Here’s another free CA as an alternative to Let’s Encrypt! (scotthelme.co.uk)

Now, if Let’s Encrypt are having a bad day and you can’t get a certificate from them for whatever reason, you have a problem. This is why a backup CA is so important, we must have other options.

New CAs with the ACME API – I like this a lot!

macOS 11’s hidden security improvements (blog.malwarebytes.com)

Who benefits from NO_SMT and TECS? Google.

I’ve looked everywhere and no one else seems to use these mitigation APIs. The only source code match (outside of the macOS 11 and 12 SDKs, and the XNU source code itself) is Chromium. The only binary matches on my macOS 11 machine (outside of system libraries) are the Chrome and Electron frameworks, i.e. Chromium. Not even Safari seems to use them!

MacOS 11 has quite some security improvements under the hood and it seems that they are not widely adopted yet.

My Philosophy on Alerting (docs.google.com)

My Philosophy on Alerting based my observations while I was a Site Reliability Engineer at Google

I stumbled over this within the Alerting Documentation of Prometheus.

Tempo 30 in Schweden – Die Jugend fährt Zeitlupe (tagesanzeiger.ch)

In Schweden dürfen schon 15-Jährige Autofahren – aber nicht schneller als 30 Stundenkilometer. Im ganzen Land sind deshalb viele stolze Verkehrshindernisse unterwegs.

Irgendwie geil 🙂

How does Cloud SQL maintenance work? (cloud.google.com)

The good first part of how Cloud SQL Instances get maintained – Waiting for Part 2 as there might be much more to it than meets the eye in the first place.

Wie sehen die tierischen Ersatzprodukte der Zukunft aus? (urkraut.ch)

Braucht es Ersatzprodukte überhaupt?

Zuerst zum Elefanten im Raum: Ja, es braucht pflanzliche Ersatzprodukte. Unsere Ernährung basiert auf Traditionen. Mit dem Erwachsenwerden kristallisieren sich auch unsere Vorlieben heraus. Dadurch können wir nicht einfach verlangen, dass alle Menschen auf die ihnen gewohnten Produkte, wie beispielsweise Fleisch, verzichten. Das wäre ungesund.

Zusammenfassung und Empfehlungen Welle 47 (projekte.uni-erfurt.de)

Risikowahrnehmung und Schutzverhalten — Impfbereitschaft und Impfpflicht — Bereitschaft zur Impfung eigener Kinder — Vertrauen, Ablehnung von Maßnahmen und Demonstrationsbereitschaft — Delta-Variante und Vierte Welle

Bei einer Recherche bin ich über die grossartige Publikation der Uni Erfurt, RKI und vielen andern, welche eine gute Übersicht in Deutschland über das Wissen, Risikowahrnehmung, Schutzverhalten und Vertrauen in der Pandemie untersuchen.

Slack Certified Admin (slackcertified.com)

For Slack admins at organizations of all sizes, you’re in the right place to learn and prove your skills.

I am not sure what to think of it…

H/T Toby

Vor und nach der Flut 2021: Die Ahr-Rotweinstraße von Altenahr nach Dernau (youtube.com)

Embrace ephemerality with default disappearing messages (signal.org)

Until now, disappearing messages had to be enabled on a per-conversation basis, but for those who want to take ephemerality to the fullest, Signal now supports the ability to preconfigure all conversations you initiate with a default timer.

We’ve also added the ability to set custom timer durations on your conversations, so that some content can be gone in 60 seconds and others can exist for 18 minutes or 4 weeks. Install Signal, and give it a shot today!

Default on 4 Weeks it is!

Open sourcing a more precise time appliance (engineering.fb.com)

we’ve built a new dedicated piece of hardware called Time Appliance, which consists of a GNSS receiver and a miniaturized atomic clock (MAC). Users of time appliances can keep accurate time, even in the event of GNSS connectivity loss. While building our Time Appliance, we also invented a Time Card, a PCIe card that can turn any commodity server into a time appliance.

Alternatively: Build a Stratum-1 NTP Server for normal people.

Effective Alerting in Practice (newrelic.com)

No one ever said that alerting was easy. How do we ensure that alerts are delivered in a timely manner while preventing as many false positives and negatives as possible? Additionally, how do we make sure we’re detecting issues on time and not waking up our users in the middle of the night with false alarms? Alert fatigue is a real thing.

Very good documentation on effective Alerting strategies from New Relic.