2024-10-05 Random Tech News

William Johnston

William Johnston

— 5 min read

Hey folks!

I'm trying out something new. At two jobs now, I've ended up being the person who posts things in some channel and hears from time to time that folks follow tech news by reading that channel. Whelp, let's try an email newsletter. I'm using self-hosted Ghost, like any self-respecting sysadmin with too much time on their hands.

The basic idea will be that this will come out on Fridays, usually. If I feel like it. Honestly, I'm not promising much. You might not get this some weeks. You might not see this for several weeks. Sometimes it'll be short. Sometimes it'll be long. Sometimes it'll have a bunch of comments from me. Sometimes they won't. This will generally just reflect things I'm interested in. It might be useful to you. Please unsubscribe if it isn't.

Thanks for reading!
~William

General tech news

iOS 18 Quick Tips; Security Edition
Having recently updated to iOS 18, there are a couple of features that I’ve immediately enabled now that they’re available! I’m going to share with you what those features are, and, a security tip that has been available prior to the release of iOS 18 too. iOS 18 There are
Scott HelmeScott Helme

I didn't know about a bunch of these features. Probably a bit more paranoid than I would use, but there are a few financial and such apps that might be worth turning on per-app FaceID.

Matt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me’
WordPress’s WP Engine battle is dividing the community.
The Verge

This is quite bad. Personally, I think egos being involved are the first issue. But I also wonder whether the concept of WordPress the codebase, wordpress.org the infrastructure, and Automattic the company need to be separated more. Like, maybe have a use agreement for wordpress.org that allows free use by any company with less than $N in revenue or maybe based on the number of WordPress sites in combination with revenue. Basically, if you host WordPress sites for a living, you probably can pay for some amount of hosting. Insert side rant about how I initially used "X" as the placeholder for a number, and then changed to "N" to avoid confusion with the dumpster fire formerly known as Twitter, which, by the way, is how I will refer to that site.

Solving the Maker-Taker problem
How open source projects can balance Makers and Takers: lessons from Drupal’s contribution credit system and recommendations for WordPress and other open source communities.
Dries BuytaertDries Buytaert

Great article from the creator of Drupal about how they have avoided some of the issues WordPress is dealing with right now.

Security and security-adjacent

Cloudflare blocks largest recorded DDoS attack peaking at 3.8Tbps
During a distributed denial-of-service campaign targeting organizations in the financial services, internet, and telecommunications sectors, volumetric attacks peaked at 3.8 terabits per second, the largest publicly recorded to date. The assault consisted of a “month-long” barrage of more than 100 hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks flood.
BleepingComputerIonut Ilascu

A glimpse into the world of DDoS attacks. Sadly, the only real mitigation today is to stick your site behind a massive CDN like Akamai, Cloudflare, CloudFront, Fastly, Azure, et cetera. Sites like yours truly would go down instantly under an attack like this.

Privacy

(Using a shared link from another newsletter. May have a paywall.) I really don't like this headline… I sympathize with how hard it is to build a social media site, but seriously, if you have to bug people to upload their entire contact list without the consent of the folks in that list then you probably shouldn't exist. Hopefully this is the beginning of this being viewed as a really bad practice that hopefully ends in favor of less invasive practices.

Brain dump of the week

Recently I learned that my mental model of Cloudflare and AWS as both being "at-cost" domain registrars and thus basically identical is wrong. First, I assumed that this meant the cost at both would be the same. This is not the case. For example, at time of writing, a .link TLD domain costs $7.18/year at Cloudflare and $5/year at AWS. Why? I don't know, he's on third, and I don't give a darn!

Also, it turns out that Cloudflare has Opinions about how you configure your DNS. I usually just register at AWS, and then point the domain NS records at Opalstack, where I host everything, and manage DNS in Opalstack (thus saving $1/month in AWS hosted zone fees). But Cloudflare doesn't let you just point a whole domain at another DNS server (although you can set up an NS delegation for a subdomain).

I got this into mess because I tried to register the domain for this newsletter on AWS, and it failed with an utterly useless message:

We can't finish registering your domain. Contact AWS Support at https://console.aws.amazon.com/support/home?region=us-east-1#/case/create?issueType=customer-service&serviceCode=service-domains&categoryCode=registration-issue for further information.

I filed the ticket as requested, and a day or so later got this response:

Thanks for your patience while our system conducted a review. We have finished our review and have lifted the domain registration hold off your account.

I have no clue what is going on here… Why was there a domain registration hold? But it works now… I'm not even going to bother searching for an answer. Feel free to email me if you have the answer.

Unrelated, another reason for starting this newsletter is moving to a new job! I've left the lovely folks at Drip (who are hiring, if you are interested) to work for Solventum.

As part of this, I got disconnected from the company 1Password account, and now have to pay for my family subscription again. I briefly looked into just using iCloud Passwords, but features like the 1Password CLI and the SSH-Agent integration keeps me on the 1Password product. I also didn't want to see how much better or worse the website autofill is. It is kind of useful how Passkeys work in iCloud, and how the "Sign In With Apple" accounts show up in iCloud Passwords.