Security

A while back we audited the machine that runs our local AI: the same Mac Mini that does all of the inference, the one whose entire selling point is that your data never leaves it. An earlier pass (Hardening the Inference Node) went looking for the dramatic stuff, what someone could reach with elevated privileges. This pass asked a smaller, meaner question. What’s readable with no privileges at all, just ordinary code running as the everyday account that already runs the AI, all day, by design? ...

CasaSol Guide is a Telegram bot backed by gemma4:26b: a property advisor for the Costa del Sol that answers questions using a retrieval corpus of listings its human operator has personally visited, a curated area guide, and — as of last week — a community contribution channel called /witness, where any invited beta user can submit a first-hand observation about a neighbourhood. Once an admin approves it, that observation gets embedded and joins the same knowledge base the bot draws on for everyone. ...

The pitch for local-first AI is simple: your documents never leave your hardware. It’s a true claim, and it’s also an incomplete one, because it quietly assumes the hardware itself is secure. Nobody had actually tested that assumption on the machine doing the work — a Mac Mini M4 Pro that runs local inference for a client-facing document-processing deployment, all day, every day. This is what happened when we did. ...