There's a few complaints online about the same happening to multiple users.

Otherwise anti-gravity has been great.

Your criteria heavily biases towards very performative and obvious signs of hard work in a commercial setting, completely oblivious to hard work and character outside of it.

Those not on rota can either join or have their PR receive heavy scrutiny

TLDR: infosec is screwed in Malta. The only people who benefit are malicious actors.

Some missing historical context is that there was no real legislation other than computer misuse up until the recent case known as the FreeHour case. A group of students discovered some pretty nasty vulnerabilities in an app aimed at matching student schedules. One of these vulns was exposing RW API keys for hundreds of student's google calendars, hanging out to dry on the open internet.

The students involved, together with one of their lecturers, sent a standard vuln disclosure notice via email to the company. Instead of what you'd expect, the students were arrested, strip searched and charged with computer misuse.

This really threw the entire local infosec scene off, with some very vocal voices saying how draconian the situation was. Finally they all receieved presidential pardons [1] although last I heard they don't have their hardware back yet. FreeHour and their tech supplier (never publicly mentioned but if you ask around you can find out who they are) never saw any consequences.

I've done two public disclosures [2] [3] which worked out well but only because I knew how to go about it. In such a tiny country is about who you know and how you know them, so in both cases I established contact via trusted intermediaries, both times ensuring I found someone who would know what I was talking about whilst also not immediately reach for the police.

I'm sitting on another issue I discovered because after a long conversation with CSIRT about it we figured the only way I can actually anonymously report it is by snail mailing it to them. I can't pull together the energy to complete it because I don't have the time right now in my life for another legal melodramatic situation.

Despite this, MITA (the government IT department) annually runs cybersec award ceremony [4]. I had once planned to nominate the students for the award but the nomination criteria forbids nominations for individuals who have "averse media publications" about them.

This is very much a deep socio-political problem in the country: we don't handle candour or bluntness of any kind in the public sphere. Being a very blunt person, it got me in all kinds of trouble growing up.

[1] https://timesofmalta.com/article/pardon-issued-students-lect...

[2] https://www.simonam.dev/accidental-pentest/

[3] https://www.simonam.dev/total-account-takeover/

[4] https://ncc-mita.gov.mt/cyber-awards/

GDPR Request. Ah wait, regulation bad.

My proxy doesn't attempt to handle security. Most folks use either Tailscale or some other VPN solution. In my case I use the wireguard server in my router to VPN into home which gives me access to the proxy and consequently to the machine.

I then configured debian-autoshutdown [2] to turn the machine off if there's no traffic on ssh after 15 minutes.

This way I just ssh into my machine (whether via antigravity on my laptop or termius on my phone) and within 30 or so seconds its awake, no physical button presses needed. I documented the whole flow in more detail on my blog [3].

I'm now working on an improvement called machine on proxy (or mop) that will allow me to start Proxmox VMs instead of physical machines, so I can let gemini-cli run wild and if it decides to wipe the entire hard drive I can restore from a snapshot.

[1] https://github.com/simonamdev/ssh-wol-proxy

[2] https://github.com/mnul/debian-autoshutdown

[3] https://www.simonam.dev/ssh-wol-proxy/

Whats the best way to hear about it when it does? Maybe newsletter I can register to or something.

Funny you mention mercury tower. Thats a rich person's idea of what good housing is... which is way over the price any middle or even upper class person can afford. It isn't affordable housing, it's a parking lot for excess liquidity.

For what its worth it's the raising of property height limits that helped kick off a lot of the construction boom. One could argue the situation was better when the restrictions were bigger.

There has been major increase in demand for housing and supply cannot be built fast enough to match. Its turned most of the island into a construction site so rampant that I made an online tracker for urban planning permits so folks can get ahead on knowing whats going on around them.

Idk if you have any wisdom but there's no creative solutionising happening, just the rich able to buy whatever property they want causing prices to rise which is pricing out the middle class, causing a whole lot of grief and downstream issues (such as plummeting fertility rate because homes are too expensive).

Is there a magic toggle we missed to unlock this creativity or am I being realistic by being skeptical that limiting important resources just leads to harsher inequality?

Maltese is definitely its own language. Arabic roots are there (theres a Semitic joke in there ) but it isn't arabic anymore. Its written left to right with a variant of the english alphabet.

Businesses do work in Maltese and English. Both are official languages. Its quite rare to encounter a business that deals near exclusively in Maltese. Many prefer Maltese but will fall back to english where necessary.

Regarding monolignual speakers, I think theres a lot of stereotypes for maltese only, english only and code switchers. I think its all a bit silly... So as long as communication can happen I don't fuss.

On Maltese music... There's a lot of low ish quality music then there's a few absolute gems. Look up The Travellers, Lapes, Jon Mallia on YouTube/Spotify.

There was a point about 7 years ago when the overton window shifted to "speak english to strangers first" because of a large influx of foreigners who did not know the language. Since then I've met foreigners who have better Maltese than some natives.

Older folks & geriatrics will sometimes be surprised when they assume someone is foreign and they turn out to be Maltese. "int Malti??" is a statement I get often because I don't look Mediterranean despite being born here.