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Cake day: June 12th, 2025

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  • With the growth of Kubernetes, it’s getting very feasible even for smaller companies to rent their own colocation in a datacenter, shove their own servers into the racks and run the company’s own private cloud.

    We did the math at my current employer, and AWS was roughly 20x as expensive as buying your own servers over a 5 year period, including the datacenter costs. Of course this also means you have to take on more responsibility yourself, like swapping hardware if it breaks, and cabling the rack yourself… But nothing that makes up for the 20x price difference.






  • These are great points, but there is something more that phones have going for them.

    All modern phones are full-disk encrypted by default, and can be remote wiped. I think this is only the case for Mac laptops, but not for Linux and Windows.

    So if your phone is stolen, it’s not really a risk of the thief having your password manager and your 2FA at the same time, but rather can they get in to your phone and then password manager and 2FA before you can trigger the remote wipe.

    Unless the attacker is sophisticated enough to mirror the whole disk and attack it offline.





  • Ubuntu works just fine. But Canonical has an iffy track record.

    Some years ago they bundled an Amazon app with the plain install. For a while it also integrated with the system search by default. So if you searched for a file on your machine, then your search query would also be sent directly to Amazon. You could opt-out but it was enabled by default. Later it was changed to be an opt-in, and I believe it’s entirely removed today.

    Besides that they often push technologies that isn’t really fostering the community. When Wayland was slowly gaining traction, Canonical suddenly announced and aggressively pushed Mir, instead of collaborating on Wayland, the preferred making their own alternative.

    These days they are pushing their Snaps pretty hard. So back in the day if you apt-get install firefoxyou would get a regular native Firefox install. Today if you do the same it will instead install a Snap of Firefox. Snaps are also a bit funny… Flatpak was gaining traction, and suddenly Canonical decides to build their own alternative instead of contributing to Flatpak.

    So all in all, Canonical is making some dodgy business partnerships. The add a good bit of bloat in their regular install, and they constantly build their own (inferior) alternatives to all sorts of stuff.

    I’m all for having alternatives and choices, but in Canonical’s case, they generally don’t give you much choice, they just force you to use their alternative. This of course leads to fragmentation, which is unfortunate.



  • The idea is that you could have your data stored encrypted, such that the entity that is storing your data can’t read any of your data, but can still make calculations or updates to your data without ever learning anything about your data.

    The use cases seems rather narrow to me, but there are probably many that I just can’t think of at the moment.

    One idea could be something like a VPN service that wants to store as little data about the customer as possible. They could keep the account balance in an encrypted format. When you then add money to the balance, they can increment your balance by however much you paid, without knowing what your old balance was or what the new balance is. And they could then have another homomorphic function that can check whether your balance is positive. If your balance is positive you are allowed onto the service, if it’s not positive you don’t get access. And the company wouldn’t be able to know whether you had $5 in your account or $5000, just that your balance is currently positive.

    So yeah fundamentally it’s just being able to store and update some data, while the data is fully encrypted, never decrypting the data, to ensure some form of privacy or confidentiality



  • Damn… The more I hear about stuff like this the more I like the Danish police and traffic laws… They certainly aren’t perfect, but man is most of the rest of the world a shit show when it comes to that.

    In Denmark 3 km/h above the limit can get you a ticket. 30% above will get you a “point” to your drivers license and a much larger fine. 60% above and you will immediately lose your license and a large fine or potentially prison.

    A “point” stays on your license for 3 years, and it you get 6 cuts, you lose your license.

    I haven’t heard of anyone keeping their license “because they needed it”… You just have to bike, or take public transport.

    You also get a point for many other offenses, such as using a handheld phone, crossing on red, tailgating, driving the wrong way, or many other things.

    The first 3 years after getting your license, the limit is lower at 4 points, and if you lose your license and get a new license the limit is only 3 points.