Makura no Soshi

on the decline of the open web and its communities…

• Should you fix errors and contribute to Google Maps for free? – Daniel Aleksandersen
  Google Maps is incredibly detailed and useful. But Google uses it for tracking and deliver ads. Should you contribute for free to build its monopoly?
  → with follow-up Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap for free? – Cj Malone
• Why OpenStreetMap is in Serious Trouble – Serge Wroclawski
  As long as this post is, it’s not a comprehensive list of all the problems with the project, only the ones I found most directly affect the project’s success and that I wasn’t able to address myself during my time on the project.
• The Third Web – tante
  For anyone that wants to know what all the fuss is about and why they should care.
• Stack overflow is almost dead – Gergely Orosz
  Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.
• The Old Internet Died And We Watched And Did Nothing – Katie Notopoulos
  When we signed up for these services in the 2000s, we naively trusted them.
• Endgame for the Open Web – Anil Dash
  What we are seeing is the application of the same market-crushing techniques that were used to displace entire industries with the rise of social media and the gig economy, now being deployed across the very open internet infrastructure that made the modern internet possible.

Some links on speaking, presentations, and documentation …

• On Conference Speaking – Hynek Schlawack
  I’ve seen quite a bit of the world thanks to being invited to speak at conferences. Since some people are under the impression that serial conference speakers possess some special talents, I’d like to demystify my process by walking you through my latest talk from start to finish.
• The Price of the Hallway Track – Hynek Schlawack
  There are many good reasons to not go to every talk possible when attending conferences. However increasingly it became hip to boast with not going to talks at all – encouraging others to follow suit. As a speaker, that rubs me the wrong way and I’ll try to explain why.
• Advice on Conference Speaking – Neil Bowers
• Presentation tools – anarcat
• Advice for writing LaTeX documents – Diomidis Spinellis
  If you’re writing a scientific book, a paper, or a thesis in computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics or a related field, it pays to write it using LaTeX, especially if your work contains formulas, symbols, and heavy cross referencing.
• Über example.com und das Schreiben von technischer Dokumentation – Un*xe
  viele Menschen, die sowas schreiben, scheinen nicht zu wissen, dass es genau hierfür reservierte $DINGE gibt

On microservices and containers …

• Modules, monoliths, and microservices – Avery Pennarun
  Module boundaries and service boundaries are two different things.
• STOP!! You don’t need Microservices. – Ebin John
  Having seen microservices playing the role of both the protagonist and the antagonist, I exhort myself to be the devil’s advocate. If you’re an architect or a designer who is leaning towards microservices as a default architecture, I urge you to bite the bullet and ask a few questions to yourself.
• The Business Executive’s Guide to Kubernetes – Jessie Frazelle
  I thought it would be fun to write a post aimed towards business leaders making technology decisions for their organizations. There is a lot of hype in our field and little truth behind the hype.
• What is a container? – Marc’s Blog
  When you use the word container, consider whether your audience is using the same definition as you.
• Docker vs. containerd vs. Nabla vs. Kata vs. Firecracker: Welcome To The Container Jungle! – Simon Kienzler
  In this blog post, we compare more than ten container runtimes and classify them based on standards like OCI, Kubernetes’ CRI and CNI.
• OCI Image Layout – Batuhan Apaydin
  A container image is nothing magical—it’s just a packed directory structure, much like a good old tar archive.

On Linux and WSL …

• Sorting out what the Single Unix Specification is and covers – Chris Siebenmann
  For most purposes, then, I can just talk about ‘POSIX’ or ‘Single Unix Specification’ interchangeably, which is somewhat different than how I used to think it was.
• Pragmatic Debian packaging (2019) – Vincent Bernat
  Building Debian packages with the official tools can become straightforward if you bend some rules.
• Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2023 edition – Artem S. Tashkinov
  In this regularly but rarely updated article, which is without doubt the most comprehensive list of Linux distributions’ problems on the entire Internet, we only discuss their main problems and shortcomings […]
• Why I Will Never Use Alpine Linux Ever Again – Martin Heinz
  There are plenty of reasons why you should not use Alpine for your container images, some of which can cause you great amount of grief…
• Windows for Linux Nerds – Jessie Frazelle
  I am super excited about Windows Subsystem for Linux. It is one of the coolest pieces of tech I’ve seen since I started using Docker.
• Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential – Julio Merino
  WSL 2 “throws away” all of the Linux subsystem parts […] What this means is that the beauty of the WSL 1 design is gone.

Some older texts, all about blockchains …

• Bitcoin’s Academic Pedigree – ACM Queue, Arvind Narayanan and Jeremy Clark
  The concept of cryptocurrencies is built from forgotten ideas in research literature.
• Git, PGP, and the Blockchain: A Comparison – Netfuture, Marcel Waldvogel
  An attempt at technological genealogy.
• XML, blockchains, and the strange shapes of progress – apenwarr
  XML solved syntax, which turned out not to be the problem. Blockchains [purport to] solve centralization, which will turn out not to be the problem. But they do create the incentive to slash and burn and invest a lot of money hiring consultants.
• 10 years of… whatever this has been – apenwarr
  I forgot one essential reason bitcoin has survived: Because people really, really, really want it to.
• Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain – Kai Stinchcombe
  After years of tireless effort and billions of dollars invested, nobody has actually come up with a use for the blockchain—besides currency speculation and illegal transactions.
• Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster – Drew DeVault
  Cryptocurrency has invented an entirely new category of internet abuse.

I still keep a rather old PGP key around, and I have extended its lifetime by changing its expiry date. Something I would not recommend, because everyone with an old copy of the key in their keyring gets an “expired” warning or error.

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For an easy way to lookup a domain’s SMTP TLS Reporting Policy try my nice MTA-STS Policy Viewer.

After writing the first notes on SMTP TLS Reporting I thought it would be nice to see all setting on one page, without using multiple tools and lookups for DNS and HTTPS data. The first iteration was a shell script, and the second iteration was a Python function. With some more fiddling I set it up as a Google Cloud Function, with a simple web frontend.

The SMTP standard is just as ubiquitous as it is ossified and hard to change. Thus all newer RFCs follow similar patterns of a) adding optional extensions and b) providing feedback loops to detect usage, problems, and abuse of these extensions.

One more recent extension tries to enforce TLS transport between mailservers. This sounds very simple (and would be very simple if one could change the SMTP standard to require TLS), but is not trivial when compatibility is necessary and all TLS policies are “opt-in”.

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