2025 Year in Review

2025 has been a year of significant transformation, not just for the global tech landscape but for this blog as well. It marked a decade of sharing knowledge, but more importantly, it was the year where Artificial Intelligence truly moved from a cloud buzzword to a practical, self-hosted reality in our homelabs. From uncovering privacy concerns in major email clients to building autonomous security colleagues and deep-diving into mobile forensics, the journey has been nothing short of exhilarating.

The Rise of the AI Colleague

One of the most defining themes of 2025 was the integration of local AI into daily security operations. It was no longer about just asking a chatbot a question; it was about onboarding a new team member. The series on AI-driven Threat Hunting and the introduction of 'Mecha' demonstrated that powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) could be hosted locally to analyze logs and even respond to incidents.

The article Run Uncensored AI Selfhosted (Dec 2025) showed that with the right hardware, privacy and power can coexist. By utilizing tools like Ollama and Open WebUI within Docker containers, sensitive data remains on-premise while leveraging the reasoning capabilities of models like Llama 3 or Qwen.

For those who missed the setup, here is the quick-start configuration that was standardized this year for a privacy-first AI stack:

# M. Meister - Quick AI Stack Setup
# 1. Install the backend (Ollama)
curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh

# 2. Deploy the Frontend (Open WebUI) via Docker
# Note: Ensure Docker is installed and the NVIDIA Container Toolkit is active if using GPUs
sudo docker run -d \
  -p 3000:8080 \
  --add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway \
  -v open-webui:/app/backend/data \
  --name open-webui \
  --restart always \
  ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main

Regaining Digital Sovereignty

While AI provided new tools, the need for privacy became more acute. The investigation detailed in New Outlook: The End of Email Privacy? (Nov 2025) was a wake-up call. It was revealed through log analysis that modern mail clients were transmitting raw IMAP credentials to external servers, a practice that undermines the fundamental trust of email protocols.

In response, the focus shifted towards self-hosted communication. The guide Beyond Signal: Regaining Control with a Self-Hosted Matrix Server provided a roadmap for deploying a resilient, decentralized chat infrastructure. By moving away from proprietary silos, full control over metadata and message retention was reclaimed.

This theme of 'taking back control' extended to mobile devices as well. In Deep Dive into iPhones from the Linux Terminal (Dec 2025), it was demonstrated that one does not need a Mac to inspect an iOS device. Using the open-source libimobiledevice toolkit, deep insights into the device's state were achieved without jailbreaking.

# M. Meister - iPhone Diagnostics via Linux
# Verify connection and get device ID
idevice_id -l

# Extract detailed device information (battery, serials, usage)
ideviceinfo -x | grep -A 5 "BatteryCurrentCapacity"

Smart Automation and Infrastructure

Security is often about visibility, and 2025 saw innovative ways to use existing signals. The project WiFi Probe Requests for Smart Security (Dec 2025) turned standard WiFi packets into a presence detection system, integrated seamlessly with ioBroker. This allowed the smart home to react not just to authorized devices, but to understand the wireless environment around it.

On the infrastructure side, the importance of automated resilience was highlighted in Smart Proxmox Snapshots. A 'set and forget' script was developed to ensure that containers and VMs were snapshotted with a retention policy that respected storage limits, ensuring that a bad update never resulted in data loss.

Conclusion

As 2025 comes to a close, it is clear that the convergence of local AI, Linux automation, and privacy-focused self-hosting has created a new standard for the modern security lab. The tools are more powerful than ever, but they require vigilance and technical curiosity to be mastered. Best wishes are extended to all readers for a secure, bug-free, and innovative 2026. May your logs be clean, your uptime high, and your backups verifiable.