And here we are again. The past few months were pretty intense but interesting – A few conferences, side projects and yes a TEDxBern went smoothly by. Oh yes and I spent quite some times in the mountains thats why it was quite silent here (if you’re with me since a while you know this happens every once in a while.)

On Cash (tbray.org)

Rout­ing ev­ery­thing through my cred­it card is feed­ing the glob­al pay­ments cartel, who ex­tract a tar­iff mea­sured in freak­ing dol­lars for al­most ev­ery rou­tine trans­ac­tion. I’ve seen so many great busi­ness plans go beg­ging be­cause they could have done some­thing won­der­ful in the world if you could on­ly do mi­cro­pay­ments, which you can’t, did I men­tion that car­tel that ba­si­cal­ly has it locked up and tied down?

Goodread on cash 🙂

4G Mobiltelefon – MP02 (punkt.ch)

Wenn es Zeit ist, online zu gehen, kann die 4G LTE-Verbindung des MP 02 mit einem Tablet/Laptop geteilt werden – das bedeutet eine leichtere Eingabe als beim Smartphone und einen größeren Bildschirm. Dieser Zwei-Geräte-Ansatz bedeutet, dass das Internet etwas ist, in das Sie eintauchen, und nicht umgekehrt.

Finally! A Dumbphone with 4G wifi capability.

IRL Glasses Block All the Screens Around You (wired.com)

Originally, they prototyped the glasses using the Casper film stuck onto regular lenses. But they later realized that any polarized lens rotated 90 degrees and flattened could produce the same screen-blocking effect. Right now, their lenses can block light emitted from LCD and LED screens, but not OLED screens. That means they tune out most televisions and some computers, but not the newer crop of smartphones like the OLED-packing iPhones.

Love the idea!

Balancing Engineering and Support (stories.amazee.io)

The schedule we currently operate on is two weeks of support and two weeks of engineering. It’s not a completely pure system, of course, you might get pulled into support when you are on an engineering sprint but there is an expectation that you can and should have time to build, to innovate, and to unplug if necessary to do it.

A few insights from Tyler how we handle engineering and support at amazee.io

12 Factor CLI Apps (medium.com)

At Heroku, we’ve come up with a methodology called the 12 factor app. It’s a set of principles designed to make great web applications that are easy to maintain. In that spirit, here are 12 CLI factors to keep in mind when building your next CLI application. Following these principles will offer CLI UX that users will love.

We’ve also built a CLI framework called oclif that is designed to follow these principles to build great CLIs in Node.

Interesting approaches for people building CLI apps.

Delaying Further Symantec TLS Certificate Distrust (blog.mozilla.org)

Unfortunately, because so many sites have not yet taken action, moving this change from Firefox 63 Nightly into Beta would impact a significant number of our users. It is unfortunate that so many website operators have waited to update their certificates, especially given that DigiCert is providing replacements for free.

We prioritize the safety of our users and recognize the additional risk caused by a delay in the implementation of the distrust plan. However, given the current situation, we believe that delaying the release of this change until later this year when more sites have replaced their Symantec TLS certificates is in the overall best interest of our users. This change will remain enabled in Nightly, and we plan to enable it in Firefox 64 Beta when it ships in mid-October.

Change takes time… an awful lot of it

Schweizer Steuer-App speicherte alle Daten öffentlich in der Cloud (heise.de)

Zwar schon älter aber der Facepalm hallt nach. 🤦

How Will Climate Change Affect Politics? (theatlantic.com)

Day Zero is still hypothetical, but Cape Town’s reality will soon impact many global cities, where water will become a constant concern, and democracy will become contingent upon the taps.

A good read on climate change and how it will affect politics.

Build a better Bookshelf (huytd.github.io)

Step 1: Install any document scanning app on your phone
Step 2: Scan all the index pages and table of contents in all of your books
Step 3: Send it to whatever software you’re using that has OCR feature
Step 4: Now you can search your books digitally

Great Idea!

CLI: improved (remysharp.com)

Remy has a few nice changes he implemented on his shell.. 🙂

I fell for prettyping

GovCMS coming of age (lilengine.co)

The Lagoon product does push us to the very limits of what can be realistically open sourced and free of vendor lock-in. So what would it take a government organisation to run/roll their own Lagoon?

<3 I love feedback like this on our open source project!

After a slightly longer weekend (bank holidays are a fabulous thing) – Back in action! This week is fueled by a few GDPR/DSGVO articles.

fridge 0.1 (joeyh.name)

How about a fridge powered entirely by solar panels without the powerwall? Zero battery use, and yet it still preserves your food.

That’s much cooler, because batteries, even hyped ones like the powerwall, are expensive and innefficient and have limited cycles. Solar panels are cheap and efficient now. With enough solar panels that the fridge has power to cool down most days (even cloudy days), and a smart enough control system, the fridge itself becomes the battery — a cold battery.

Interesting experiment with Solarpower and a Fridge!

The Amish understand a life-changing truth about technology the rest of us don’t (qz.com)

The reason the Amish rejected television is because it is a one-way conduit to bring another society into their living rooms. And they want to maintain the society as they have created it. And the automobile as well. As soon as you have a car, your ability to leave your local community becomes significantly easier.

Good (Anti)Technology Longread

DSGVO – häufig gestellte Fragen, häufig verbreitete Mythen › Jan Philipp Albrecht (janalbrecht.eu)

GDPR #0: DSGVO-Panik

A 2-Year Stanford Study Shows the Astonishing Productivity Boost of Working From Home (thriveglobal.com)

I feel I’m consistently at the most productive I’ve ever been in my entire life. My morning commute is a seven-second walk to my study and I actually start working far earlier than I did in the corporate world.

While I make it a point to not work any later than I did at a corporate office, I’m working more deeply with far fewer breaks in concentration. I quite often “get on a roll” that lasts four-plus hours at a time. I can’t remember the last such streak working in an office.

Surprised, much?

Kubernetes Gardener (gardener.cloud)

Many Open Source tools exist which help in creating and updating single Kubernetes clusters. However, the more clusters you need the harder it becomes to operate, monitor, manage and keep all of them alive and up-to-date. And that is exactly what project Gardener focuses on.

Looks interesting

Intel Shows Xeon Scalable Gold 6138P with Integrated FPGA, Shipping to Vendors (anandtech.com)

A CPU partnered with an FPGA. Hello Future!

We Made a Tool So You Can Hear Both Yanny and Laurel (nytimes.com)

We built a tool to gradually accentuate different frequencies in the original audio clip. Which word or name do you hear, and how far do you have to move the slider to hear the other? (The slider’s center point represents the original recording.)

I’m still left confused hearing two things at the same time…

John Byrd’s answer to What is the most sophisticated piece of software/code ever written? (quora.com)

You would never expect that all those problems were caused by a computer worm, the most devious and intelligent computer worm in history, written by some incredibly secret team with unlimited money and unlimited resources, designed with exactly one purpose in mind: to sneak past every known digital defense, and to destroy your country’s nuclear bomb program, all without getting caught.

A good writeup on Stuxnet 🙂

WordPress 4.9.6 Privacy and Maintenance Release (wordpress.org)

GDPR #1 – WordPress comes with new features!

• Data Export
• Data Erasure

Introducing Git protocol version 2 (opensource.googleblog.com)

We recently rolled out support for protocol version 2 at Google and have seen a performance improvement of 3x for no-op fetches of a single branch on repositories containing 500k references. Protocol v2 has also enabled a reduction of 8x of the overhead bytes (non-packfile) sent from googlesource.com servers. A majority of this improvement is due to filtering references advertised by the server to the refs the client has expressed interest in.

New stuff comes to git!

There Will Be WireGuard (latacora.singles)

TL;DR

[NEW] WireGuard for macOS
You can install wg-quick, wg, and wireguard-go using Homebrew. Then you should
be able to run wg-quick up whatever and familiar commands as you’re used to.
If you’re setting up a network manually, you can run wireguard-go utun3 in
place of the usual Linux command ip link add utun3 dev wireguard. Install
with the Homebrew command:
$ brew install wireguard-tools

Completely Silent Computer (tp69.wordpress.com)

I’ve been trying to make my computers quieter for nearly three decades. Custom liquid cooling loops, magnetically-stabilised fluid-dynamic bearings, acoustic dampeners, silicone shock absorbers, you name it. Well, last week I finally managed to build a completely silent computer

Nice! Back when i had those towered confusers at home i tried (and often failed) to make them dead silent. But atleast they were silent enough to sleep next to them (25-30 dBA)

🎥 Iron Man Becoming Real (youtube.com)

Intersting talk on a Jetengine driven suit 😀

A Dark Time for Data: WHOIS Blackout Period Likely Starting in May (cooley.com)

ICANN plans to settle on a final model by the GDPR enforcement date of May 25, at which point it will likely place all of the currently available WHOIS data behind a wall where it will no longer be accessible by the public. This “WHOIS blackout” period will last at least six months until ICANN likely implements its accreditation mechanism to allow third parties to access this “walled” data.

GDBR #2 – Whois!

The headers we don’t want (fastly.com)

At the same time, there are lots of headers that are hugely popular but aren’t new and aren’t actually all that useful

Good Article on the importance and un-importance of some headers that are blasted trough the net.

Mein erster DSGVO Rant – Zu viele Mythen und gefährliches Halbwissen zum neuen europäischen Datenschutzrecht (rechtzweinull.de)

GDPR #3 – Take whatever

Charlotte Roche: Verlasst die Städte! (sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de)

Im Wald triffst du keine anderen Menschen, die dir voll auf den Sack gehen, und bist nicht gezwungen, Plakate zu lesen, Werbung in deinen Kopf zu lassen und anschließend bei Amazon einzukaufen. Die Natur will dir nichts verkaufen. Du sollst nur sein, im Hier und Jetzt. Glücklich.

Anti-Tech Beitrag #2 😉

AWS won serverless – now all your software are kinda belong to them (theregister.co.uk)

Leading Edge Forum’s Simon Wardley, never one to mince words, helps to parse what a 70 per cent (or 44 per cent) lead means: “Let me translate that for you. Amazon is currently positioned to own 70 per cent of the future of ALL software.” Developers, for their part, happily focus on writing business logic while AWS (or Microsoft/Google) handle all the server infrastructure. As Matt Wood, AWS general manager of Deep Learning and AI, told me: “With S3, DynamoDB, and Lambda, you can build apps without thinking about the underlying infrastructure.”

Just let that sink in for a minute, shall we? I’m very happy that there are alternatives to the walled gardens that seem to be oh-so-confortable.

Walmart has patented autonomous robot bees (weforum.org)

Walmart has just filed a patent for autonomous, robot bees. Yes, that Walmart — and no, you didn’t slip into another, stranger dimension. The mega-corporation’s patent specifically covers “pollination drones.” These tiny robots could act just like bees, pollinating crops autonomously.

Black mirror is it you?

Google YOLO (blog.innerht.ml)

Buttons are everywhere. Elevator buttons, machinery buttons, and even “Nuclear Button” that sits on the President’s office desk. But are you always sure the button you push really performs what you want it to do?

Fun with Buttons!

iOS 11.4 to Disable USB Port After 7 Days: What It Means for Mobile Forensics (blog.elcomsoft.com)

Apparently, iOS stores information about the date and time the device was last unlocked or had a data connection to a USB port. After the seven days elapse, the Lightning port will be disabled. Once this happens, you will no longer be able to pair the device to a computer or USB accessory, or use an existing lockdown record, without unlocking the device with a passcode. The only thing you’ll be able to do is charging.

A good move! Wondering when Google draws level disabling the USB ports after a while.

Russlands Staatsfeind Nummer eins (republik.ch)

Das russische Internet steht kopf, seitdem Moskau versucht, den Kurznachrichtendienst Telegram zu blockieren. Wer ist Telegram-Gründer Pawel Durow, der als «russischer Zuckerberg» gilt?

Good Longread on Telegram and how their Founder operates.

Conference Buddy (conferencebuddy.io)

The idea was born for a simple reason: While I love going to meetups, barcamps and conferences, I don’t like going on my own when I don’t know anyone. Even the thought is intimidating. And I can’t be the only one, right?

A thing we talked about at PHPDays Verona during the past week. Great initiative!

Now Is The Perfect Time For An RSS Renaissance (neflabs.com)

So the very idea of RSS – obtaining content from a website without having to visit the site itself – is due for a comeback. No ads. No suspicious javascript. Just the signal without the noise. It’s not perfect privacy, but it’s one step back and two steps forward in the right direction.

Still on RSS. Never went away from it… even if it feels a bit oldscool. Own your content.

Victory! Fourth Circuit rules that border officials can’t subject electronic devices to suspicionless forensic searches (boingboing.net)

Now, in U.S. v. Kolsuz, the first appellate ruling since Riley, the Fourth Circuit appeals court has held that it is unconstitutional for US border officials to subject visitors devices to forensic searches without individualized suspicion of criminal wrongdoing.

Win!

Passive Wi-Fi: Bringing Low Power to Wi-Fi Transmissions (usenix.org)

We build prototype hardware and implement all four 802.11b bit rates on an FPGA platform. Our experimental evaluation shows that passive Wi-Fi transmissions can be decoded on off-the-shelf smartphones and Wi-Fi chipsets over distances of 30–100 feet in various line-of-sight and through-the-wall scenarios. Finally, we design a passive Wi-Fi IC that shows that 1 and 11 Mbps transmissions consume 14.5 and 59.2 µW respectively. This translates to 10000x lower power than existing Wi-Fi chipsets and 1000x lower power than Bluetooth LTE and ZigBee.

Impressive presentation!

120+ WordPress-Plugins im DSGVO-Check (mit Lösungen, Alternativen und Plugin-Tipps!) (blogmojo.de)

Because GDPR/DSGVO && WordPress

Everything old is new again: Microservices (blogs.dxc.technology)

Well, it depends. If you got your start programming in the 90s, you’d say I just defined a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). But, if you’re younger and cut your developer teeth on the cloud, you’d say: “Oh, you’re talking about microservices.”

Serverless, Microservices – Isn’t that all just SOA?

Translations of My hovercraft is full of eels in many languages (omniglot.com)

Mis Luftchüssiboot isch volle Aal

The most useful phrase in many languages 😉

This is what it’s like using only open-source software on Android (androidpolice.com)

Four years ago, Ars Technica wrote a detailed analysis of using Android without all the proprietary Google software. It wasn’t a great experience, as you can probably guess. But plenty can change in four years, so is the situation any better in 2018? That’s what I wanted to find out.

If you want to go Google-Free that’s a good article here!

New Rowhammer Attack Can Hijack Computers Remotely Over the Network (amp.thehackernews.com)

Since triggering a bit flip requires hundreds of thousands of memory accesses to specific DRAM locations within tens of milliseconds, a successful Throwhammer attack would require a very high-speed network of at least 10Gbps.
In their experimental setup, researchers achieved bit flips on a targeted server after accessing its memory 560,000 times in 64 milliseconds by sending packets over LAN to its RDMA-enabled network card.

Nerdy, i know but Rowhammer attacks are intersting!

Remediating Fukushima—“When everything goes to hell, you go back to basics” (arstechnica.com)

To further limit groundwater flow into reactors buildings, TEPCO actually froze the ground around them, creating a kind of frozen wall down to a depth of about 30 meters. Approximately 1,500 meters long, the wall is kept frozen by pipes filled with an aqueous solution of calcium chloride cooled to -30ºC. Freezing commenced in March 2016 and is now “99 percent complete,” according to Kohta.

Just one piece in the puzzle of cleaning up the Aftermath of Fukushima – And yes it’s already 7 years since the accident happened.