Writing
Articles
137 articles, newest first.
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OPINION: Why Linus Torvalds’ Decision to Exclude Russian Contributors is Justified
Last week about a dozen maintainers tied to sanctioned Russian companies were removed from the Linux kernel's maintainers list, and Linus Torvalds refused to reverse it. What actually happened, what it does and doesn't…
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A Veteran’s Perspective on the Harmful Impact of Return to Office (RTO)
An open letter to CEOs from someone with thirty years in IT. Forcing technical staff back to the office full time is a step backward. The evidence says hybrid work keeps productivity and cuts attrition, the best…
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Is Red Hat the New SCO?
SCO tried to make money from Linux by claiming to own part of it, and sued until it went bankrupt. Red Hat hasn't sued anyone. But its move to put RHEL's source behind a subscription agreement uses contracts to restrict…
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Repercussions of Closed Sourcing in Open Source Realms
Last week Elastic, which closed its license in 2021, added an open source one back. Three years of relicensing by MongoDB, Elastic, HashiCorp, Redis and now CockroachDB have produced enough evidence to judge the…
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All the Linux (maybe)
How many Linux distributions are there? Hundreds, but they come in a handful of families. A guided tour of the ones worth knowing in mid-2024, family by family, from Debian and Fedora to Arch, NixOS and the Android…
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Gentoo Linux
Gentoo compiles everything from source, optimized for your machine, and for a few years in the early 2000s it was the coolest distribution around. It never became mainstream, and its culture is a cautionary tale about…
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Red Hat vs. Debian
The two great lineages of Linux: one built by a company to sell support, one built by volunteers bound by a social contract. How RHEL and Debian actually differ in release cycles, packaging, security defaults, support…
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The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
The first Linux distributions appeared in 1992 because installing Linux by hand was brutal. A few are still with us more than thirty years later, a few changed everything and vanished, and a few are footnotes. The…
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Introduction to OpenCTI
OpenCTI is an open source platform for organizing cyber threat intelligence: who's attacking whom, with what, and how to spot them. What threat intelligence actually is, how OpenCTI models it with STIX, how it compares…
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Debian turns 31!
On August 16, 1993, a Purdue student named Ian Murdock announced a new Linux distribution built in the open by volunteers. Thirty-one years later Debian is the foundation of Ubuntu, Mint, Raspberry Pi OS, Kali and…
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Postmortem: The CrowdStrike Outage of July 2024
CrowdStrike's full root cause analysis is out. The sensor expected 20 inputs, the new content supplied 21, and every test that should have caught it used a wildcard in exactly the wrong place. A month on, here's the…
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The 2013 Target Data Breach
Attackers got into Target through an HVAC contractor's stolen password and walked off with 40 million card numbers during the 2013 holiday season. Target's own security tools caught them, and nobody acted on the alerts…