Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 02, 2023

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• I am not a supplier

  It may feel a bit legalese, and yes, it shouts at you, but I can summarise it pretty easily. If you use this, I owe you nothing. At all. We have no relationship. I put this up online on the condition that if you use it, all the risks are on you.

  What it means is that there is no supply chain here. Because there is no supplier. I am not providing you something that you bought for me. There is no relationship. I put something online because I wanted to. The fact you made your product depend on it is your responsibility. Not mine. Not the one of the providers. We provide libraries. We do not supply them. You cannot apply rules to me.

  And quite honestly, I am not going to accept them. I barely have time to spend on doing the work on the FOSS libraries I maintain and doing so regularly burns out the people doing it.

• Why I quit Twitter… a decade ago

  And so it has come to this. I finally quit Twitter… almost exactly a decade ago.

  I could spin yarn and claim it was some major feat of clairvoyance, of course. That I foresaw all that happened lately with Twitter and decided to bail early. But it wasn’t that, really. I just felt strongly that centralized services are dangerous and unethical, and I decided to stop using them. Back then, Twitter was the last one on the chopping block for me.

• ‘Open source it’: Facebook whistleblower dares Elon Musk to ‘publish the algorithms’ controlling Twitter

  On Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press, former Facebook executive-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen said that if Twitter owner Elon Musk is truly interested in transparency and championing free speech that he should make public the algorithms that determine what users see on their timelines. Musk pledged to do that earlier this year, and while he has yet to follow through, Haugen believes that it would be a huge step in fostering safer experiences online.

• InfoSec Handlers Diary Blog - SANS Internet Storm Center

  There are a variety of services listening for connections on DShield honeypots [1]. Different systems scanning the internet can connect to these listening services due to exceptions in the firewall. Any attempted connections blocked by the firewall are logged and can be analyzed later. This can be useful to see TCP port connection attempts, but it's usefulness is limited. Without the ability to complete the SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK handshake process other protocol data may not be sent.

• SQLite's automatic indexes

  Why is it that SQLite automatically creates an index for this join and PostgreSQL doesn’t?

• GNU Chinese Translators Team - News: Summary of 2022

  Dear CTT team: 
  Thank you very much for you contribution in 2022. There have been a few new comers joining our team, like Wind. Their work is appreciated. 
  The whole team have been doing a good job in 2022. Here is official letter from GNU. 
  Dear GNU translators! 
  This year was relatively quiet; the total number of new translations 
  was considerably lower than in 2021, especially in terms of size. 
  Almost two of every three translations were made in the "Simplified" 
  Chinese team; the Albanian and Turkish teams significantly reduced 
  the percentage of their outdated translations. 
        General Statistics 
  In November, we reached new maximum values of translations per file 
  in important directories, 9.44 translations per file (0.12 more 
  than in 2021) and 8.85 translations weighted with size of articles 
  (0.46 more than in 2021), 50 Mi in 3300 files total. 
  Meanwhile, the percent of outdated translations was as high 
  as at the end of 2021 (about twice as high as the historical 
  minimum in 2014-2015). 
  The table below shows the number and size of newly translated 
  articles in important directories and typical number of outdated 
  GNUNified translations throughout the year.
  

• Hybrid cloud infrastructure modernisation

  Public clouds enabled digital transformation at unprecedented speed. But their operational costs over time can be exacting as compute needs increase. Hybrid clouds emerged as an alternative to gain the benefits of both worlds: private infrastructure that allows for lower operational expenditures and tighter control, and public clouds that can scale with ease.

  Organisations looking to adopt a hybrid cloud architecture should carefully consider their options for private cloud vendors, as well as their implications for application design and development, workload orchestration and long-term maintenance.