bert_hubert

bert_hubert, 4 months ago to random

The EU Cyber Resilience Act latest text has some pretty good words on open source. These words are to be found in the preamble & "recitals". Contrary to what some people are now claiming, these words on open source do determine what the act means & how judges will read it. These are not just 'non-binding comments':
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/eu-cra-recitals-comments-compiler-judge/

bert_hubert, 3 months ago to random

So I used to worry about leap seconds causing problems. But with declining programming standards & increasing code brittleness, I wonder what will break this February 29th...

bert_hubert, 27 days ago to random

Recently places like @SIDN (Dutch national operator of .NL) have been claiming that nobody in Europe can deliver their computer needs, and that they are therefore forced to outsource operations to American cloud providers. Meanwhile our own IT industry denies this. Here I delve into what's going on, and how Europe is being Cloud Naïve instead of Cloud Native.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cloud-naive-europe-and-the-megascaler/

bert_hubert, 5 months ago to random

"Like and subscribe!" has come to GitHub https://github.com/daeuniverse/dae/issues/368#issuecomment-1859984256

bert_hubert, 4 months ago to random

New post! The EU Cyber Resilience Act is now (almost) final, but what does it ACTUALLY mean for open source? It is mostly good news, and there are real opportunities to use the #CRA to our advantage: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/eu-cra-what-does-it-mean-for-open-source/

bert_hubert, 3 months ago to random

My measurements of the frequency of Europe's continental grid line up very well with those of Swissgrid. Mine show a little more high resolution detail.

The '50Hz' frequency of Europe's continental electricity grid, shown hovering around 50Hz, as measured by my hobby setup

bert_hubert, 6 months ago to random

So tomorrow there are national elections in The Netherlands and I need to acquaint you with two oddities. For one, we take our democracy entirely for granted so we mostly vote in.. garbage bins. Secondly, our ballots are HUGE as they list 28 parties and 1128 candidates (no joke). So we need to make good use of the space in the garbage bin. For this purpose, polling stations are equipped with the STEMBUSSTAMPER, specially designed to tamp down wayward ballots:

The stembusstamper is a longish piece of wood that fits through the slot meant for ballots. It allows one to tamp down wayward ballots so there is more room in the ballot box.

bert_hubert, 6 months ago to random

>25% of Dutch votes apparently went for extreme right wing and Putin supporting parties today. Exit polls, but they've never been very wrong.

bert_hubert, 2 months ago to random

Re previous post, if you've ever pined for a specific test that your monitoring platform can't do out of the box, please let me know! I'm looking for things that may currently be "possible to build but hard to do yet high value" and turn that into a single line test. Like the DNS SOA sync test that is already in there -> https://github.com/berthubert/simplomon?tab=readme-ov-file#simplomon

bert_hubert, 4 months ago to random

So I'm building a thing - a useful image sharing solution, that also shows how you can build robust and viable web things without 750 dependencies and weekly mandatory upgrades. Actual software you can easily host yourself: https://github.com/berthubert/trifecta

bert_hubert, 3 months ago to random

Dutch .NL internet registry SIDN gives up, moves all its IT to Amazon Web Services. Cite that they are proud to be a first mover. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7157716103236894720/

bert_hubert, 3 months ago to random

So a few days ago I asked for help how to record my mains signal with high resolution, because something in my house is eating LED lights. Together with @alzimon & friends we built a setup. Today I got it working here, and lo and behold, there appears to be crap on the wire. 196kHz samples (!). Still need to double check this is not caused by my setup, but it looks reasonably solid:

image/png

bert_hubert, 11 months ago to random

I would also like a pony. EU requirements for detecting child sexual abuse material or the solicitation of children. Article 10 of https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A2022%3A209%3AFIN&qid=1652451192472

bert_hubert, 3 months ago to random

Dutch intelligence & security agencies MIVD and @aivd have just published details of a Fortigate/Fortinet Remote Access Trojan that they found on an unclassified network. They attribute it to Chinese actors. Full techical details are in this PDF: https://www.ncsc.nl/binaries/ncsc/documenten/publicaties/2024/februari/6/mivd-aivd-advisory-coathanger-tlp-clear/TLP-CLEAR+MIVD+AIVD+Advisory+COATHANGER.pdf

bert_hubert, 9 months ago to random

Dutch traffic light that prioritizes cyclists when it detects rain. Nice.

bert_hubert, 3 months ago to random

Microsoft is trying to get all email users, including governments, to migrate to their cloud-based solutions. This makes their email cloud THE prime target for nation-state/state sponsored hackers. Yet Microsoft appears to be leaving gaping security holes in the setup of their email services: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/in-major-gaffe-hacked-microsoft-test-account-was-assigned-admin-privileges/

bert_hubert, 3 months ago to random

On the ongoing mystery where everyone sees 1-2% Firefox use, and I measure >35%. Hypothesis is that my content is so geeky it attracts technical people only. Here is % of Firefox split out over various articles. Lowest % is on a Dutch post on debating techniques. Highest on a very specific open source page.

bert_hubert, 4 months ago to random

And another unfortunate security thing I learned today is that .svg files can contain JavaScript, and that your browser will happily execute that if someone directly views your image (so not through <img>). This has consequences for anyone hosting user supplied images. Thank you Wander Nauta for pointing this out. The painful story is here: https://github.com/berthubert/trifecta/issues/38

bert_hubert, 3 months ago to random

"To be good with technology requires actually doing technology" - it is so sad that we have to point this out today. You can't outsource all the things you do and assume you'll continue to be in control of what you do. (from https://www.techpolicy.press/the-dangers-of-moving-key-internet-governance-functions-to-amazons-cloud-the-case-of-the-netherlands/)

bert_hubert, 3 months ago to random

Turning on the batsign. @revk you are my only hope. I've been aching to build some kind of power quality monitor, something that currently costs like 10k in relevant currencies. But I think we could do so much better. Here's the idea: https://berthub.eu/tmp/sampler.pdf - you in?

bert_hubert, 4 months ago to random

Europe has no position in "cloud" at all, but (government) initiatives abound to change this. In the post below I argue that AWS & friends are "IKEA clouds", attractive because they offer everything. And no one can compete with IKEA. I also argue that modern clouds are incredibly advanced (like airliners), and that you don't just replicate those either. Instead, Europe might might be better served by a narrower initial ambition:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/taking-the-airbus-to-the-ikea-cloud/

bert_hubert, 5 months ago to random

You may have heard of the Y2038 32 bit epoch problem, but ARE YOU READY FOR Y287586 when in May we cross the point where Javascript millisecond time crosses the Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER & it can no longer do time math? Get your compliance plans ready! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Number/MAX_SAFE_INTEGER

bert_hubert, 28 days ago to random

Fun thing I learned today. To normal people "ethernet" sounds like some kind of wireless network. And they will tell you that the wifi isn't working after selecting ethernet in the Windows 11 installer (since they don't know ethernet needs a cable). I can't even blame them, "ethernet" does sound like some kind of radio thing ("in the ether").

bert_hubert, 6 months ago to random

The Hilbert Curve is a great way to visualize a lot of 1D data in a 2D plot. A chromosome is a very long 1D construct. Here is the amount of correlation between mouse and human chromosome 1, and zebrafish and human chromosome 1, from the most excellent: https://bioconductor.org/packages/devel/bioc/vignettes/HilbertCurve/inst/doc/HilbertCurve.html

A square graph showing a squiggly line that fills a square entirely. The parts of the line that are red denote high correlation between zebrafish and human chromosome. Most parts are not red, but there are significant islands of red where the correlation is 80% or higher.

bert_hubert, 4 days ago to random

This is quite rare - the C root-servers are out of sync with the rest of the world by 3 days. Since that time there have been no changes in the root zone, except for DNSSEC signature updates. It appears all C instances (operated by #cogent) are serving an outdated zone. For now this has no operational impact, but that might change #DNSSEC