Infrastructure
A Department of Energy (DOGE) employee Jordan Wick has been publicly sharing sensitive work-related code on GitHub, including a Twitter DM downloader and geospatial data analysis tools for undersea cables and critical minerals.
Nigerian entrepreneurs are developing local cloud infrastructure alternatives to AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, offering naira-based payments and data sovereignty solutions. The rise of homegrown cloud providers like Nebula, Nobus, and Galaxy addresses challenges faced by Nigerian tech companies dealing with currency depreciation and data localization needs. In response to local competition, AWS has started accepting naira payments, while Nigerian providers leverage shared data centers to build cost-effective infrastructure.
Superglue is an open-source proxy server that simplifies API integration by automatically handling configuration, data transformation, and schema validation. The solution enables seamless connectivity to various data sources while providing features like LLM-powered mapping, smart pagination, and flexible authentication.
SpaceX is launching a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a mini data center to the moon as part of Lonestar Data Holdings' mission to establish lunar data storage facilities. The project aims to protect sensitive data from Earth-based hazards and bypass data sovereignty restrictions through space-based storage solutions. The initiative faces challenges like latency and maintenance but offers advantages including natural cooling and potential renewable power operations.
A massive power outage in Chile affected 8 million homes across 14 regions, disrupting transportation, internet, and mobile services. The government declared a state of emergency and implemented a curfew while investigating the cause of the blackout, which stemmed from a disrupted high-voltage transmission line. By Wednesday, 90% of affected areas had power restored, though 220,000 customers remained without electricity.
A detailed review compares three Canadian VPS providers - Serv3r.net, Globo.Tech, and FullHost - evaluating their performance, pricing, and features. FullHost emerges as the preferred choice, offering better performance and lower costs compared to DigitalOcean, despite lacking IPv6 support. The analysis covers technical specifications, network connectivity, and real-world performance benchmarks.
SubImage, built on the open-source Cartography security graph, helps security teams identify and fix infrastructure vulnerabilities before attackers find them. The platform maps infrastructure, emulates adversary behavior, and provides actionable recommendations through a hosted solution that allows deep customization and integration with various data sources.
Laravel Cloud offers a comprehensive platform for deploying and managing Laravel applications with features like automatic scaling, edge caching, and integrated databases. The platform eliminates configuration complexity while providing enterprise-grade security, performance monitoring, and team collaboration capabilities. Developers can deploy applications quickly through git integration and manage multiple environments with ease.
Thailand plans to cut utilities to five Myanmar border locations linked to Chinese-operated scam centers that have caused billions in losses. The decision, made during an urgent security meeting, targets areas with suspiciously high electricity consumption in Payathonzu, Tachileik, and Myawaddy townships. The action comes ahead of Thai PM's China visit and could affect up to 100,000 people.
The Matrix.org Foundation faces financial challenges despite doubling revenue in 2024, needing $610K to break even and may shut down bridges without $100K by March 2025. The Foundation maintains critical programs including spec maintenance, trust and safety tooling, and network growth initiatives while transitioning from Element dependency to diversified funding sources. Matrix's ecosystem shows growing adoption and urgency for decentralized communication, yet requires sustainable funding to continue its mission of providing sovereign and secure communication.
An in-depth analysis of server reliability issues encountered with Hetzner's AX162 server line, which initially showed a 16x higher crash rate than its predecessor. Through extensive debugging and multiple hardware iterations, the issues were eventually resolved with newer motherboard versions, demonstrating the risks of early hardware adoption.
Lennart Poettering's FOSDEM keynote discusses systemd's 14-year evolution from an init system to a comprehensive suite of Linux OS building blocks, highlighting its growth to 150 binaries, adoption by major distributions, and future focus on boot integrity, IPC improvements, and image-based deployments.
A developer details the migration of searchcode.com's database from MySQL to SQLite, resulting in what might be the world's largest SQLite database at 6.4TB. The migration involved implementing BTRFS compression, upgrading to a powerful server with an Intel Xeon CPU, and successfully maintaining performance across all operations.
PowerOutage.us is a real-time tracking platform that monitors and aggregates power outage data across the United States, updating information every ten minutes.
An analysis of using SQLite in server-side production environments reveals that while technically capable, it introduces unnecessary complexity compared to traditional client-server databases. Despite SQLite's reliability and performance, implementing features like high availability and backups requires additional infrastructure, potentially negating its main benefits.
Larry Ellison advocates for centralizing all national data, including genomic information, into a single Oracle database system for AI analysis, suggesting this approach would improve healthcare and government services. Speaking at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, the Oracle tycoon promoted the idea of comprehensive data unification while dismissing privacy concerns, just months after endorsing real-time population surveillance.
A new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has gained unprecedented access to critical US government systems, including Treasury, USAID, and OPM, bypassing essential security protocols and potentially exposing sensitive data. The breach involves uncleared personnel making system modifications while dismantling security measures, creating vulnerabilities that could be exploited by foreign adversaries.
A detailed account of Checkly's migration from Heroku to AWS in 2022, driven by PostgreSQL upgrade limitations and maintenance window constraints. The migration involved careful planning, data replication strategies, and resulted in a successful transition with minimal downtime, offering valuable insights for similar cloud platform migrations.
Backblaze manages 305,180 drives with a focus on data drives performance and failure rates throughout 2024, revealing an overall improvement in annualized failure rates from 1.70% in 2023 to 1.57% in 2024. The company has successfully integrated new high-capacity 24TB Seagate drives while phasing out older 4TB models, demonstrating their ongoing storage optimization strategy.
Mature, predictable technology ('boring tech') offers significant advantages for system administrators by reducing unexpected behaviors and providing well-documented solutions to common problems. NetBSD exemplifies this concept by being mature and reliable, making it valuable for production environments despite not being the most widely adopted solution.