Once we were acquired, Yahoo helped us on the tech side, but not as much as it said it would. I think this is common for acquisitions. Before you’re acquired, you’re an important visionary. Afterward, you’re a crazy person who just wants to burn money.

Any decision was an endless discussion. I remember once, we had to present to a senior vice-president. We had a 105-slide deck prepared, and we didn’t get past the second slide because they ratholed about one fucking slide. It was a miserable environment.

Bezirksrichter Amit Mehta wusste am ersten Prozesstag nicht, ob Mozillas Firefox ein Browser oder eine Suchmaschine ist

So as you may know, I’ve been getting interested in CRDTs lately. For the uninitiated, CRDTs (Conflict-Free Replicated Data types) are fancy programming tools which let multiple users edit the same data at the same tim

I’ve always loved building tools and platforms, and have long been fascinated with the world of operating systems. Apart from reading through the source code (where that’s legally available, of course…) I think there’s no better way to explore and understand a system - and the mindset that produced it - than to develop for it.

What follows is a brain-dump of what I’ve learned about developing for the AmigaOS, both on classic 68k-powered hardware to modern PowerPC systems like the X5000. I’ll cover development environments, modern workflows like CI builds on containerised infrastructure, distribution of packages and even a look back in time before C existed, thanks to AmigaDOS’s odd heritage.

A reconstructed version of a KLF album most of whose copies were destroyed after a legal dispute with Abba has been donated by the band to the British Library.

The library said it had acquired The Acetate, the only physical copy of a new version of 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) by the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, who later renamed themselves the KLF.

OpenSSL, which encrypts an estimated 66% of the web, is currently maintained by 18 engineers compensated through donations and elective corporate contracts.

The OpenForum Europe (OFE) by Eclipse Foundation, Open Source Initiative (OSI), APELL, CNLL, and The OSB Alliance stated in its letter to the EC: "The current formulation of the CRA interferes with almost every software development model other than the case of a single company developing the entire code-base behind closed doors and making periodical releases." And who does these days? Apple maybe, but no one else of any importance comes to mind

I mention PTSD. She reminds me that the term “post-traumatic stress disorder,” or “PTSD,” is being overused at the moment.

The problem with a lot of us, Amanda, she says, is that we are not “post”-anything.

You’re still in the thick of it. You have acute anxiety, because none of these things are in the past.

It’s still happening to you.

This is true, and I find it strangely comforting.

Post-anything, my ass.

So, in these days of attackers with access to a pile of GPUs, a purely computationally expensive KDF is just not a good choice. And, unfortunately, the subject of this story was almost certainly using one of those. Ubuntu 18.04 used the LUKS1 header format, and the only KDF supported in this format is PBKDF2. This is not a memory expensive KDF, and so is vulnerable to GPU-based attacks. But even so, systems using the LUKS2 header format used to default to argon2i, which is memory strong, but not designed to be resistant to GPU attack . New versions default to argon2id, which is. You want to be using argon2id.

What makes this worse is that distributions generally don’t update this in any way. If you installed your system and it gave you pbkdf2 as your KDF, you’re probably still using pbkdf2 even if you’ve upgraded to a system that would use argon2id on a fresh install.

Wandteller stehen für Heimat, Idylle, Nostalgie, für Windmühlen in Delfter Blau. Was Windmühlen früher waren, sind Atomkraftwerke heute: Energiebauwerke. Ihre ikonenhaften Silhouetten prägen die Landschaft und damit unser Heimatbild. Als Kathedralen einer technologischen Weltanschauung versprachen sie Unabhängigkeit und unendliches Wachstum. Sie sind Zeugnis ihrer Epoche, Relikte des Fortschritts und Zeichen einer Zeitenwende. Die Tage der Windmühlen sind längst vergangen und nun neigt sich die Dämmerung über die Ära der deutschen Atomkraft. Höchste Zeit also, Atomkraftwerke als das zu zeigen, was sie sind:
Denkmäler des Irrtums - Hoffnung von Gestern - Folklore von Morgen

Laut Verordnung gelten Berufe als Mangelberuf, sobald auf eine unbesetzte Stelle weniger als 1,5-mal so viele Arbeitssuchende kommen. Ein einziger Faktor bestimmt, wo Mangel am Arbeitsmarkt herrscht und wo nicht. Landet ein Beruf einmal auf der Liste, dürfen Unternehmen Arbeitskräfte außerhalb der EU rekrutieren.
Was passiert, wenn Berufe für Menschen aus EU-Drittstaaten geöffnet werden? Der Pool an potenziellen Arbeitskräften wächst schlagartig für Unternehmen. Das vergrößerte Angebot wiederum befreit Unternehmen vom Druck, ihre angebotenen Stellen zu verbessern. Es findet sich schon wer der’s macht. Weil im Herkunftsland die Arbeitsbedingungen noch schlechter sind.

Accordingly, space organisations have started considering how to keep time on the Moon. Having begun with a meeting at ESA’s ESTEC technology centre in the Netherlands last November, the discussion is part of a larger effort to agree a common ‘LunaNet’ architecture covering lunar communication and navigation services.

Grady Booch, chief scientist for software engineering at IBM Research, on Web3 and cryptocurrencies: Web3 is a flaming pile of feces orbiting a giant dripping hairball. Cryptocurrencies—ones not backed by the full faith and credit of stable nation states—have only a few meaningful use cases, particularly if you are a corrupt dictator of a nation with a broken economic system, or a fraud and scammer who wants to grow their wealth at the expense of greater fools.

I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.

t reveals that public resolvers dominate the internet, accounting for nearly 60% of recursive DNS usage. Telecom giants represent nearly 9%, with Google the clear front-runner at a little over 30%, followed by Amazon Web Services at 16%. The report also highlights the declining usage of EDNS Client Subnet (ECS), the slow adoption of IPv6 and DNSSEC, and the emergence of HTTPS records as a solution to the “CNAME-at-apex” challenge.

As Bender says, we’ve made "machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it." One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace "AI" with "SALAMI" ("Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences"). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, "Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?"

Test how well your mailserver delivers emails!

We test various security (DNSSEC, TLS, DANE, MTA-STS) and deliverability (IPv6) features your server should support when sending mail. (details)

The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing. If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs, the reason is that everybody else is doing it. Layoffs are the result of imitative behavior and are not particularly evidence-based.

I’ve had people say to me that they know layoffs are harmful to company well-being, let alone the well-being of employees, and don’t accomplish much, but everybody is doing layoffs and their board is asking why they aren’t doing layoffs also.

Do you think layoffs in tech are some indication of a tech bubble bursting or the company preparing for a recession?

Could there be a tech recession? Yes. Was there a bubble in valuations? Absolutely. Did Meta overhire? Probably. But is that why they are laying people off? Of course not. Meta has plenty of money. These companies are all making money. They are doing it because other companies are doing it.

Shell is a thing you want to understand and then not use, because you learned to understand it. (in German, from 1998 )

For the rest of this discussion, we assume “Python 3” as an instance of “something else”, but if you are older than 50, feel free to use “Perl” instead.

If you are already doing Python, the rest of this is not for you. You already know these things.

In the past 10 years, the median size for a desktop webpage has gone from 468 KB to 2284 KB, a 388.3% increase. For mobile, this jump is even more staggering — 145 KB to 2010 KB — a whopping 1288.1% increase.

That’s a lot of weight to ship over a network, especially for mobile. As a result, users experience terrible UX, slow loading times, and a lack of interactivity until everything is rendered. But all that code is necessary to make our sites work the way we want.

This is the problem with being a frontend dev today. What started out fun for frontend developers, building shit-hot sites with all the bells and whistles, has kinda turned into not fun. We’re now fighting different browsers to support, slow networks to ship code over, and intermittent, mobile connections. Supporting all these permutations is a giant headache.

How do we square this circle? By heading back to the server (Swiss basement not required).

The concept of radical novelties is of contemporary significance because, while we are ill-prepared to cope with them, science and technology have now shown themselves expert at inflicting them upon us. Earlier scientific examples are the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics; later technological examples are the atom bomb and the pill. For decades, the former two gave rise to a torrent of religious, philosophical, or otherwise quasi-scientific tracts. We can daily observe the profound inadequacy with which the latter two are approached, be it by our statesmen and religious leaders or by the public at large. So much for the damage done to our peace of mind by radical novelties.

I raised all this because of my contention that automatic computers represent a radical novelty and that only by identifying them as such can we identify all the nonsense, the misconceptions and the mythology that surround them. Closer inspection will reveal that it is even worse, viz. that automatic computers embody not only one radical novelty but two of them.

What turns weakness into catastrophe is monoculture. All software has flaws, all systems have weaknesses, and you design around that by having multiple different systems with different weaknesses. If the world’s banana crop is a single strain, then a single pathogen can take out the lot.

You’re not going to harden your IT infrastructure by rewriting Active Directory in FORTH under VMS, much as such an exercise may appeal to the more perversely creative. But the more experience you have of seeing things done differently, of analyzing and understanding systems that don’t make the current industry standard assumptions, the better you’ll be at assessing and working with different contemporary options.

The Braille Institute has developed a font - free to download - that’s designed to be clearer for readers with lower vision.

An example of one of the aspects of low legibility that they tackled attached.

It’s named Atkinson Hyperlegible. Here’s where you can read about the font and download it: https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont

On 14 January 2023, we celebrate World Logic Day. In the city of Kurt Gödel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle, mathematical logic and its application to the sciences have a long and rich tradition. This January, we welcome Dov Gabbay (King’s College London and University of Luxembourg) as speaker at the Vienna World Logic Day Lecture.

The third edition of the lecture series is welcoming Prof. Dav Gabbay who will talk about “Logic and Argumentation for the 21st Century”.