As part of EFF’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve edited and compiled our critical thoughts on digital rights and the pandemic into an ebook: EFF’s Guide to Digital Rights and the Pandemic. 

The BUS DRIVERS are refusing to work for the police state, while software engineers, with the most leveraged profession of our time, still can’t get their employers to stop working for ICE. Cowards. Disorganized and cowards. All of us. I’m ashamed

So why is the blockchain so revolutionary?

Politicians and Business Leaders: What Should You Do and When?

How institutions, trust and truth are annihilated by monopoly and corruption. The pandemic isn’t the only disease that’s annihilating our society: alongside of it, there is an epidemic of mistrust in institutions and a growth in conspiricism, a panic to save yourself and let everyone else fend on their own. Blaming Big Tech for the collapse in trust and commonly held truth is backwards: Big Tech’s bigness is en effect, not a cause, of the corruption that made our institutions so untrustworthy.

The only way I can possibly conceive of humans living in a New Cretaceous age is as a rump of scientists and technologists working in artificial, protected shelters, rather like the denizens of the novelist Italo Calvino’s invisible city of Baucis, in which people live up on stilts above the clouds ‘contemplating with fascination their own absence

The basic reproduction number is defined as the number of cases that are expected to occur on average in a homogeneous population as a result of infection by a single individual, when the population is susceptible at the start of an epidemic, before widespread immunity starts to develop and before any attempt has been made at immunization. So if one person develops the infection and passes it on to two others, the R0 is 2.

If the average R0 in the population is greater than 1, the infection will spread exponentially. If R0 is less than 1, the infection will spread only slowly, and it will eventually die out. The higher the value of R0, the faster an epidemic will progress.

R0 is estimated from data collected in the field and entered into mathematical models. The estimated value depends on the model used and the data that inform it.

fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

How to wire up laptop screen backlights: https://youtu.be/Y2KK4YiOO1o
DIY Secondary Screen (from laptop screen): https://youtu.be/CfirQC99xPc
Dual Screen Laptop Project: https://youtu.be/J2aY6cvk-WI
DIY Smart Mirror: https://youtu.be/puFSdfIRNIw
CCTV from laptop webcams: https://youtu.be/CouxmNqxO4A
Media PC project: https://youtu.be/e3fnsGHe8eE

Make your own using a T-shirt or handkerchief

Die Berater aller Welt verkaufen uns sündteure Lösungen gegen horrende Tagesätze, damit wir Zeit einsparen. Diese Luxusberater lehren uns, dass wir dann, wenn wir ihnen unser Geld im Tausch gegen eigene Zeit gegeben haben – dass wir dann endlich Zeit für das Eigentliche haben. Wir überlegen uns aber nie vorher, was das Eigentlich wäre, wenn wir Zeit hätten. Meistens sind wir dann darüber traurig, dass unser schönes Geld weg ist, und wir nehmen einen Kredit für Berater auf, um zu erfahren, wie wir zu Geld kommen.

Mein Rat: Online-Meetings in den Fernsehpausen. Bis das gut funktioniert, dürfen Sie wieder auf die Massentierhaltungsbüroarbeitsfläche.

10 years ago, systemd was announced and swiftly rose to become one of the most persistently controversial and polarizing pieces of software in recent history, and especially in the GNU/Linux world. The quality and nature of debate has not improved in the least from the major flame wars around 2012-2014, and systemd still remains poorly understood and understudied from both a technical and social level despite paradoxically having disproportionate levels of attention focused on it.

I am writing this essay both for my own solace, so I can finally lay it to rest, but also with the hopes that my analysis can provide some context to what has been a decade-long farce, and not, as in Benno Rice’s now famous characterization, tragedy.

Drei Viertel (77%) können sich zwar die Anwendung einer solchen App auf freiwilliger Basis vorstellen. Eine verpflichtende Einführung wird jedoch eindeutig abgelehnt (72%) und nur von einer Minderheit (21 Prozent) als akzeptabel angesehen.

Millions of Indians have no choice but to download the country’s tracking technology if they want to keep their jobs or avoid reprisals.

Dass die Tiroler Behörden nicht sofort reagiert hätten, als sie Ende Februar vom Gesundheitsministerium über die Vorgänge in Ischgl informiert wurden, beweise aus Sicht von FPÖ-Landesparteiobmann Markus Abwerzger das absolute Versagen der Tiroler Landesregierung. "Wann räumen Bernhard Tilg und Landessanitätsdirektor Franz Katzgraber endlich ihre Plätze, nachdem was sie in den vergangenen Monaten alles angerichtet haben? Sie sollen endlich gehen und Verantwortung übernehmen, da braucht es keine Kommissionsberichte des Tiroler Landtages“, so Abwerzger.

In der Nacht auf Dienstag erfolgte in der Länderkammer dann auch der Einspruch gegen Änderungen des Epidemiegesetzes, die im Nationalrat beschlossen worden waren. Sowohl SPÖ als auch FPÖ befürchteten eine Einschränkung der Grund- und Freiheitsrechte.

Gesundheitsminister Rudolf Anschober (Grüne) hat heute im Rahmen einer Pressekonferenz erklärt, dass die App eine „freiwillige Variante“ der Kontaktverfolgung bleiben werde. Auch Innenminister Karl Nehammer (ÖVP) sagte: „Freiwilligkeit“ sei „hier das Gebot“.

Monoliths are the future because the problem people are trying to solve with microservices doesn’t really line up with reality.
Google cloud native adherent and evangelist Kelsey Hightower

The proc filesystem is an important feature of Linux that you can’t ignore. proc is a pseudo or virtual filesystem that provides an interface to kernel data structures. In other words, proc isn’t an actual filesystem in the real-world sense; rather, it resides only in memory and not on a disk. It is automatically mounted by the system.

Most of its contents are regular files and directories, so you can use most regular Linux tools to navigate the proc filesystem. The examples in this article should run the same on any Linux distribution.

Did you ever want to match a regex, but all you had was a fat32 driver? Ever wanted to serialize your regex DFAs into one of the most widely supported formats used by over 3 billion devices? Are directory loops your thing?

Worry no more, with regex2fat this has become easier than ever before! With just a little regex2fat ‘[YOUR] F{4}VOUR{1,7}E (R[^E]G)*EX HERE.’ /dev/whatever, you will have a fat32 regex DFA of your favourite regex. For example, to see whether the string ‘Y FFFFVOURRE EX HEREM’ would match, just mount it and check if ‘/Y/SPACE/F/F/F/F/V/O/U/R/R/E/SPACE/E/X/SPACE/H/E/R/E/M/MATCH’ exists.

If you’re trying to learn Docker you will first have to master its various terminal commands. This guide aims to help you get started with basic docker commands.

systemd has become a mainstay for the Linux world, but one of the things that still seems to stick around is cron jobs. It’s understandable, as cron is a tool that we have been using for a long time. Change is hard, but I think systemd Timers make the change well worth it. Here are a few reasons why…

A large majority of computer systems have some state and are likely to depend on a storage system. My knowledge on databases accumulated over time, but along the way our design mistakes caused data loss and outages. In data-heavy systems, databases are at the core of system design goals and tradeoffs. Even though it is impossible to ignore how databases work, the problems that application developers foresee and experience will often be just the tip of the iceberg. In this series, I’m sharing a few insights I specifically found useful for developers who are not specialized in this domain.

On any given day, we handle around 15% of daily retail trading volume across all stock exchanges in India. Billions of requests generated in the process are handled by a suite of systems we have built in-house. Also, we are very particular on self-hosting as many dependencies as possible, everything from CRMs to large databases, Kafka clusters, mail servers etc.

To aid these primary systems, there are a large number of ancillary workloads that run, covering everything from real-time trades, document processing, KYC, and account opening, legal and compliance, complex, large scale P&L and number crunching, and a wide range of backoffice workloads. The systems are spread across a hybrid setup; physical racks across two different data centres (where exchange leased lines terminate) and AWS. All of this means that we have a lot of dynamic workloads and dissimilar systems and environments, bare metal to Kubernetes clusters, to be monitored independently.

The first and second open source migration waves were periods of rapid expansion for companies that rose up to provide commercial assurances for Linux and the open source databases, like Red Hat, MongoDB, and Cloudera. Or platforms that made it easier to host open source workloads in a reliable, consistent, and flexible manner via the cloud, like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

This trend will continue in the third wave of open source migration, as organizations interested in reducing cost without sacrificing development speed will look to migrate more of their applications to open source. They’ll need a new breed of vendor—akin to Red Hat or AWS—to provide the commercial assurances they need to do it safely.

I’ve been writing about running Docker on Raspberry Pi for five years now and things have got a lot easier than when I started back in the day. There’s now no need to patch the kernel, use a bespoke OS, or even build Go and Docker from scratch.

The decision in 2017 to move back to a monolith considered all the trade-offs, including being comfortable with losing the benefits of microservices. The resulting architecture, named Centrifuge, is able to handle billions of messages per day sent to dozens of public APIs. There is now a single code repository, and all destination workers use the same version of the shared library. The larger worker is better able to handle spikes in load. Adding new destinations no longer adds operational overhead, and deployments only take minutes. Most important for the business, they were able to start building new products again. The team felt all these benefits were worth the reduced modularity, environmental isolation, and visibility that came for free with microservices.

In this letter, the minister agrees to the principle of Free Software by default ("Open Source by default") for procurement, which can be considered a parallel to the ‘comply or explain’ policy that is already in effect for the adoption of open standards. The minister also agrees to the government actively developing and publishing Free Software.

"Protesting is a non-essential activity." That’s what the police said.

Humans are complex beings, and we are capable of holding more than two thoughts in our minds at once. That’s how I’m able to recognize that these protestors were, at best, the unwitting patsies of a bigoted death cult — while also acknowledging that a police department deeming protest as "non-essential" is, at best, dumb, and at worst, utterly horrifying.