Notices by Poul-Henning Kamp (bsdphk@fosstodon.org)

@MidniteMikeWrites

US politics make a lot more sense once you realize it is a one-party system cosplaying as a two-party system...

Dear everybody:

Everything is so much easier to understand, once you realize that the Gold-foil-King is a Mafioso, who only know mafioso methods, and only use mafioso methods.

The letter to the .no PM is classical mafia:

"Nice country you have there, pity if something happened to it. Better think careful about who gets those peace-prices, capisce ?"

EU needs to stop pussying around, and go full in and stand up to the bully.

If not now, when ?

This is why we need mandatory, government funded, independent IT accident investigation boards!

This kind of investigation needs to happen *every* *time* IT endangers life, limb or liberty, so that we all can learn from the mistakes and avoid them happening again.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/19/optus_emergency_outages_cause_report/?td=rt-3a

@lproven

Ohh man, I had just gotten over that trauma...

@cmconseils

Danish: Nine and half five twenty

@ditol @cmconseils

nine plus halfway (from four) to five times twenty

twenty used to be a very common number in trade, it was called "en snes"

@ditol @cmconseils

Weird, but 100% systematic from 50 to 99:

51 = 1 + 2.5*20

64 = 4 + 3*20

72 = 2 + 3.5*20

87 = 7 + 4 * 20

How to tell that somebody was not competent enough for the job they held:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/27/jen_easterly_ai_cybersecurity/

@timbray @robpike

The tech in these TI chips was invented in Denmark, so we heard about them long time ago.

I swapped my beloved Tandberg TPA-3006a out for one of these beasts many years ago, and never looked back.

Speakers: Rauna Njord - not the easiest task for the amplifier.

@mei @lofty @wren6991

As somebody who once wrote a malloc implementation seeing that makes me want to farm carrots instead...

Somebody is conducting an academic survey about AI-SLOP and FOSS projects.

The problem is economic in nature, so the solution has to be economic too.

My proposal:

Charge a €100 fee to file a bug report, to anybody who has not previously filed valid bug reports.

Refund the fee if the bug report is valid, otherwise keep it.

This is how most consumer/producer arbitration/conflict resolution boards operate in civilized countries.

Here's a back-of-the-envelope result from today:

USA has approx one million practicing doctors and there are approx one million employees in "Health Insurance" preventing them from doing their job.

Approx 7.5 million people are employed by hospitals, approx 2/3 of which are "administrative" which means their job is to ensure somebody pays.

Six million employees get a salary for prioritizing money over health.

Six million is 3.5% of USA's total employment.

Hello #varnish_cache users!

A multi-vendor HTTP2 DoS for your enjoyment: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-8671

Fixes are in our repos, and making their way though the pipeline:

https://varnish-cache.org/security/VSV00017.html#vsv00017

Big thanks to Martin for doing the work!

I am a sucker for opto-electronics, so got this discarded kit (ex CNN's London studio?)

Each button has a 36x24 LCD display and red+green LEDS.

Well-designed hardware: ColdFire (=68k) CPU, plenty of RAM, plenty of FLASH, serial port, ethernet etc.

Firmware ? Not so impressive, but very easy to get rid of:

Anybody can flash new firmware from ethernet: No userid, no password, all you need to know is the IP# and how they botched their CRC-16 implementation.

Now it runs #MicroPython :-)

@simon_brooke @catgirlQueer @vashti

Also:

Until we ditch leap-seconds, we cannot predict how many seconds there will be until some timestamp in the future, since that depends on what the director of the Paris Observatory decides twice a year.

And on top of that, time-zones are political decisions, so even without leap-seconds, it is anyone's guess how long time there is to 2026-01-01 09:00 in Mississippi.

@simon_brooke @catgirlQueer @vashti

Fun fact:

Until 1972-01-01Z we used rubber-time, because astrometry is not nearly as constant as most people seem to think.

But it is worse than that.

We literally have no idea how long nanoseconds took before 1958-01-01Z

If you go back before observations of solar eclipses, we even barely know how long days took.

Any epoch before 1972-01-01Z by defintion causes wrong timekeeping.

@bert_hubert @joyofcoding

Deja-vu there....

When #Varnish-Cache were young, many years ago, we got a lot of reports of people reducing servers a factor of 3 to 10 because it was so much more efficient code.

@chrisvest

Yes, not a bad one either.

But "alternative" malloc implementations need people to actively decide to use them, which is reactive to some specific problem.

phkmalloc, by being OS default, meant the 10K+ ports collection got exposed to it.

I remember only one or two "Bah!, FreeBSD is broken watch me not care!" upstream reactions, everybody else went "Ohh, I guess everybody but FreeBSD are unsafe!" and fixed the reported bugs.

Some even said thanks :-)

@pitrh

Wait, I know the answer to this one:

Lennart Poettering.

Right ?

@chrisvest

I guess I have to send him a laminated membership card to the Retired FreeBSD malloc Maintainers Association now ?

https://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/phkmalloc/