bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦

Software developer, entrepreneur, former government regulator, current government advisor, amateur scientist.  https://berthub.eu/

Website: https://berthub.eu/
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6317-0670
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bert-hubert-b05452/

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bert_hubert_at_fosstodon.org@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2025-05-02 18:27:42 UTC

Quick note on giving talks. It is not enough to have great content. Expectations are low. When you start off, quickly establish some kind of bond with your audience. Once that is in place, your listeners will give your presentation a decent chance: https://berthub.eu/draft-klad-tijdelijk-draft/but-first-connect-with-your-audience.html

2025-04-29 11:11:23 UTC

If I wanted to leave fosstodon.org, where should I go? I need a very boring server with no surprising moderators causing upheaval..

2025-04-29 08:59:24 UTC

In 15 minutes Europe will hopefully launch its next climate satellite. The launch can however only be watched via YouTube since we apparently can’t do that ourselves and have to put our government info next to the antivax promo. https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/ESA_Web_TV

2025-04-02 09:35:11 UTC

With great fanfare the #NeoNephos foundation was announced just now over at #Kubecon. It is not that easy to figure out that this means, but it appears to be about Kubernetes-like infrastructure, which I rank as 'step 3' on the cloud scale, where AWS/Google/Azure are at 5.
https://neonephos.org/2025/03/31/the-linux-foundation-announces-the-launch-of-neonephos-to-advance-digital-autonomy-in-europe/ - and some projects are here https://neonephos.org/projects/ - further reading on the kinds of clouds: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-european-cloud-ladder/

2025-03-29 09:11:32 UTC

Doing some work on my unreleased yet widely used availability & performance monitoring thing Simplomon. https://codeberg.org/berthubert/simplomon
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/244/934/989/987/945/original/b2c76f83b569d030.png
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2025-03-25 07:00:51 UTC

Me, being subtle.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/221/776/629/339/567/original/2aac5391e54c611e.png

2025-03-18 16:29:20 UTC

Massive result in Dutch parliament just now. They passed 10 separate motions to enhance digital resilience, run more of our own servers & reduce dependency on US cloud technology.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/dutch-parliament-calls-end-reliance-us-software-2025-03-18/

2025-03-15 16:50:10 UTC

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maybe not the best example (for me), but perhaps I know too much. I'm not putting that much stock in security barriers I can't see. The history is not that great. https://www.techradar.com/pro/amazon-pauses-usd1bn-microsoft-365-rollout-following-russian-security-concerns

2025-03-15 16:33:36 UTC

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well, I did not mean to endorse AWS etc, but I am pretty fed up with linguistic tricks used by at best "container" providers that they are in the same business as AWS/GCP etc.

2025-03-15 16:16:07 UTC

No matter how much you want it, you can't use a clever definition of "cloud native" to pretend that you compete with the AWS/Azure/Google stack. And please don't try to fool people with a wonky definition, it will backfire eventually. "There is no cloud just other people's computers" means you don't understand what modern developers are doing with clouds. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-european-cloud-ladder/

2025-03-11 14:07:36 UTC

With a quote by me. Very happy to see this problem getting traction outside of tech circles: https://www.politico.eu/article/push-for-eurostack-as-eu-us-tech-tensions-grow/

2025-03-09 12:15:42 UTC

Back when COVID-19 hit, savvy observers were aware this was going to be Bad, even as we were surrounded by people who assumed this would not be a big deal. I vividly remember doing last minute shopping with folks thronging around bowls of free food. I knew then not to get anywhere near that. I get the same feeling now. We cling to normalcy but the world is heading to a crazy situation at a rapid clip. Yet our thinking is not yet there. "Surely this will pass?"

2025-03-09 10:19:28 UTC

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it falls out of the sky after a week of no maintenance using proprietary parts. So it doesn't matter. It is lost.

2025-03-03 09:54:27 UTC

A reminder, no matter how hard you try, there are things you can't *meaningfully* explain to people who do not (yet) have the background to understand it. There is only so much gap you can bridge in a single attempt. Some things truly require education and a lot of time. Here Feynman (in pain I think) explains the limits of explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8

2025-03-02 17:27:46 UTC

The article below (and the Dutch version) received over 100k real visitors. Apparently this does interest us. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-your-government-and-society-on-us-clouds/

2025-03-01 09:04:07 UTC

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you fell for it sadly. The reality is not like that. Sanctions mean stuff will stop working just the same. And belief in legal firewalls at this stage is a bit naive.

2025-02-24 19:06:16 UTC

A Dutch government department (not sensitive) has deeplinked an image from my website on their (apparently) autoreloading intranet page. It is a good thing I'm a responsible person (ahum). Here is the number of hits/minute, clearly showing the lunch break, and that far fewer people work on Friday, and that most visits are in the morning. This is a GREAT example of how much data you leak by putting external content on your (government) web page.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/060/420/401/843/961/original/e7c9c532df5216a1.png

2025-02-23 11:53:22 UTC

It is very hard to accept, but it is no longer safe to move EU governments & societies to US clouds. Not only is it dangerous to do so, it is also likely flat out illegal in the near feature. We're trading convenience for utter dependence on a mad king. It should stop.
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-your-government-and-society-on-us-clouds/

2025-02-22 20:40:45 UTC

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I've tried in many places to raise the issue of 'fuzzing' GNSS receivers how they'd react to truly odd data coming from one constellation. Most places did not quite understand the question. Many seemed to assume this would not happen/not be a problem. Only one (important) place assured me they had looked into it.

2025-02-16 09:19:14 UTC

A good day to re-read George Orwell's review of Bertrand Russel's book 'Power'.
"Underlying this is the idea that common sense always wins in the end. And yet the peculiar horror of the present moment is that we cannot be sure that this is so"
https://www.lehman.edu/faculty/rcarey/BRSQ/06may.orwell.htm
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2025-02-09 13:46:44 UTC

I'm no fan of the email oligopoly of Google, Microsoft and Apple. But if you care about how Gmail feels about your email, I highly recommend enabling Google Postmaster Tools for your domain. This tells you how often people flag your email as spam, if your encryption is enabled, if your DKIM/DMARC is working & more.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/974/229/717/399/463/original/e09f155592c29b71.png

2025-02-03 13:14:57 UTC

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I showed you an independent legal analysis. Do you also have a link to one that backs up your claims? That would be mighty interesting. And novel btw.

2025-02-03 12:44:51 UTC

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I recommend reading https://www.ncsc.nl/binaries/ncsc/documenten/publicaties/2022/augustus/16/cloud-act-memo/Cloud+Act+Memo+Final.pdf before continuing to opine on the security of EU data on Microsoft servers.

2025-02-02 13:38:29 UTC

In Dutch, but translation works well. My call for the Dutch government to retain at least a core IT/communication/email/file capability that is independent of US clouds. Named after the iconic Radio Kootwijk which we built in response to the English cutting off our communications with Indonesia in 1916: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/mailen-en-communiceren-zonder-musk-en-trump-cloud-kootwijk/

2025-01-29 16:43:12 UTC

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For how this works, developers are always worried no one is yet running their latest versions. You do them a great favour by deploying and trusting their latest and greatest. It helps everyone gain confidence in the new versions. And on the flip side, it is a lot of work for a developer to try to investigate your issue in years old releases. So everything is just Way better if first reproduce on something recent.

2025-01-29 16:38:38 UTC

A pro-tip from the field - if you want to report a problem to an open source project, it helps TREMENDOUSLY if you can reproduce the issue with a very recent release of their work. In other news, my parliamentary data monitor https://opentk.nl/ is now running on a two week old SQLite version.

2025-01-28 08:00:14 UTC

Always good to go to the source - even on modest hardware you can use Ollama to run different versions of DeepSeek-R1. It sure is long winded in its thinking! This is the 70b version:
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/904/920/928/636/308/original/b208a40fc4dce82f.png

2025-01-27 19:35:57 UTC

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We might have hoped for more immediate breakthroughs, and people were surely expecting those. These days we are working on 'pangenomes' which incorporate all human DNA variation, and these may in fact hold more 'smoking gun' results than the "universal genome" created by the HGP. But because we would not have gotten where we are today without first doing "a" HGP, it has by definition been a success. /end

2025-01-27 19:33:29 UTC

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yes hello, I do know a bit. The human genome project can now be reproduced in a single week. We now have a depth and breadth of DNA knowledge of all kinds of human beings the original project never dreamed of. But to get to where we are today the HGP had to happen first. One of the main discoveries may have been that our genome is far more nuanced and complicated than people thought. There is no chance we would not have done the project. It was inevitable. 1/

2025-01-27 08:22:17 UTC

Interestingly, one person captured by big tech found that Microsoft was perfectly in their rights to POST to you "since we could have no proof a user wasn't behind initiating that POST". Another reader wanted Microsoft to be prosecuted for hacking. Others chimed in how this explained their subscribe/unsubscribe links being weird lately: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/shifting-cyber-norms-microsoft-post/

2025-01-25 12:24:52 UTC

Amount of energy left in Europe's gas storages. We should not get a cold February. Usually this linear prognosis is quite pessimistic late January since the weather improves in February and March. Best be hoping this is true this year as well. Data from GIE Europe. https://www.gie.eu/
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/888/965/282/868/379/original/68e08bc6eb1980c0.png

2025-01-23 15:56:33 UTC

"So how long have you been into cyber" - apparently since October 1989. I must have been insufferable if I read this correctly! Using the PowerC compiler no less! http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm
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2025-01-23 12:05:01 UTC

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I wonder what your thoughts are on the above - Microsoft running JavaScript on links found in email & sending out POSTs, and where this might be heading.

2025-01-23 11:50:33 UTC

Yesterday a user told me they couldn't log in to my parliamentary monitoring site. On investigating, I found that Microsoft email security was logging in on behalf of my user by executing a POST. This broke the single-use sign-on link. Executing POSTs is usually considered unacceptable, and in this way Microsoft again transgresses an important norm. Here's how to deal with the specific POST problem & what might be done about these transgressions in general:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/shifting-cyber-norms-microsoft-post/

2025-01-22 21:59:39 UTC

The GPS augmented landing system in Europe appears to be degraded tonight. Only the parts in red are working well if I understand it correctly. Second image is what this normally looks like. https://egnos.gsc-europa.eu/aviation-portal/aviation-dashboard
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/874/238/641/140/834/original/c7c6a448fecae2d0.png
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/874/246/860/504/711/original/9b4bd23afee5b4e7.png

2025-01-22 19:34:11 UTC

So I send out login links in emails. If the user clicks on the link, JavaScript in that webpage will *POST* to a URL to log in. The login token works only *once*. I now have a user that tells me they can't log in. From the logs, I see a Microsoft IP address POSTing that login link. Is some kind of MS email security product executing JavaScript and POSTING things? Is this a known phenomenon? I've now made this a login *button* which the user has to click again. I hope it helps.

2025-01-20 19:36:28 UTC

Wishing all my American friends strength today & for the future. Please hang in there!

2025-01-19 16:25:17 UTC

Also for your mental health, I recommend never reading the source code for the various implementations of mktime() and strptime(). The authors really try their best, but on reading that, you worry how anything ever works. https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/time/mktime.c
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/855/943/400/422/277/original/4b2b402e88072ece.png

2025-01-19 15:15:28 UTC

So how hard could it be to convert `Fri, 17 Jan 2025 06:07:07` in UTC into a UNIX epoch time_t timestamp, in C or C++? Quite hard. Many things that you'd think would work actually don't. Here I present solutions (with running code), and a little tour through 'struct tm', 'time_t', 'mktime' and 'strptime':
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-to-get-a-unix-epoch-from-a-utc-date-time-string/

2025-01-18 20:11:25 UTC

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I have vague memories of this happening to me too. And that it was standard compliant also. But only vague memories. Tried godbolt yet on different compilers?

2025-01-18 11:48:58 UTC

My life has improved appreciably since I found out you can block people on LinkedIn. And I do so easily if you repeatedly foul up my posts with nonsense comments. Recommended.

2024-12-02 11:40:57 UTC

Maybe fun to know - using #MS365 means that the US government has bulk access to your data, which matters if you are a government yourself. Supporters of Microsoft will tell you you can easily use "double key encryption" to protect your MS365 data against US government snooping. This is how easily you can do that. Hint, it involves GitHub and compiling code: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/double-key-encryption-setup

2024-12-01 14:59:53 UTC

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I read it, it did not really work for me and I don't know who'd benefit from it today, since the state of the art has likely advanced somewhat.

2024-11-27 13:50:54 UTC

Some wizened acquaintances of mine are at risk of this: "When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all." - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/

2024-11-27 09:18:47 UTC

Earlier post, but in recent talks I'm encountering more and more organizations that are losing their last technical people. You can outsource a lot, but most places have a core thing that they should really own. And once your own technical department is no longer viable, you are hosed. The longer story: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/your-tech-my-tech/

2024-11-24 17:28:11 UTC

I made a to-scale picture of American and European cloud players, but you may have to squint a bit.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/539/104/818/422/430/original/d70e950f540e4010.png

2024-11-24 13:22:54 UTC

If you are of a certain age.. #wordperfect51
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2024-11-23 21:29:50 UTC

A blast from the past - I used to make a lot of plots of European natural gas usage & imports. This eventually became hard to do, but I've restarted plotting the energy content of gas storage sites in Europe, which are rumored to be emptying faster than before. This appears to be true. The line extends until the 20th of April 2025, which is the usual start of filling season.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/534/388/572/720/020/original/d871822a58f54a51.png

2024-11-23 14:15:16 UTC

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it maybe good to know that node_exporter is a serious CPU hog itself, and transports enormous amounts of data. The concept is good though.

2024-11-18 21:03:12 UTC

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added an update. you are one of the two readers I mention:
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/505/978/875/759/070/original/bc441fc347c83c7c.png

2024-11-18 10:17:08 UTC

Kind of depressing that initial reactions to my well sourced article "we don't know why people are voting like that" are from people that are very sure that THEY do know why people are voting like that.

2024-11-18 09:45:06 UTC

After every terrible election result we get 100s of pieces telling us exactly why this happened. But the supposed reasons are all different & conflicting. Below I argue we should take a leaf out of the UK's Home Intelligence WW2 project, where they fought propaganda & tracked "the vibes" to keep everyone on board with the war effort. We only have a few elections left to get to grips with populism, so we should stop the amateur hour sleuthing & figure things out:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/we-dont-know-why-people-are-voting-like-that/

2024-09-05 12:39:34 UTC

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I also touch on this great insight in my piece on being useful, which can happen in many https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/on-being-useful/

2024-09-05 12:37:45 UTC

Some odd pushback on this big truth. We’d all like to make Big Change happen. But a lot of progress comes from supporting small improvements (with hard work) or providing friction for bad ideas. In the end it adds up.
From: @npub1n7k…7g0f
https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/113083660841393614

2024-09-01 22:31:04 UTC

I keep coming back to this one neat trick to parallelize work in C++ with no hassle. Currently using it to index 5 months of Dutch parliamentary documents in under a minute.
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/simple-parallelism-idiom/

2024-08-27 11:15:28 UTC

Source unknown. #boeing
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/033/694/954/463/746/original/b4458dcb82536b23.jpeg

2024-08-27 09:46:04 UTC

Every time I see this ad I conclude that if this is the output of your AI-amplified marketing suite, that I can do without: https://www.infosys.com/aster.html
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/033/339/485/698/956/original/3e277a9c92d65692.jpeg

2024-08-27 07:33:36 UTC

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ik ben er donderdag!
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/032/821/952/960/060/original/099288efcac02b43.jpeg

2024-08-19 16:00:00 UTC

Recently, a Dutch hacker found a vulnerability allowing him to shut down 4 million solar power installations. A handful of mostly non-European places manage perhaps 100 GW of solar power in the EU. Any mishap there, or heaven forbid, a compromise, could easily shut down so much power that the European electricity grid would collapse. Shockingly, we regulate these massive control panels as if they are online birthday calendars. And that must change. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-power-plants-in-the-cloud/

2024-08-10 23:20:56 UTC

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my that is a juicy paper! And indeed highly applicable to my post. But it also has me thinking about other complex systems and people’s estimates of their reliability… thanks for the pointer!

2024-08-05 16:32:08 UTC

Any fans of nuclear energy that want to read a draft of my upcoming blog post that predicts a disappointing future for nuclear? If there is good nuclear news I'm not aware of, I'd love to hear it! Email bert@hubertnet.nl or try DM here or BertHubert.72 on Signal.

2024-07-25 14:05:49 UTC

This was no fun to write, but over the past years, I've come to the conclusion that Gaia-X is not ever going to deliver a working European cloud, not even indirectly. But worse, its very existence, expense and prominence form a distraction that is holding us all back. It is time to abandon Gaia-X.
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-distraction/

2024-05-11 22:28:19 UTC

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so the weird thing is that I have to work very hard to write text that people are prepared to believe. Or even read. I don't see people believing anything that is written. But perhaps I pick my friends carefully!