Blogs

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-35.


Telegram is neither “secure” nor “encrypted”

Tags: tech, telegram, security, privacy

Here a good reminder that the PR of Telegram is highly misleading. It’s not very secure, they don’t really care about your privacy.

https://rys.io/en/171.html


How Telegram’s Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr

Tags: tech, telegram, law

Yes, such an arrest is concerning. Now, lots of people are voicing the wrong concerns… this article actually does a good job explaining it.

https://www.404media.co/how-telegrams-founder-pavel-durov-became-a-culture-war-martyr/


Is the Open Source Bubble about to Burst?

Tags: tech, foss, values, licensing, fundraising

I’m not sure the “bubble” comparison properly applies. Still there are indeed signs of the Open Source movement getting in troubles. It’ll be all the more important to stick to the Free Software values.

https://tarakiyee.com/is-the-open-source-bubble-about-to-burst/


Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again

Tags: tech, foss, licensing

It’s about time… I wish they would have gone for the AGPL + proprietary double license scheme instead of their odd licenses the last time.

https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-is-open-source-again


Top Programming Languages 2024 - IEEE Spectrum

Tags: tech, language

Interesting to see Typescript and Rust picking up pace slowly. Otherwise Python, Java, Javascript and C++ are still the big four overall. For jobs, C# and SQL are good to have in your tool belt.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2024


What RSS Needs

Tags: tech, rss

Very good list of the challenges ahead for RSS as a popular protocol. It’d be great to see some of it being tackled.

https://www.mnot.net/blog/2024/08/25/feeds


OpenSSH Backdoors

Tags: tech, supply-chain, security, linux

Interesting comparison between old attempts at backdooring OpenSSH and the latest xz attempt. There are lessons to be learned from this. It makes a good case for starting to sandbox everything.

https://blog.isosceles.com/openssh-backdoors/


Bypassing airport security via SQL injection

Tags: tech, security, airline

Woops, this was clearly a very bad security issue allowing to completely bypass airport security screening in the US.

https://ian.sh/tsa


SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL

Tags: tech, databases, sql

Looks like an interesting way to improve SQL. This feels like a nice extension, it’s much better than throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

https://research.google/pubs/sql-has-problems-we-can-fix-them-pipe-syntax-in-sql/


Python’s Preprocessor

Tags: tech, programming, python, metaprogramming

Interesting to see how far you can go preprocessing Python.

https://pydong.org/posts/PythonsPreprocessor/


Don’t use complex expressions in if conditions | Volodymyr Gubarkov

Tags: tech, programming, maintenance

Definitely a good advice, I see very complex expressions in if (or while BTW) conditions way too often. They tend to accumulate over time.

https://maximullaris.com/if_condition.html


Why Playwright is less flaky than Selenium

Tags: tech, web, frontend, tests, performance, reliability

Interesting reason which would explain the Selenium flakiness. It’s just harder to write tests with race conditions using Playwright.

https://justin.searls.co/links/2024-08-29-why-playwright-is-less-flaky-than-selenium/


Putting a meaningful dent in your error backlog

Tags: tech, monitoring, reliability, debugging

How to avoid drowning in errors when getting serious about monitoring. Finding class of errors and treating them one by one will definitely help.

https://blog.danslimmon.com/2024/08/15/putting-a-meaningful-dent-in-your-error-backlog/


There can’t be only one

Tags: tech, design, databases

A weird detour via baseball obscure rules to justify why we should pay attention to the “Highlander problem”. This should be kept in mind especially for designing databases.

https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2024/aug/27/highlander-problem/


Building with purpose

Tags: tech, business, architecture

Definitely something architects should do more. Understanding the business needs should be the input to the technical decisions. Otherwise you might just happily build the wrong thing.

https://cremich.cloud/building-with-purpose



Bye for now!