-level understanding of the world military balance, just as the location of physical plant was only a rough cut of the state of the world market.

Second by second, market and military forces shifted unpredictably, their mutual interpenetration more complex than any ideology had ever foreseen. With most of the world’s official armies revolutionary or mercenary or both, and most of the conflicts settled in unarguable simulation before they started, everyone from the bankers down through the generals to the grunts on the ground would shrug and accept the virtual verdict, and change sides, reinforce or retreat in step with their software shadows—all except the Greens, and the Reds.

They fought for real, and played for keeps.

It was like the old Civilization game, Myra sometimes thought, with a new twist: Barbarism II. Nobody was going to wipe the board, nobody was going to Alpha Centauri. They were all going down together, into the dark… Just as soon as enough major players decided to contest the incontestable, and put the simulations to the audit of war.

But, for the moment, the dark was full of twisting light. And in the real world, blinked up as backdrop, one front was more than virtual, and closer than she’d like. Beyond the northern border of Kazakhstan, itself hundreds of kilometres north of the ISTWR, the Sino-Soviet Union’s ragged front-line advanced in flickers of real fire: guerilla skirmishes and sabotage on one side, half-hearted long-range shelling and futile carpet-bombing on the other.

The Sheenisov—the name was subtly derogatory, like Vietcong for NLF and Yank for United Nations—were the century’s first authentic communist threat, who really believed in their updated version of the ideology which communistans like the ISTWR parodied in post-futurist pastiche. Based in the god forsaken back-country of recusant collective farms and worker-occupied factories, stubbornly surviving decades of counter-revolution and war, armed by partisan detachments of deserters (self-styled, inevitably, “loyalists’) from the ex-Soviet Eastern and ex-PRC Northern armies, they’d held most of Mongolia and Siberia and even parts of north-west China since the Fall Revolution back in 2045, and in the years since then they’d spread across the steppe like lichen.

Myra detested and admired them in equal measure.

Of more immediate, and frustrating, concern: the Sheenisov were outside the virtual world, a torn black hole in the net.

Their computers were permanently offline; their cadres didn’t trade combat futures; they refused all simulated confrontation or negotiation; like the Green marginals in the West and the Khmer Vertes in the South, the Reds in the East put all to the test of practice, the critique of arms.

Even Jane’s could only guess at their current disposition.

Full episode:

Showtimes: https://simontv.org/p/broadcast-links

Full episode:

Showtimes: https://simontv.org/p/broadcast-links

Full episode:

Showtimes: https://simontv.org/p/broadcast-links