Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life

When this book was presented as available to review, I jumped for it: who does not love reading a nice bit of computing history, as told by a well-known author (affectionaly known as “Uncle Bob”), one that has been immersed in computing since forever… What is not to like there? Reading on, the book does not disappoint. Much to the contrary, it digs into details absent in most computer history books that, being an Operating Systems and Computer Architecture geek, I absolutely enjoyed. But let me first address the book’s organization. The book is split in four parts. Part 1,...

Many people that were once enthusiast Twitter users have dropped as a direct or indirect effect of its ownership change and the following policy changes. Given Twitter X is getting each time more irrelevant, it is less interesting and enciting for more and more people… But also, its current core users (mostly, hate-apologists of the right-wing mindset that finds conspiration theories everywhere) are becoming more commonplace, and by sheer probability (if not for algorithmic bias), every time it becomes more likely a given piece of content will be linked to what their authors would classify as crap. So, there has...

Just wanted to share… I enjoy reading George V. Neville’s Kode Vicious column, which regularly appears on some of ACM’s publications I follow, such as ACM Queue or Communications. Today I was very pleasantly surprised, while reading the column titled «Can’t we have nice things» Kode Vicious answers to a question on why computing has nothing comparable to the beauty of ancient physics laboratories turned into museums (i.e. Faraday’s laboratory) by giving a great hat tip to a project stemmed off Debian, and where many of my good Debian friends spend a lot of their energies: Reproducible builds. KV says:...

“The Comedy of Computation” is not an easy book to review. It is a much enjoyable book that analyzes several examples of how “being computational” has been approached across literary genres in the last century — how authors of stories, novels, theatrical plays and movies, focusing on comedic genres, have understood the role of the computer in defining human relations, reactions and even self-image. Mangrum structures his work in six thematic chapters, where he presents different angles on human society: How have racial stereotypes advanced in human imagination and perception about a future where we interact with mechanical or computational...

So, for the first year, this year’s DebConf had the “DebConf Academic Track”, that is, content for a one-day-long set of short sessions, for which of them there was a written article presenting the content — often with a very academic format, but not necessarily. I hope that for future DebConfs we will continue to hold this track, and that we can help bridge the gap: to get people that are not usually from the academic / universitary prepare content that will be formally expressed and included in a long-lasting, indexed book of proceedings. We did have (informal) proceedings in...

As I often do, this year I have also prepared a set of personalized maps for your OpenPGP keysigning in DebConf25, in Brest! What is that, dare you ask? One of the not-to-be-missed traditions of DebConf is a Key-Signing Party (KSP) that spans the whole conference! Travelling from all the corners of the world to a single, large group gathering, we have the ideal opportunity to spread some communicable diseases trust on your peers’ identities and strengthen Debian’s OpenPGP keyring. But whom should you approach for keysigning? Go find yourself in the nice listing I have prepared. By clicking on...

If we ever thought a couple of years or decades of constant use would get humankind to understand how an asymetric key pair is to be handled… It’s time we moved back to square one. I had to do an online tramit with the Mexican federal government to get a statement certifying I successfully finished my studies, and I found this jewel of user interface: So… I have to: Submit the asymetric key I use for tax purposes, as that’s the ID the government has registered for me. OK, I didn’t expect it to be used for this purpose as...

Large language models (LLMs) have awed the world, emerging as the fastest-growing application of all time–ChatGPT reached 100 million active users in January 2023, just two months after its launch. After an initial cycle, they have gradually been mostly accepted and incorporated into various workflows, and their basic mechanics are no longer beyond the understanding of people with moderate computer literacy. Now, given that the technology is better understood, we face the question of how convenient LLM chatbots are for different occupations. This paper embarks on the question of whether LLMs can be useful for networking applications. This paper systematizes...

Internet users, software developers, academics, entrepreneurs – basically everybody is now aware of the importance of considering privacy as a core part of our online experience. User demand, and various national or regional laws, have made privacy a continuously present subject. And privacy is such an all-encompassing, complex topic, the angles from which it can be studied seems never to finish; I recommend computer networking-oriented newcomers to the topic to refer to Brian Kernighan’s excellent work [1]. However, how do regular people –like ourselves, in our many capacities– feel about privacy? Lukas Antoine presents a series of experiments aiming at...

Digital humanities is a young–though established–field. It deals with different expressions in which digital data manipulation techniques can be applied and used to analyze subjects that are identified as belonging to the humanities. Although most often used to analyze different aspects of literature or social network analysis, it can also be applied to other humanistic disciplines or artistic expressions. Digital humanities employs many tools, but those categorized as big data are among the most frequently employed. This book samples different takes on digital humanities, with the particularity that it focuses on Ibero-American uses. It is worth noting that this book...