The 19-inch rack format with rack-units of 1.75 inches (44.45 mm) was established as a standard by AT&T around 1922 in order to reduce the space required for repeater and termination equipment in a telephone company central office. The earliest repeaters from 1914 were installed in ad hoc fashion on shelves, in wooden boxes and cabinets. Once serial production started, they were built into custom-made racks, one per repeater. But in light of the rapid growth of the toll network, the engineering department of AT&T undertook a systematic redesign, resulting in a family of modular factory-assembled panels all "designed to mount on vertical supports spaced 191⁄2 inches between centers. The height of the different panels will vary, ... but ... in all cases to be a whole multiple of 13⁄4 inches".

Some authentication means are more secure than others: using a hardware device designed to store a private key without making it possible to ever extract it is more secure than storing the private key in a file. Unfortunately the most secure ones are also more painful to use. Users who have their keys on a device need to carry the device with them, need to type their PIN code every time they initiate a SSH session, etc. This makes it quite difficult to advocate ways more secure than passwords and files for use cases where the security of the access is not the priority.

So the question is: is it possible to store the authentication material more securely than in a file (which can be stolen by some malware), without changing the user experience?

And the answer is: yes, using a TPM!

Heute spielen wir wieder Bäumchen wechsel Dich und Tim und Khaleesi führen durch die Sendung. Dabei wird unsere Nerd Cred auf eine harte Probe gestellt und wir prüfen unsere Affinität zu Star Trek, Star Wars, Herr der Ringe und Rollenspielen. Dazu einige gute Nachrichten rund um die Chatkontrolle und die (erfolgreichen) Klagen der Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte, der wöchentliche Musk-Rant und Berichte über depressive Suchmaschinen.

Das Gesundheitsministerium hat seine Pläne für die elektronische Patientenakte vorgestellt und am besten soll jetzt alles ganz schnell gehen, ohne viel Gezeter um Datenschutz. Aber wir tun gut daran, Gesundheitssysteme nicht aus Sicht der Mehrheit zu denken, sondern aus Sicht derer, die von solchen Systemen diskriminiert werden könnten, schreibt unsere Kolumnistin.

Fingerabdruck
Die Polizei darf einen Fingerabdruck abnehmen, um ein Mobiltelefon zu entsperren, hat das Landgericht Ravensburg entschieden. Es hagelt Kritik von Anwälten.

WiFi LoRa 32 is a classic IoT dev-board designed & produced by Heltec Automation. Since its launch in 2017, it has been loved by developers and makers. The newly launched V3 version has the same pin sequence as the V2 version and retains Wi-Fi, BLE, LoRa, OLED display, and other functions.

It is the best option for smart cities, farms, homes, industrial control, house security, wireless meter reading, and IoT developers.

Christian Wagner (home.social/@obichan) on Twitter: "@leyrer @spacealpaka Erfunden habens das Ding in OÖ/Steyr, aber sitzen wird es in Wien beim Klimek. Uni- und Wissenschaftspolitik in OÖ ist nur mehr Buzzword Bingo. Hier und noch mehr bei der "Digitalisierungs Uni" 🤡" / Twitter

Test how well your mailserver delivers emails!

We test various security (DNSSEC, TLS, DANE, MTA-STS) and deliverability (IPv6) features your server should support when sending mail. (details)

Bei der Umstellung von der Bürgerkarte auf den Elektronischen Identitätsnachweis (E-ID) gibt es „wesentliche Verzögerungen“. Ursprünglich für Anfang 2020 angepeilt, kündigten die zuständigen Ministerien den Echtbetrieb jetzt für Mitte 2023 an, geht aus einem heute veröffentlichten Rechnungshofbericht (RH) hervor.

Mängel fanden die Prüfer und Prüferinnen vor allem im früher zuständigen Wirtschaftsressort, dort kam es wegen fehlender Finanzierung und Personal zu einem längeren Projektstopp.

At law firm Nixon Peabody LLP, associates have started saying no to working weekends, prompting partners to ask more people to help complete time-sensitive work.

“The passion that we used to see in work is lower now, and you find it in fewer people—at least in the last two years,” says Sumithra Jagannath, president of ZED Digital, which makes digital ticket scanners.

Iosevka is an open-source, sans-serif + slab-serif, monospace + quasi‑proportional typeface family, designed for writing code, using in terminals, and preparing technical documents.

The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing. If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs, the reason is that everybody else is doing it. Layoffs are the result of imitative behavior and are not particularly evidence-based.

I’ve had people say to me that they know layoffs are harmful to company well-being, let alone the well-being of employees, and don’t accomplish much, but everybody is doing layoffs and their board is asking why they aren’t doing layoffs also.

Do you think layoffs in tech are some indication of a tech bubble bursting or the company preparing for a recession?

Could there be a tech recession? Yes. Was there a bubble in valuations? Absolutely. Did Meta overhire? Probably. But is that why they are laying people off? Of course not. Meta has plenty of money. These companies are all making money. They are doing it because other companies are doing it.

Die Vision: Dein Browser identifiziert sich gegenüber dem Provider mit einer eID, und die Filterregeln für Deine IP werden gemäß Deinem Alter/Jugendschutz-Status eingestellt. Außerdem bist Du bei an TrustPID teilnehmenden Sites automatisch eingeloggt, ganz ohne Paßwort und "trotz" TLS.

Sicherheit allerorten, ohne Paßwort, "datenschutzkonform" und souverän!

The fundamental problem of shells is they are required to be two things.

A high-frequency REPL, which requires terseness, short command names, little to no syntax, implicit rather than explicit, so as to minimize the duration of REPL cycles.
A programming language, which requires readable and maintainable syntax, static types, modules, visibility, declarations, explicit configuration rather than implicit conventions.

And you can’t do both. You can’t be explicit and implicit, you can’t be terse and readable, you can’t be flexible and robust.

Shells optimize the former case, so that you can write cat beef.txt | grep "lasagna" | sort -n | uniq instead of:

with open(Path("beef.txt")) as stream:
lines = filter(
stream.readlines(),
lambda line: re.match(line, "lasagna") is not None
)
print(set(reverse(sorted(lines))))

Which does not spark joy.

So the programming language aspect suffers: shell scripts are an unreadable nightmare of stringly-typed code resembling cyphertext.

Shell is a thing you want to understand and then not use, because you learned to understand it. (in German, from 1998 )

For the rest of this discussion, we assume “Python 3” as an instance of “something else”, but if you are older than 50, feel free to use “Perl” instead.

If you are already doing Python, the rest of this is not for you. You already know these things.

Dutch privacy negotiators have spurred major changes at Google, Microsoft and Zoom, using a landmark European data protection law as a lever.

In the past 10 years, the median size for a desktop webpage has gone from 468 KB to 2284 KB, a 388.3% increase. For mobile, this jump is even more staggering — 145 KB to 2010 KB — a whopping 1288.1% increase.

That’s a lot of weight to ship over a network, especially for mobile. As a result, users experience terrible UX, slow loading times, and a lack of interactivity until everything is rendered. But all that code is necessary to make our sites work the way we want.

This is the problem with being a frontend dev today. What started out fun for frontend developers, building shit-hot sites with all the bells and whistles, has kinda turned into not fun. We’re now fighting different browsers to support, slow networks to ship code over, and intermittent, mobile connections. Supporting all these permutations is a giant headache.

How do we square this circle? By heading back to the server (Swiss basement not required).

This is an ongoing effort for documenting and understanding the Austrian "ID Wallet" apps:

Digitales Amt
eAusweise

First, the user logs in at the Digitales Amt app. Then, the eAusweise app is set-up, which sends an intent to the first app.

Based on a reverse-analysis, the ./demo.py script re-implements this procedure. After a successfull run, it provides you with TLS Client Certificates (and keys) for use with:

The Digitales Amt backend API endpoints
The eAusweise backend API endpoints

You will need some eIDAS compliant identity token during the process, such as the german national identity card.

Mobilizon is your federated organization and mobilization platform. Gather people with a convivial, ethical, and emancipating tool.

The strength in hiring, which occurred despite layoffs in the technology sector as well as in sectors like housing and finance that are sensitive to interest rates, poured cold water on market expectations that the U.S. central bank was close to pausing its monetary policy tightening cycle.