I celebrate my 50th birthday today 🥳! I used to be quite dramatic about this prospect but thanks to some recent health setbacks in my family (from which we are now thankfully recovering well it appears) I’ve come to realize that my life, even at 50, is quite a feast!

I've written an unhealthy amount of words on "the cloud" and specifically Europe's woes. In the post below I tie many articles together into a hopefully useful overview. It may be good to know that nothing what I write on the cloud is novel or original, I mostly hope to report things as they are. Which is scary enough already! https://berthub.eu/draft-klad-tijdelijk-draft/cloud-overview.html

Everyone agrees something needs to be done about our total dependence on US clouds. But what? And who should do it? Ample words have been written on the 'why', and we also have a lot of text on our values and that *someone* should do *something*. Here I elaborate on an earlier suggestion with a coherent strategy that is concrete enough to disagree with. This reads well with the latest Euro-Stack letter also: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/a-coherent-non-us-cloud-strategy/

If I wanted to leave fosstodon.org, where should I go? I need a very boring server with no surprising moderators causing upheaval..

As nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq0as0hep2w8dvv9ge6egzuxpq87gehe35ad3fdw3w893w8dkl9qcqsepej0 likes to say, CO₂ PPM still speeding up in the wrong direction:

Massive result in Dutch parliament just now. They passed 10 separate motions to enhance digital resilience, run more of our own servers & reduce dependency on US cloud technology.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/dutch-parliament-calls-end-reliance-us-software-2025-03-18/

It is very hard to accept, but it is no longer safe to move EU governments & societies to US clouds. Not only is it dangerous to do so, it is also likely flat out illegal in the near feature. We're trading convenience for utter dependence on a mad king. It should stop.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-your-government-and-society-on-us-clouds/

nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqyhj4ua6580h3w0kucwwrtwl4uv9pg7m2drxzplq5x3364jczp36sfkq54u there is also no money. Or at least not at any scale for doing things. Meanwhile European governments spend 100b euros a year on proprietary software and services. 1% toward autonomy would go a long way!

The Council of the EU has adopted the #CRA Cyber Resilience Act yesterday. This will have huge consequences for everyone who ships hardware and software as a product. Almost no actual open source developers face direct regulation (for writing software), but the users of our open source software very much do. The CRA notably suggests that commercial users pony up for improved open source security attestation. It is a big act, but it offers real possibilities for making better software! 1/2

nostr:npub1hcesfc0fhhhl3hwqlngqaur76kvwk8qdfyakjxwzpstwk2dp2u9szsc5cz all these things are actually in the read me.

nostr:npub1hcesfc0fhhhl3hwqlngqaur76kvwk8qdfyakjxwzpstwk2dp2u9szsc5cz I might be confused but doesn’t the read me start with “Very simple monitoring system with a single configuration file and a single binary”? Can you suggest a better text?

nostr:npub1d72jjxqkq9ufcu27yvrrqmlun364qpapw7xcjr3q64z9y2mr3l8q36zpdk Interesting, checking them out. Thanks!

So I have a Docker image that uses almost no CPU and almost no network, can I host that somewhere for money? Key thing is, it is not a web service and you can't "spin it down" if you see no traffic. This is for https://github.com/berthubert/simplomon

Very proud that the IEEE has published my article “Why Bloat Is Still Software’s Biggest Vulnerability - A 2024 plea for lean software”:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/lean-software-development

Typing in a blog on the dire state of software only to find out that Niklaus Wirth already wrote most of it in 1995. Some things have changed since then, but mostly his article is even more true today (in new ways) than it was in 1995. https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf

Just removed Twitter/X from my phone and wondering just what I'm going to do with all that time now..

nostr:npub1jw50ps6cehf060ytu6c7g4udrha6g002grwamtzvfhk8xk58nekq4k9fry I used 'calidns' for this, which I think still hides out in the powerdns repository. It is a research tool so don't expect something that does what you want out of the box.