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.
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 It appears all C instances (operated by #cogent) are serving an outdated zone.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
Cogent is in the midst of three different peering disputes, with Tata, NTT, and HE, so their connectivity is pretty limited at the moment. Most people cannot reach https://http://c.root-servers.org for instance.
There's been a lot of conversation in different channels about whether this is sufficient to call their competency to run a root into question.
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
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/
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
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/
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/
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.
@bert_hubert@SIDN afaict, only Scaleway in europe is going that direction. And from friend that tried and are migrating away now, the database and load balancer offering are not even meeting the lowest bar.
The problem is that changing provider gives you basically nothing. None of them massively undercut price, because the price are not as extravagantly high as it looks.
There are no move between them because why the heck would you do that?
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.
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.
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").
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