bert_hubert

bert_hubert, 20 hours ago to random

Two days ago I created a blog post which I did not promote in any way, but it did appear on my RSS feed. It now has over 6000 visitors. There are 15000 requests for the RSS feed every day, coming from the user agents listed below. RSS might not be dead yet.

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 It appears all C instances (operated by #cogent) are serving an outdated zone.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

bert_hubert, 5 days ago to random

This is part of the ribosome, the machine in all living things that 3D prints proteins to order, based on digital instructions in our DNA. All of life consists of proteins or things built by proteins. In our labs we can barely imitate the ribosome somewhat using cumbersome pieces of fragile equipment that need lots of expert handling. The ribosome meanwhile can print copies of itself and is 20nm large. Bow before its glory. https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Ribosome

a 3d rotating animation of the ribosome, showing blue and brown squiggly parts.

bert_hubert, 7 days ago to random

Over 10,000 non-bot visitors for the transcript of my talk for NCSC / @SURF / @ACCSS on "Cyber Security: A Pre-War Reality Check"! - very happy to see that the story is reaching people. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cyber-security-pre-war-reality-check/

bert_hubert, 10 days ago to random

Yesterday I presented at the NL-NCSC / @SURF / @ACCSS symposium "Cyber Security & Society". According to Donald Tusk we are entering a new pre-war era, and I fear that he is right. I also fear that we do not have anything near a "war-time resilient" level of control over the IT infrastructures that our societies depend on utterly. We are sitting ducks & it is getting worse. Transcribed presentation, with slides, is here:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cyber-security-pre-war-reality-check/

bert_hubert, 15 days ago to random

So I live in one of the most light polluted places on Earth, and still my phone managed to produce this. It must be a total sensation if you live in a dark place! #AuroraBorealis

bert_hubert, 25 days ago to random

I continue to wonder what makes people send emails where they clearly state they have no experience with X and then confidently go on to say that I'm wrong about X. Anyhow, do enjoy my page about Parsing Expression Grammars which has led to such an email: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/practical-peg-parsing/

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, 27 days ago to random

Some people here are trying to convince me we have serious full featured cloud native providers here in Europe. The Nile is not just a river it appears. Having said that, I'd love to hear first hand stories from people that actually made this work outside the big hyperscalers. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cloud-naive-europe-and-the-megascaler/

bert_hubert, 27 days ago to random

Embarrassingly for Europe, they had to turn to SpaceX to launch two new Galileo satellites (EU GPS). This happened yesterday but they gave this exactly 0 publicity. I had missed the launch entirely. https://www.gsc-europa.eu/notice-advisory-to-galileo-users-nagu-2024020 - eventually these two new satellites will appear on https://galmon.eu/ - but might be a while.

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, 28 days ago to random

Is @syncthing as good as it definitely appears to be? Quite impressed. Tried to get it to fail today and it didn't fall for any of my stunts. I'm especially impressed by the extensive versioning features.

bert_hubert, 28 days ago to random

Regarding previous post, ponder also this "WiFi Cable" sign:

bert_hubert, 29 days ago to random

Writing blog posts on a 128GB tricked out Xeon feels kind of like sacrilege. I should be doing science on this thing!

bert_hubert, 1 month ago to random

After the recent publicity I have updated the Google beeper / googerteller somewhat, including new Google IP addresses. I've browsed the web a bit with it and things are as terrible as ever. Lots of noise. I've also reinstated the bpftrace based per-process capability. https://github.com/berthubert/googerteller

bert_hubert, 1 month ago to random

Just upgraded from PostgreSQL 13 to 15 and the process was so smooth that at first I worried nothing had happened. But turns out PostgreSQL is just that good. Deeply impressed.

bert_hubert, 1 month ago to random

I can't tell you how exhausting it is to see governments go out there time and time again to argue for more human rights violations (see ECHR CASE OF PODCHASOV v. RUSSIA). https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/22/europol_becomes_latest_cop_shop/

bert_hubert, 1 month ago to random

New post: A very practical introduction to Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs), in which we build a non-trivial parser (for Prometheus metrics) using the most excellent cpp-peglib single-include C++ library. So easy you won't ever want to parse a string by hand anymore. Post includes links to PEG libraries for Go, Rust and Python, and a ready to run GitHub repository of all examples: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/practical-peg-parsing/

bert_hubert, 1 month ago to random

European police chiefs are again asking the world to break end to end encryption, something the European Court of Human Rights very recently ruled against explicitly. In 2020 I spoke at an event at the European Parliament on why breaking end to end encryption is fraught with difficulties, and why you should try nearly everything else first:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/end-to-end-encryption-european-internet-forum/

bert_hubert, 1 month ago to random

If you want to ruin your day, go read up on "quiet NaNs". If you had any faith left in computers this should clear that right up. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/QuietNaN.html

bert_hubert, 1 month ago to random

Over the past 8 years I've held a trilogy of presentations over at @NLNOG on the working life of technical people, and how we could improve it. The talk also covers if you should become a contractor of launch your own company. Here are links to two hours of video & slides of the trilogy, plus some context: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/technical-job-presentations/

bert_hubert, 1 month ago to random

Oracle announces 441 security issues, which is rather stunning. And then slaps a 'Contact Sales' button on that page, which tells you all you need to know. https://www.oracle.com/security-alerts/cpuapr2024.html

bert_hubert, 1 month ago to random

Recently I found out that RIPE has a very interesting series of podcasts. Recommended. And also keep an eye open for the next episode ;-) https://labs.ripe.net/category/podcasts/

bert_hubert, 1 month ago to random

I need to share a rare story with you. My main development computer just died on me. And turns out I have no way this evening to access the SATA SSD in that computer. But! I HAD WORKING BACKUPS! AND THEY WERE FRESH AND THEY WORKED! Note that my backup script includes a sentinel file that my script checks that it can actually find that file in the backup & that it contains today's date. Thank you @restic !

bert_hubert, 1 month ago to random

Does anyone know if there is a freely usable A-GPS (and A-Galileo, A-BeiDou etc) infrastructure? I know some people are working on something, but is there really nothing? The Galmon project has the data, so we could easily provide such a service, but I almost can't believe this doesn't exist yet.