Writing
Articles
137 articles, newest first.
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The Rise and Fall of Networking Giants
Wang, Banyan and Novell each owned a piece of the office computer before the internet. Each was beaten not by a better product but by a shift in what everyone else had standardized on. How they rose, why they fell, and…
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What is Authentik SSO?
Authentik is an open source identity provider you can run yourself: single sign-on over OIDC, SAML and LDAP, MFA, and a proxy that puts a login in front of apps that have none. What it does, how it compares with…
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Who is DARPA?
A small Pentagon agency with no labs of its own funded the beginnings of the internet, Unix's networking, self-driving cars and the voice assistant in your phone. How DARPA works, what it actually built (and what it…
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Challenging the Reign of UNIX and Linux
Every serious operating system in use today is either Unix, Unix-like or Windows, and the core ideas date from the 1970s. Is it time for something new? The projects trying, from Fuchsia and seL4 to Redox and Huawei's…
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NOSTALGIA: V-DAY!!!!
On March 6, 1992, the world braced for a computer virus that was supposed to wipe five million hard drives. It hit a few thousand. The Michelangelo scare was the first time a computer virus became evening news, and it…
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OPINION: How Politics Threaten Innovation
Open source only works because code crosses borders freely and someone pays the people who maintain it. Three political currents are pushing against both: markets that reward taking without giving back, nationalism that…
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FreePBX Moves to Debian
FreePBX 17, due any day now, leaves its CentOS-based distro behind and installs on Debian 12 instead. CentOS 7 reached end of life a month ago, so the timing isn't a coincidence. Why the move is right, what changes for…
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The Linux Foundation Certifications
The Linux Foundation's certifications are hands-on exams on live systems, which makes them harder to cram for and more meaningful when you pass. Which ones exist in mid-2024, how they compare with Red Hat, CompTIA and…
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CrowdStrike Post-Mortem
Nine days after the outage, CrowdStrike has published a preliminary review. A test that should have caught the bad update passed because the test itself had a bug, and the content went to every machine at once. What the…
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Embracing the New
The first thing many people do on a new Linux desktop is make it look like Windows. That's understandable, and it leaves most of the good parts unused. Why it's worth learning what GNOME and KDE Plasma actually do…
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The Transformative Power of Open Source
If you had to pick one open source project that changed how all software is made, it's Git. Not because of a feature list, but because of one design decision, every copy is complete, that turned forking from a hostile…
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Speculative Future Where Microsoft Embraces Linux as the Core of Windows
A thought experiment, clearly labeled. Microsoft already ships a Linux kernel inside Windows, runs Azure's networking on Linux and maintains its own Linux distribution. What would it take for the next Windows to run on…