Articles and News

Reverse Engineering the Source Code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine

The author does a fascinating analysis of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine source code.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/

HTML Over The Wire

David Heinemeier Hansson writes about what he calls the HTML Over The Wire technique and why JavaScript needn’t be at the center of everything we do on the web.

https://m.signalvnoise.com/html-over-the-wire/

https://hotwire.dev

A Large Scale Analysis of Hundreds of In-Memory Cache Clusters at Twitter

The authors collected production traces from 153 in-memory cache clusters to improve the understanding of the real-world cache workloads. The anonymized cache requests are available on GitHub.

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi20-yang.pdf

How We Saved .ORG: 2020 in Review

This article recaps the story of the attempted .ORG sale.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/how-we-saved-org-2020-review

Debian’s New Homepage

The Debian project redesigned its homepage. Don’t forget to update your RSS feeds accordingly.

https://www.debian.org

https://bits.debian.org/2020/12/debian-web-new-homepage.html

rc3

Today is the first day of the remote Chaos Experience 2020, the event that takes place instead of an on-site Chaos Communication Congress that usually takes place this time of the year.

https://rc3.world

https://media.ccc.de/c/rc3

Web Authentication Methods Compared

This blog post gives an overview of authentication methods for Web developers with code examples in Python.

https://testdriven.io/blog/web-authentication-methods/

How Facebook Keeps Its Large-Scale Infrastructure Hardware Up and Running

This blog post gives an overview of how Facebook handles hardware failures while keeping service interruptions as low as possible. The post doesn’t go too much into detail, but the relevant papers are linked.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201222004333/https://engineering.fb.com/2020/12/09/data-center-engineering/how-facebook-keeps-its-large-scale-infrastructure-hardware-up-and-running/

Releases and Projects

Ruby 3.0.0

In development since 2015, the first version 3 release focus lies on performance improvements.

https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2020/12/25/ruby-3-0-0-released/

https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/v3_0_0/NEWS.md

Xfce 4.16

After nearly one and a half years of work, a new version of the lightweight desktop environment was released.

https://www.xfce.org/about/news/?post=1608595200

https://www.xfce.org/download/changelogs/4.16

Bash 5.1

Bash 5.1 returns to Bash 4.4 behavior of performing pathname expansion, introduces a new random number engine, adds so-called faces to Readline. On top of that, several bugs got fixed.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2020-12/msg00003.html

gotop

»Another terminal-based graphical activity monitor.«

https://github.com/xxxserxxx/gotop

Technitium DNS Server

The Technitium DNS Server is an ad-blocking DNS server with DNS-overTLS and DNS-over-HTTPS capabilities.

https://technitium.com

https://github.com/TechnitiumSoftware/DnsServer

Snapdrop

»Local file sharing in your browser. Inspired by Apple’s Airdrop.«

https://github.com/RobinLinus/snapdrop

https://snapdrop.net

:wq