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The 47-day certificate: faster treadmill, same broken foundation

Managing TLS certificates has become pretty crazy: Over the years validity was cut down from several years to two years to one year to half a year now. In a few years it will be only a little more than one month, with the additional requirement to basically continuously prove domain control.

Since I'm not using Let's Encrypt over here, these days I have to re-submit a CSR to my certificate provider every half a year for every domain, prove domain ownership, install the new certificate (chain), and update my DANE/TLSA records. Soon continuous domain control validation will have to be added as an additional secondary process to the domain reactivation/renewal process.

Git celebrating its 20th anniversary

Ideas for building on Git's concepts and capabilities

This month, Git is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Over the past two decades, this version control system has become the de facto standard for software version management and development. Furthermore, Git forms the foundation of major platforms such as GitHub and GitLab, supporting tens of millions of users from all over the world. Currently 95 percent of all developers use Git as their primary version control system.

After taking a brief look at the origins of Git and what has been accomplished in software version management over the past 20 years, this article highlights several adjacent domains where Git's versioning concepts can be or already have been successfully applied. In addition we present various ideas for extending Git's capabilities and usefulness in significant ways.

Keuring Honda MT5 als motorfiets

Een nieuw jaar, een nieuw project: Ik heb mijn oude Honda MT5 brommer nooit verkocht, maar altijd meeverhuisd. Inmiddels is hij 37 jaar oud en zowaar een klassieker aan het worden.

Naar ik begrijp is de keuring van deze brommer als motorfiets nu vooral een administratieve aangelegenheid, aangezien precies hetzelfde (overgedimensioneerde) frame en dezelfde achterbrug van dit type (AD01) destijds in Duitsland werden gebruikt voor de MT8 (type HD02).

Honda M motorblokken

Hier verzamel ik technische informatie over de motorblokken van de Honda M serie.

New decentralised paradigms for online infrastructures [4.5.7.2]

The USA and China both have their own online platforms for mail/messaging, (social) media, business, commerce and cloud services. These services are run by Internet conglomerates such as Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft in the USA, and in China the Alibaba Group, Baidu and Tencent. Even Russia has its own conglomerates and platforms, e.g. the Mail.ru Group (which also owns ICQ, Odnoklassniki and VKontakte), Rambler and Yandex.

Despite their geo-economic differences, the underlying model for all of these services is similar: a highly centralised platform economy/ecosystem built as a walled garden, bringing together very large numbers of users, network effects,{footnote}Rufus Pollock, founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) calls these 'platform effects' in his 2018 book 'The Open Revolution' (as discussed in section <7.1.17>).{/footnote} and surveillance capitalism or (state) mass surveillance.

Even though Europe has many platform companies, it lacks this type of large, powerful Internet conglomerate. European citizens and organisations have traditionally piggybacked on US-based platforms.

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