Standards/Consortia: Security, AV1, Bloat, ROS, and UNIX
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Who's Looking at Your security.txt File?
In April 2022, the RFC related to the small file “security.txt” was released[1]. It was already popular for a while, but an RFC is always a good way to “promote” some best practices! If you're unaware of this file, it helps to communicate security contacts (email addresses, phone, ...) to people who would like to contact you to report an issue with your website or your organization. This security.txt file was deployed on my websites for a while, and I never really paid attention to its popularity. The ISC also has its one[2].
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Steinar H. Gunderson: AV1 live streaming: Muxing and streaming
Following up on my previous posts, I've finally gotten to the part of the actual streaming (which includes muxing). It's not super-broad over all possible clients, but it probably gives enough information to tell roughly where we are.
First, the bad news: There is no iOS support for AV1. People had high hopes after it turned out the latest iOS 16 betas support AVIF, and even embedded a copy of dav1d to do so, but according to my own testing, this doesn't extend to video at all. Not as standalone files, not as video. (I don't know about Safari on macOS; I haven't tested.)
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Why your website should be under 14kB in size
Having a smaller website makes it load faster — that's not surprising.
What is surprising is that a 14kB page can load much faster than a 15kB page — maybe 612ms faster — while the difference between a 15kB and a 16kB page is trivial.
This is because of the TCP slow start algorithm. This article will cover what that is, how it works, and why you should care. But first we'll quickly go over some of the basics.
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An Open Framework for Additive Manufacturing - ROS-Industrial
Over the years the ROS-I open source project and within the ROS-Industrial Consortium the creation of frameworks that enable new application development have become a standard approach to enable rapid extensibility from an initial developed application. After numerous conversations with end-users, other technical contributors, it seemed that there was an interest in looking at some of the capabilities within the ROS and ROS-I ecosystem to create a framework that seeks to take advantage of high Degree of Freedom systems and optimization based motion planning to bring a one stop shop in additive manufacturing planning and application.
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Sandcastles and skyscrapers
The problem with the Unix lowest-common-denominator model is that it pushes complexity out of the stack and into view, because of stuff other designs _thought_ about and worked to integrate.
It is very important never to forget the technological context of UNIX: a text-only OS for a tiny, already obsolete and desperately resource-constrained, standalone minicomputer. It was written for a machine that was already obsolete, and it shows.
No graphics. No networking. No sound. Dumb text terminals, which is why the obsession with text files being piped to other text files and filtered through things that only handle text files.
While at the same time as UNIX evolved, other bigger OSes for bigger minicomputers were being designed and built to directly integrate things like networking, clustering, notations for accessing other machines over the network, accessing filesystems mounted remotely over the network, file versioning and so on.