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To counter some of the (valid) privacy concerns around TPM unlocked FDE, one big benefit is when it comes to decommissioning physically secure machines. If you aren’t concerned about the evil maid scenario and have reason to avoid network based unlocking, TPM unlocked FDE keeps your machines remotely rebootable while still allowing you pull a disk and send it for secure shredding at server EOL. That is to say, if your scenario is “encrypted at rest on a physically secure and trusted server” (more concerned with the storage medium alone), it’s a good fit. It means you’re not reliant on the OEMs opaque secure erase functionality.

This works equally well on Debian 13, but I found that installing Dracut (which will be the default from Debian 14 onwards) made the whole process smoother.

I found a small bug in QoS handling in the OpenSSH client under specific conditions. It had a big impact on my workflow but wasn’t a complete showstopper and might not have had an obvious impact on the broader user base. I raised an issue on the tracker and within a day I had a test build, a confirmed fix and a note of which release would carry the fix. It was one of the most positive experiences I’ve had reporting a bug, especially for a non-security issue.

I know this comment doesn’t add much to the conversation about this release, but I’m very grateful to Damien (who handled the issue) and the team for the wonderful job they’re doing on such a core piece of software.

Coincidentally (?) we’ve seen a huge uptick in failed login attempts to our MFA-protected admin accounts on our self-hosted Gitlab CE instance today. They’re coming from thousands of IPs across hundreds of networks (VPS providers and, apparently, residential proxies).

This book looks like it’s targeted squarely at people like me!

I’ve been a software engineer for the last couple of decades and I’ve tinkered with microcontrollers as a hobby but always been limited by my lack of electronics knowledge - very much trial and error to get a project far enough to be able to focus on the firmware (which is more my domain). I want to bridge the knowledge gap there.

My only formal electronics education was first year introduction to analog and digital circuits module at university two decades ago, led by a lecturer who assumed students had a huge corpus of pre-existing knowledge (and who I now suspect would have preferred to be supervising his PhD students and conducting research but had to make up the teaching hours - which I do understand).

I will definitely pick up a copy. However, Amazon UK (to avoid the NoStarch UPS shipping cost of $24) won’t get it to me until November. I’m excited to receive it.

I used to participate in a bunch of forums across an range of topics and in recent years considered starting one myself but with the OSA (Online Safety Act) in the UK, it’s not worth the personal risk.

But under Ofcom rules, it is social media if we are to assume that they’ll apply the same scoping as the Online Safety Act does for user-to-user services. I think a lot of comments here assume that only sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter/X would be in scope, but I see no reason why they wouldn’t use the same definitions from the OSA (essentially any site where user-to-user communication and content posting takes place, including forums and aggregators).

Yes!! The Dell WD19 was notorious for that. My wife’s company used those - we couldn’t leave her WFH dock connected to our home network because of the wild broadcast storms causing our core switch to stop processing frames from her home office desktop switch. My org used HP Dock G5 units which behaved much better (besides the occasional firmware update killing video output until a power cycle, and inconsistent MAC address pass through between hardware revisions).

An extra 4GB per user on our NFS home file server is going to be a huge pain (several thousand students). And for our Windows lab machines, they end up in AppData\Local (which isn’t redirected for operational reasons) so we either leave the profiles in place and let them accumulate (suboptimal) or clear out the profiles as we normally do and let it redownload, over and over again.

As much as I’m against unexpected 4GB bloat for an AI model, I’d much prefer it to install one copy, system-wide. 4GB per Windows or Linux lab machine, rather than a 4TB minimum load on our NFS server and 4GB downloads per user, per machine on our Windows labs.

I actually found it really reassuring and a little enlightening that he had so little to say about those technologies. I find it very easy to get sucked into a technology vortex (especially on Hacker News), where the imposter syndrome creeps in and you feel like a failure for not knowing some trendy technology that “everyone knows, duh!”. The next time I feel like that, I’m going to remind myself that Brian Kernighan doesn’t know Nix, only used Rust once (and didn’t like it) and doesn’t even know what Linux distro he uses. And no one would ever accuse him of being an imposter or a failure!

Fortunately it’s only £16.40 with VAT and shipping to the UK. Approx $21.85. Comparable to the £9 M5Stack AtomS3 Lite (ESP32-S3) I picked up from Pi Hut recently.

Anyone who has maintained code that written by engineers new to the industry, who didn’t understand the context of a system or the underlying principles of what they’re writing, may disagree.