Notices by bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺 (bert_hubert@fosstodon.org), page 2

If you care about books, this is a depressing but also enlightening read: https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books

Recently, a Dutch hacker found a vulnerability allowing him to shut down 4 million solar power installations. A handful of mostly non-European places manage perhaps 100 GW of solar power in the EU. Any mishap there, or heaven forbid, a compromise, could easily shut down so much power that the European electricity grid would collapse. Shockingly, we regulate these massive control panels as if they are online birthday calendars. And that must change. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-power-plants-in-the-cloud/

“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tape” coming for your power grid.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solar-power-is-going-to-be-huge
from The Economist

Two months ago I presented over at the Dutch National Cyber Security Center academic symposium on how fragile our IT systems are, and how they are in no way ready for disruption. Perhaps a fun read for today: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cyber-security-pre-war-reality-check/

An old favorite, "OK doomscrolling is bad but have you SEEN the quality of the doom this week?".

Last year European Parliament and national parliaments rejected the “EU child porn scanner” that was set to be installed on every phone. Apparently this week we’re going to ignore all that parliamentary action and mandate such a scanner once more. Here’s what I wrote earlier on how this super scary thing would work in practice: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/client-side-scanning-dutch-parliament/

It didn’t work out but I appreciate the attention to detail over at the financial times:

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 It appears all C instances (operated by #cogent) are serving an outdated zone.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

"Writing has been called the process by which you find out you don't know what you are talking about. Actually doing stuff meanwhile is the process by which find out you also did not know what you were writing about." - from an upcoming blog post.

@neil if you look at modern HTML, lots of stuff that was hard before (requiring javascript) is now very easy and plain HTML.

May you one day theorize something and 48 years later be photographed with the 27 kilometer large country-spanning machine that confirmed you were right. Awesome photo of Peter Higgs courtesy of the @CMSexperiment at CERN.

So Americans go crazy that the EU enacts thoughtful legislation full of procedures to rein in dominant social media players. EU bad! And this week US comes out with a law that simply bans TikTok if it is still Chinese owned 180 days from now. https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1236363592/biden-tiktok-ban

@neil So the EU CRA does however list this, which is sort of attempting to bake in some GDPR principles: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CONSIL:ST_17000_2023_INIT

In other news, Firefox market share appears to be quite substantial in the tech/geek scene (30%-40%), and near zero outside of it. This gets to you 1.5% or so globally. To raise its market share, Firefox needs to mostly gain non-tech users. Keep that in mind when judging their plans. Below, Firefox market share split out for different posts on my site:

@elmine you can't even get tech people to shift from WhatsApp to Signal. The alternative needs to be way way way better, visibly, before anyone changes their ways.

Regarding AI *in* Firefox, this has brought us a built-in translator that does not outsource the work to the cloud. That's amazingly good work. I'd love to see the browser do more of that kind of thing. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/translate/

"Questions are being asked in parliament about the decision by Dutch domain registration foundation SIDN to transfer the dot nl domain and its “complete ICT services” to Amazon’s cloud services."
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2024/01/criticism-as-dutch-domain-registry-plans-move-to-amazon-cloud/

@icedquinn A life well lived.. https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/04/niklaus_wirth_obituary/

In 1995 computing pioneer Niklaus Wirth wrote "A Plea for Lean Software". In 2024 it is entirely normal for simple software to be shipped as a 350MB package, or for it to have 1600 dependencies. In appreciation of Wirth's legacy, I wrote a 2024-era Plea for Lean Software, updated for today's computing horrors: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/a-2024-plea-for-lean-software/

@luis_in_brief @sovtechfund I'm in their orbit & they sometimes listen to me, if there is any specific worry I'd love to hear about it!