Article and News

Complexity Has to Live Somewhere

»Complexity has to live somewhere. If you are lucky, it lives in well-defined places. … If you’re unlucky and you just tried to pretend complexity could be avoided altogether, it has no place to go in this world. But it still doesn’t stop existing.«

https://ferd.ca/complexity-has-to-live-somewhere.html

History of if … then … else

Transcription of a short talk that explains how the if-then-else statement came to life.

https://github.com/ericfischer/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-else.md

Forbidden Lore: Hacking DNS Routing for k8s

Explains what you can do when you have special DNS requirements inside of Kubernetes.

https://wgtwo.com/blog/forbidden-lore-hacking-dns-routing-for-k8s

Google Services Outage on 2020-12-18

This post mortem explains how a change in the quota system has lead to an outage of customer-facing services requiring Google OAuth. Detecting, analyzing, and fixing an issue of this complexity in three-quarters of an hour is remarkable.

https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/zall/20013

Commits Are Snapshots, Not Diffs

This insightful article helps with understanding the Git object model.

https://github.blog/2020-12-17-commits-are-snapshots-not-diffs/

Personal Server Configuration with k3s

The link contains a step-by-step guide with interesting self-hosting tips.

https://github.com/erebe/personal-server

Half of 4 Million Public Docker Hub Images Found to Have Critical Vulnerabilities

Report on scanning publicly available Docker Hub images for vulnerabilities. It isn’t the first analysis of this kind, but the result is always the same: There are still many harmful container images out there.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/12/dockerhub-image-vulnerabilities/

Projects and Releases

Linux 5.10

Linux 5.10 was released. It is an LTS release and will receive support over the next five years. Among the many updates and fixes are Btrfs and EXT4 performance tuning, better RISC-V support, and enhancements for BPF programs.

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=whCKhxNyKn1Arut8xUDKTwp3fWcCj_jbL5dbzkUmo45gQ@mail.gmail.com/T/#u

JetBrains Qodana

JetBrains announced the early access program for Qodana, their new static analysis tool suited for running in CI/CD environments.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2020/12/early-access-program-for-qodana-a-new-static-analysis-and-quality-management-tool-by-jetbrains-is-open/

clair

clair is a tool for doing static vulnerability analysis in OCI and Docker containers.

https://github.com/quay/clair

pbgopy

pbgopy is a clipboard sharing server.

https://github.com/nakabonne/pbgopy

WireGuard Support in FreeBSD

With this commit, WireGuard supports lands in the FreeBSD kernel.

https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=368163

Depix

Impressive work on recovering information from pixelated images. TLDR: If you want to conceal sensitive information, don’t just pixelate it.

https://github.com/beurtschipper/Depix

:wq