Bert Hubert's writings

Recently the Dutch Electoral Board (where I am also a very part time advisor) invited me to do a talk reflecting on their open source Abacus vote tabulation software. Much software is now provided as a service, and is typically deployed continuously (CD, continuous deployment), surrounded by enough automated testing (CI, continuous integration)...

Welkom! Goed inzicht in ons parlement is belangrijk, soms omdat er dingen in het nieuws zijn. En soms juist omdat dingen (nog) niet in het nieuws zijn, maar er binnenkort wel besluiten over genomen gaan worden. De Tweede Kamer publiceert alles wat ze doen via een technische API, en dat is echt geweldig. Hierdoor kunnen we op Internet eigen...

Naar aanleiding van veel misverstanden hier een kort stukje over: Helpt het als Microsoft/Google/Amazon beloven dat mijn gegevens op servers in de EU worden opgeslagen? Kan ik met “eigen sleutels” / bring your own key / double key encryption / aparte opslag, mijn data in praktische zin beschermen tegen Amerikaanse spionage? Kan ik me zo...

Afgelopen 25 november hield ik (op persoonlijke titel) een praatje bij de Kiesraad over de toestand van de cloud, met specifieke aandacht voor de Nederlandse overheid. Iedere organisatie ziet zich nu geconfronteerd met de vrijwel verplichte gang naar de cloud. Voor een schoenenwinkel of broodjeszaak is het niet zo’n halszaak om over te gaan naar...

Here I collect for various (scientific) fields the absolutely most important books. Totemic Tomes if you will. Books you can’t miss. Books that everyone in a field should have read, or belatedly discover they haven’t yet. The book you wish you’d known about before wading through several mediocre works. “I have always imagined that paradise will...

Gisteren pleitte de minister van Justitie & Veiligheid voor nieuwe bevoegdheden voor de politie om preventief mee te mogen kijken in besloten chatgroepen: Uit de Volkskrant De minister legitimeert dit met deze motie van de Tweede Kamer, die echter iets anders zegt. En de details maken uit. Historisch gezien doet de politie onderzoek naar concrete...

We get tons of articles and reports explaining why people just voted like that. However, even for specific elections, these explanations are wildly inconsistent and can’t all be true. In essence, we don’t understand it and we don’t get it. We reasonable people (who care about democracy, rule of law, human rights etc) stand no chance at all to...

Dit stuk is ook verschenen op Villamedia.nl In Jurassic Park weet men te ontsnappen aan de dinosaurussen, omdat het gezichtsvermogen van deze dieren gebaseerd zou zijn op beweging: Nou weet ik niet of dat waar is, maar wat ik wel weet is dat het gezichtsvermogen van de politiek, en specifiek de Tweede Kamer, totaal gebaseerd is op journalistieke...

Welkom! Goed inzicht in ons parlement is belangrijk, soms omdat er dingen in het nieuws zijn. En soms juist omdat dingen (nog) niet in het nieuws zijn, maar er binnenkort wel besluiten over genomen gaan worden. De Tweede Kamer publiceert alles wat ze doen via een technische API, en dat is echt geweldig. Hierdoor kunnen we op Internet eigen...

On the 22nd of October, I presented at the annual conference of my beloved NLNOG, the community of Dutch network operators. NLNOG is a national treasure, an international treasure even, since we do everything in English. NLNOG holds several events every year, where we entertain and educate each other with talks on new and old technologies. We...

English: Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech Nu we ons meer en meer zorgen maken over de dominantie van ‘big tech’ wordt Open Source vaak genoemd als alternatief, zeker nu het erop lijkt dat onze overheden een Totale Migratie naar Microsoft aan het uitvoeren zijn. Nou zegt men dat je appels en peren niet kunt vergelijken, maar...

This is the English version of this Dutch piece. Now that we’re increasingly concerned about the dominance of ‘big tech’, Open Source is often mentioned as an alternative, especially now that it seems our governments are carrying out a Total Migration to Microsoft. In Dutch we say you can’t compare apples and pears, but that’s not entirely true....

I prefer not to spend too much time talking about myself, but I also like to make it clear who I am and what I do, so people don’t have to guess (because they might guess wrong). I studied physics at Delft University of Technology, but dropped out somewhere around 40%. I still love physics though. Until relatively recently I was a part time...

Eerder deze week verscheen het rapport van de Auditdienst Rijk en daar staat het helder in: het is zo “dat straks (bijna) de volledige Rijksoverheid gebruik maakt van MS 365”. En voor de zekerheid, verderop staat: “Hiermee wordt de on-premises werkplek van de Rijksoverheid verplaatst naar de public cloud [van Microsoft]”. Het gaat dus gebeuren,...

A quick update - The European Commission and EU member states have been pondering, for years now, if they should force WhatsApp/Apple/Signal/Telegram to scan all our private messages for suspected child sexual abuse material (CSAM). For various reasons it is a horrendous idea to break end to end encryption in this likely highly ineffective way....

De hele korte versie: Om kinderen zo goed mogelijk te beschermen zijn er veel dingen die we onmiddellijk kunnen doen, zoals investeren in oplossen achterstanden bij de politie. Het is juist niet behulpzaam nu de nieuwe EU CSAM-verordening te steunen, want die zal niet daadwerkelijk helpen en voornamelijk meer afleiding veroorzaken. Wel creëert...

De brief is ook beschikbaar als PDF. Prof. Dr. Frederik J. Zuiderveen Borgesius legt terloops in zijn brief uit waarom het voorliggende voorstel juridisch onhoudbaar is. Verder schreef ook ISOC NL een brief. En dan is er nog de brief van Prof. dr. J.-H. Hoepman. Hier de brief van Bits of Freedom, Amnesty International, Cyberveilig Nederland en...

Recently a Dutch hacker was able to take control of 4 million solar panel installations (FTM (Dutch), Euractiv, Victor Gevers). And this wasn’t the first time something like this has happened either (PV Magazine). As usual, huge thanks are due to the many beta readers and experts who helped improve this article with their feedback, valuable...

There is now also an English version of this page with more EU relevance! Media: BNR, TenneT wil regels zien voor apps voor zonnepanelen en waarschuwt voor black-outs. Recent weer in het nieuws, een Nederlandse hacker kon 4 miljoen zonnepaneelsystemen overnemen (FTM, Euractiv). En dit was niet de eerste keer dat zoiets gebeurde. Zoals...

This is a story in three acts, where we go from “trying to procure more nuclear power plants in 2024 is nuts”, to “I could see why you’d want some nuclear”, to “but if so, not like this”. This post has been quite a trip to write, where I rediscovered that writing something down is an ACE way to find out you didn’t know what you were talking...

It pains me that I have to write this, but Gaia-X is a harmful and expensive distraction, and it is not doing anything that will ever get us a “European cloud”, not even indirectly. Its very existence is holding back progress. For this reason, Gaia-X should be abandoned, and we should try to learn as much as possible from its failure, so we can...

Dit artikel is eerder ook verschenen in het tijdschrift iBestuur Soeverein is een duur woord, en het klinkt lekker. Iedereen zou het graag willen zijn, maar zoiets komt met kosten en ongemak. Het is daarom nuttig het begrip op te splitsen om te kijken wat we echt bedoelen, en wat het ons waard is. Vertrouwelijkheid is vaak het eerste wat in ons...

“Be even more suspicious […] of all those who employ the term ‘we’ or ‘us’ without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that ‘we’ are all agreed on ‘our’ interests and identity. […] Always ask who this ‘we’ is” – Christopher Hitchens in Letters to a Young Contrarian. It is so easy to write...

Er is recent veel discussie over digitale autonomie, en Europa’s “positie in de cloud”. Maandag 8 juli vanaf 14:00 is er een event “Digitale soevereiniteit: zin of onzin” bij Instituut Clingendael. Dit is (na inschrijving) ook online bij te wonen. Corinne Cath (TU Delft), Martijn Lucassen (Ministerie van Economische Zaken en Klimaat), Paul Brand...

Welcome to SkewDB! A free database of GC and many other skews for over 53,000 chromosomes and plasmids (viewer, blog post). The Scientific Spring Meeting KNVM & NVMM 2022 presentation is here (pdf). And now also on YouTube as video! SkewDB, a comprehensive database of GC and 10 other skews for over 30,000 chromosomes and plasmids, Nature...

Vandaag 27 juni is er een commissievergadering van de vaste kamercommissie Binnenlandse Zaken, en gisteren heeft het kabinet daarvoor een brief gestuurd. Zoals ik eerder schreef gaat de regering de nieuwe AIVD/MIVD wet per 1 juli in werking laten treden. Update: Er is een heel duidelijk stuk van Follow The Money met daarin zeer heldere uitspraken...

1 juli gaat hij in, de door AIVD en MIVD zo zeer begeerde wet die het toezicht op deze diensten flink omploegt. In 2022 begon de discussie: minder gedetailleerde procedures vooraf om te mogen hacken en tappen, en meer ruimte om slachtoffers van hacks direct ook onder de tap te kunnen zetten, zonder nieuwe toestemming aan te hoeven vragen. En ook...

Dit is een licht verbeterde versie van mijn praatje op 7 juni op de Public Spaces conferentie in Amsterdam, en ik wil de organisatie graag bedanken voor hun uitnodiging, en het publiek voor de goede vragen & reacties zelfs al tijdens het praatje. Vind de oorspronkelijke slides met notities hier. Of, voor wie zin heeft, hier is de oorspronkelijke...

De hele korte versie: stilletjes maar in hoog tempo verhuizen cruciale ICT-diensten binnen de Nederlandse overheid naar met name Microsoft-servers onder Amerikaans recht. Dit neemt zulke enorme vormen aan dat de ICT-kennis binnen de Nederlandse overheid, maar ook binnen Nederland zelf, snel afkalft. Ook is deze beweging dodelijk voor onze eigen...

Sovereignty is a great word, and it has a nice ring to it. Everyone would like to be sovereign, but being so comes with costs and inconveniences. Therefore, it’s useful to break down the concept to see what we really mean by it and what we’d be prepared to do to be “sovereign”. Confidentiality is often the first thing that comes to mind. Who can...

Er is een hoop gedoe over Ronald Plasterk en zijn DNA patenten. Onderbelicht is nog wat die patenten dan beschrijven, en misschien is dat ook wel leuk om te weten. Het gaat om WO2023068931A1 (Cancer neoantigens), WO2021172990A1 (Hidden frame neoantigens), WO2020022897A1 (Method of preparing subject-specific immunogenic compositions based on a neo...

This is a lightly edited transcript of my presentation today at the ACCSS/NCSC/Surf seminar ‘Cyber Security and Society’. I want to thank the organizers for inviting me to their conference & giving me a great opportunity to talk about something I worry about a lot. Here are the original slides with notes, which may be useful to view together with...

We leven in rare tijden. Cookies en tracking zijn overal op internet. We worden overal gevolgd, iedere klik wordt bijgehouden. Tools als Google Analytics zijn hierbij een Faustiaanse deal: De analytics vertellen jou dingen over je gebruikers, en in ruil vertel jij Google wat diezelfde gebruikers op jouw site doen. Vreemd genoeg hebben bergen...

Lately there’s been some confusion: places like SIDN (Dutch national operator of all internet names that end on .NL) claim that nobody in Europe can deliver their computer needs, and that they therefore must outsource their operations to American cloud providers. Dutch version of this page here: Cloud Native, Europa, de ‘Bijenkorf’ Megascaler...

Recent is er verwarring: instellingen als SIDN claimen dat niemand in Europa nog in hun computerbehoeftes kan voorzien, en dat ze daarom wel moeten uitwijken naar Amerikaanse aanbieders. English version: Cloud Naïve: Europe and the ‘Bijenkorf’ Megascaler Tegelijkertijd hebben we in Nederland en Europa grote providers van servers en diensten die...

A very practical introduction to Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs), in which we’ll build a non-trivial parser using the most excellent cpp-peglib single-include C++ library. Post includes links to PEG libraries for Go, Rust and Python, and a ready to run GitHub repository of all examples. If I’ll ever stop programming it will be because I can no...

Over the past eight years I’ve held a trilogy of presentations over at NLNOG covering the working life and career of technical people. This is around two hours of video and slides (with notes), but I’ve heard from people who binge-watched all of it in one go. The presentations have been online for ages, but you had to know where to look for them....

Op 27 maart was er een mooi gesprek over de Nederlandse en Europese afhankelijkheid van “de cloud”. Het gesprek vond plaats op het ministerie van Economische Zaken en Klimaat, en deelnemers waren onder andere minister Micky Adriaansens en staatssecretaris van digitalisering Alexandra van Huffelen. Het onderwerp wordt dus (terecht) serieus...

De hele korte versie: een minister voor Digitale Zaken heeft alleen zin als deze minstens evenveel doorzettingsmacht krijgt als de minister van Financiën. En het werkt ook alleen als die nieuwe minister een agenda heeft waarbij ICT veel meer is dan “iets wat je inkoopt”, maar echt een kernactiviteit wordt waar geïnnoveerd kan worden. En dat vergt...

13th of June UPDATE: The Dutch government has failed to hire and house the promised new 10 oversight staff. Yet, the new law will be enacted July 1st, passing oversight to people that don’t exist. I surely enjoyed living under the rule of law, but it appears it was a passing thing. “The Netherlands hosts some of the world’s largest internet...

The short version: organizations often hesitate for many years before outsourcing tasks, particularly in the field of ICT (Information and Communication Technology). During those years, valuable ICT employees leave because constantly justifying their own existence is frustrating. In the long run, something will eventually go wrong, making the...

There’s now also an English version of this post. De hele korte versie: organisaties twijfelen vaak vele jaren over het uitbesteden van dingen, met name ICT. Gedurende die jaren vertrekken de goede ICT-mensen, want steeds je eigen bestaan moeten rechtvaardigen is rot. Op termijn gaat er dan weleens iets goed mis, en is de keuze daarna makkelijk:...

Het gaat allemaal niet best met de wereld - het klimaat ontspoort, en men twijfelt of we er iets aan moeten doen, de rechtstaat wankelt, de ongelijkheid groeit, mensen vallen bij bosjes voor complottheorieën en ze stemmen zonder enige moeite op fascisten, racisten en clowns die geen enkel probleem op gaan lossen. En overal is oorlog. Sommige...

Door Corinne CathDr. Corinne Cath is an anthropologist of technology who studies the politics of Internet infrastructure. She is a recent graduate of the Oxford Internet Institute’s PhD program (University of Oxford) and the Alan Turing Institute for data science. Previously, she worked on technology policy for human rights’ organization ARTICLE...

In november 2023 was ik de gast-columnist van de Volkskrant, en heb ik vier stukjes geschreven die steeds op zondag (alleen online) verschenen. Dit was voor mij voor het eerst dat ik echt iedere week moest ’leveren’, en ook nog binnen heldere kaders: 700 woorden, opinie over dingen die al in het nieuws geweest zijn. Ik heb nu een nieuw respect...

Onderstaand een licht bewerkt transcript van aflevering 376 van BNR’s De Technoloog, Europa is (bijna) volledig afhankelijk van de VS en China en dat is een probleem, ook beschikbaar op YouTube. Redactie Daniël Mol. In deze aflevering bespreken we hoe het zo gekomen is met Europa’s bedroevende positie in de cloud, maar ook hoe onze overheden door...

Iets eerdere versie van het stuk in de Volkskrant, deel van een serie van vier columns: De wereld gaat de klimaatdoelen niet halen (volgens de Verenigde Naties). Hoewel er in Nederland harder wordt gewerkt aan CO₂-reductie dan menigeen denkt gaat het niet genoeg zijn. Ook zijn veel van de lokale resultaten het gevolg van de-industrialisatie,...

Iets eerdere versie van het stuk in de Volkskrant, deel van een serie van vier columns: Ze zeiden het echt. De geheime diensten AIVD en MIVD krijgen binnenkort een nieuwe wet waarmee ze makkelijker en vaker kunnen afluisteren en hacken. Vorige week legden ze het voorstel uit in de Eerste Kamer, en claimden daar dat hun nieuwe wet eigenlijk een...

Iets eerdere versie van het stuk in de Volkskrant, deel van een serie van vier columns: Het ligt niet aan de Kamerleden Het is verkiezingstijd, en het is bon ton om te klagen over het gebrek aan ervaring van Kamerleden, en om vervolgens ook nog te constateren dat juist de meest ervaren parlementariërs niet terugkeren na de verkiezingen. En dat is...

Iets eerdere versie van het stuk in de Volkskrant, deel van een serie van vier columns: Leiders? Ik weet niet hoe het met u zit, maar op de werkvloer heb ik me zelden ‘geleid’ gevoeld. Wel gemanaged. En hoewel ook belangrijk, is dat toch echt iets heel anders. Iemand een leider noemen doen we hier niet snel, het klinkt zelfs raar. “Only sheep...

Trifecta is a simple open source image sharing site, built with a combination of modern C++, database and web technologies. Intended to both be useful and make some points. This page sets out to explain the underlying technology of this small yet hopefully useful piece of software. More background can be found on its main page, where you can also...

Trifecta is actual stand-alone software that you can use to paste and drag images to, for easy sharing. It has pained me for years that I had to use imgur for this purpose. Not only does imgur install lots of cookies and trackers on my browser, I also then force these onto the people that visit the images that I share. I checked out some existing...

This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away January 1st. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software”, and in what follows, I try to make the same case nearly 30 years later, updated for today’s computing horrors. The really short version: the way we build/ship software...

Over the past few years I’ve been writing a lot about innovation, and specifically, the lack thereof in Europe. I also touch on how we’ve outsourced a ton of operational capabilities, leaving us relatively helpless. By now this is such a huge amount of words, audio and video that it is in dire need of a summary, if only to see if it makes any...

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. The very short version: All of computing is moving to the cloud at a rapid pace, including (government) parts you might want to keep under your own control Europe has no relevant ‘hyperscaler’ cloud providers at all, and there is a desire to change this by policy means...

Vandaag groot in het nieuws, een Nederlandse AIVD agent zou een sleutelrol gespeeld hebben in het binnenbrengen van sabotagesoftware bij het Iraanse kernwapenprogramma. Nou moet me wel van het hart, dit zou op zichzelf geen schandaal moeten zijn. Iran zijn onze vrienden niet, en ik heb liever dat ze geen kernwapenprogramma hebben. Wel wekken de...

The final compromise text of the EU Cyber Resilience Act is now officially available, and various open source voices are currently opining on it. This is a complex act and other parts of the open source world (like the Eclipse Foundation and NLNet Labs) have been hard at work to advocate with the EU and member states to get a CRA that is good for...

A bit of an “emergency blog post”. The final compromise text of the EU Cyber Resilience Act is now available, and various open source voices are now opining on it. This is a complex act and other parts of the open source world (like the Eclipse Foundation and NLNet Labs) have been hard at work to advocate with the EU and member states to get a...

Je kunt een discussie winnen op de vorm of op de inhoud. Ik heb het graag over de inhoud, maar dan moet je wel goed opletten dat je ook echt aan die inhoud toekomt. Want er zijn genoeg mensen die het liever over wat anders hebben, of het houden bij mooie woorden die niet de kern van hun mening of plan zijn. Men noemt dat soort technieken ook wel...

UPDATE: On December 1st the EU agreed on a version of the Cyber Resilience Act that appears to have substantially addressed the concerns in the post below. Further analysis awaits, but do know that the text that follows is now mostly of historical interest! UPDATE 2: Here is the final compromise text of the Cyber Resilience Act. UPDATE 3: Here is...

Hieronder een licht bewerkte versie van mijn live-verslag op Mastodon van het wetgevingsoverleg over de nieuwe AIVD/MIVD wet. De tijdstippen voor iedere regel linken naar de uitstekende Debat Gemist service van de Tweede Kamer. Het tijdstip is steeds 60 seconden voor de update, dus misschien moet je nog verder terug in de tijd om bij de...

Dit artikel is geschreven naar aanleiding van het recente rondetafelgesprek in de Tweede Kamer over het EU client side scanning voorstel, ook bekend als ‘chatcontrol’, een verplichte module in je WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage/Snapchat die je communicatie en foto’s scant op ‘grooming’ en bekende en onbekende kinderporno & automatisch melding doet bij...

On the 11th of October, Dutch parliament organized a hearing on the EU “Chatcontrol” proposal, with a focus on client side scanning. Dutch parliament had earlier passed two motions calling on the Dutch government not to support this proposal, but our government has declared it will ignore those motions. This hearing was timely because next week,...

Op 11 oktober was er een rondetafelgesprek in de Tweede Kamer over het EU ‘Chatcontrol’ voorstel. Hier is mijn position paper voor dat gesprek te vinden. Die pagina heeft ook links naar de artikelen in NRC, BNR, NOS en de uitzending van het NOS journaal. Hieronder het transcript van mijn opmerkingen. Op de site van de Tweede Kamer is het...

Dit is mijn position paper voor het rondetafelgesprek in de Tweede Kamer op 11 oktober over het EU client side scanning voorstel, ook bekend als ‘chatcontrol’, een verplichte module in je WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage/Snapchat die je communicatie en foto’s scant op ‘grooming’ en bekende en onbekende kinderporno & automatisch melding doet bij politie...

Onze overheden en het internationale bedrijfsleven leggen steeds grotere databases over ons aan, op een schaal die we 20 jaar geleden nooit geaccepteerd zouden hebben. Eerder schreef ik in de Volkskrant hoe we dit vroeger automatisch verwerpelijk vonden, met name vanwege onze herinnering aan de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Update: We bespraken dit...

Before we start, I’d like to thank ESA’s Mark McCaughrean who helped kick off this article by referring me to two key articles that lay out, in scientific terms, how global warming really works. Here you can pick your favorite temperature unit: C F (Test temperature: ) Feel free to skip this wordy intro and head straight to the model, or even to...

I won an award! Earlier this year I was lured to the NLUUG spring conference, and after my presentation (on machine learning from scratch), the two large presentation rooms were joined for some additional announcements. Turns out this was to give me an NLUUG Lifetime Achievement Award! Previous awardees include Piet Beertema, Guido van Rossum,...

Tussen de enorme blogposts van 6000 woorden over het klimaat, hier wat luchtige observaties over denken, voelen en wetgeving. Denken en voelen zijn twee wegen om tot beslissingen te komen. Beide zijn waardevol. We hoeven maar te horen van een situatie en we hebben er al gevoelens over, nog voor er veel feiten in beeld zijn. Foto © Avery Evans via...

“Controversieelverklaard worden die wetsvoorstellen en onderwerpen waarvan redelijkerwijze verwacht mag worden dat behandeling met een ander kabinet tot een andere uitkomst zal leiden.” – website Eerste Kamer Al bijna drie jaar is er een spoedwet in de maak om de wetgeving voor de Nederlandse Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdiensten ingrijpend te...

This is a companion page to my blog post on global warming (which is currently not yet ready). I put up this post already as a teaser for my upcoming global warming post, which desperately needs expert review before I dare put it online. If you are an experienced climate/atmospheric scientist, would you please consider helping me out? Please...

Nothing on this page is factually controversial. However, many things in this post make for uncomfortable reading. And, climate discourse is now so politicized that many factual statements are taken as dog whistles. For example, in what follows I will state that climate has always been changing, and has in fact never been stable for very long....

I wrote this piece after an early-career friend of mine asked some very good questions on how to be useful. Since this is a thing I struggle a bit with myself, I thought it worthwhile to write up my thoughts. Note that I fully understand that not everyone has the luxury to think about their career like this – you first have to take care of...

Recently, I wrote a small open source tool to make the official Dutch national address & building database more accessible. More about the tool below, but first an introduction. Last data update: 2024-12-14 If all you need is an up to date CSV file of all Dutch addresses, their zipcodes and coordinates, scroll down to the end. If all you need is...

"Best een goede samenvatting eigenlijk" — een daadwerkelijke energie-expert Op 10 juni 2023 is dit artikel uit 2022 ge-update met een extra stukje over waterstof en waar het niet voor geschikt is, plus wat meer over kernenergie, en over minder energie verbruiken. Sinds een tijdje maak ik grafiekjes van hoe Nederland aan z’n elektriciteit komt. En...

This is a mirror of the original about:intel post, since the about:intel server is sadly sometimes overloaded. Also do read the opposing view from Jan-Jaap Oerlemans and the reflection by Lotte Houwing The Dutch government is proposing adding a lex specialis to its existing intelligence and security services act. This addition significantly...

Gisteren (5 april) was er een technische briefing van de AIVD en MIVD over de tijdelijke wet cyberoperaties, gevolgd door een rondetafelgesprek met deskundigen. Vorige week was er een technische briefing door de toezichthouders TIB en CTIVD. Mijn spreektekst met veel klikbare voetnoten ter verduidelijking staat hier. Er was een goeie opkomst van...

Vielen Dank an Lili Laguna für diese Übersetzung diesen niederländischen Blog-Beitrag. English version. Jeder überschlägt sich mit Vorhersagen über KI. Sie wird uns von stupider Arbeit befreien, sie wird unsere Bildung zerstören, wir alle werden nichts mehr lernen müssen, weil die KI es für uns tun wird, Kriminelle werden uns mit ihr austricksen,...

This is a machine-aided translation of this Dutch post. Und jetzt auch auf Deutsch verfügbar! Everyone is tumbling over themselves making predictions about AI. It’s going to free us from menial work, it’s going to dismantle our education, we all won’t have to learn things anymore because the AI will do it for us, criminals will trick us with it,...

Update: This article is now also available in English. Und jetzt auch auf Deutsch! Iedereen buitelt over zichzelf heen om voorspellingen te doen over AI. Het gaat ons bevrijden van dom werk, het gaat ons onderwijs ontmantelen, we hoeven allemaal dingen niet meer te leren want de AI gaat het voor ons doen, criminelen zullen ons er mee bedonderen,...

This page is part of the Hello Deep Learning series of blog posts. You are very welcome to improve this page via GitHub! After having completed this series of blogposts (well done!) you should have a good grounding in what deep learning is actually doing. However, this was of course only a small 20k word introduction, so there is a lot left to...

This page is part of the Hello Deep Learning series of blog posts. You are very welcome to improve this page via GitHub! The previous chapters have often mentioned the chasm between “deep learning models that work on my data” and “it actually works in the real world”. It is perhaps for this reason that almost all demos and YouTube tutorials you...

This page is part of the Hello Deep Learning series of blog posts. You are very welcome to improve this page via GitHub! In the previous chapter we found ways to speed up our character recognition learning by a factor of 20 by using a better optimizer, and a further factor of four by cleverly using threads using a ‘shared nothing architecture’....

This page is part of the Hello Deep Learning series of blog posts. You are very welcome to improve this page via GitHub! In the previous chapter we successfully trained a network to recognize handwritten letters, but it took an awfully long time. This is not just inconvenient: networks that take too long to train mean we can experiment less. Some...

This page is part of the Hello Deep Learning series of blog posts. You are very welcome to improve this page via GitHub! In the previous chapter we taught a network of linear combinations and ‘rectified linear units’ to recognize handwritten digits reasonably successfully. But we already noted that the network would be sensitive to the exact...

This page is part of the Hello Deep Learning series of blog posts. You are very welcome to improve this page via GitHub! In the previous chapter we described how automatic differentiation of the result of neural networks works. In the first and second chapters we designed and trained a one-layer neural network that could distinguish images of the...

This page is part of the Hello Deep Learning series of blog posts. You are very welcome to improve this page via GitHub! In the previous chapter we configured a neural network and made it learn to distinguish between the digits 3 and 7. The learning turned out to consist of “twisting the knobs in the right direction”. Although simplistic, the...

This page is part of the Hello Deep Learning series of blog posts. You are very welcome to improve this page via GitHub! In this chapter we’re going to take the neural network we made earlier, but actually make it do some learning itself. And, oddly enough, this demonstration will again likely simultaneously make you wonder “is this all??” and...

This page is part of the Hello Deep Learning series of blog posts. You are very welcome to improve this page via GitHub! In this chapter we’re going to build our first neural network and take it for a spin. Weirdly, this demonstration will likely simultaneously make you wonder “is this all??” and also impress you by what even this trivial stuff...

This page is part of the Hello Deep Learning series of blog posts. Also, feel free to skip this intro and head straight for chapter 1 where the machine learning begins! Deep learning and ‘generative AI’ have now truly arrived. If this is a good thing very much remains to be seen. What is certain however is that these technologies will have a huge...

A from scratch GPU-free introduction to modern machine learning. Many tutorials exist already of course, but this one aims to really explain what is going on, from the ground up. Also, we’ll develop the demo until it is actually useful on real life data which you can supply yourself. Other documents start out from the (very impressive) PyTorch...

This is a living document - I’d normally spend a few days polishing everything, but since CRA talks are ongoing right now, there’s simply no time for that. Check back frequently for updates! Also please let me know urgently on bert@hubertnet.nl if you think I’m reading things incorrectly! As a follow-up to my earlier post on the EU Cyber...

First a round of thanks for the many people in industry and government who provided valuable links, background and insights! I could not have done this without your help! If you spot any mistakes, or have suggestions, please do contact me on bert@hubertnet.nl The EU’s new Cyber Resilience Act is admirable in its goal. And the EU is not alone in...

“The history of human thought would make it seem that there is difficulty in thinking of an idea even when all the facts are on the table” – Isaac Asimov In 2014, MIT’s Technology Review wrote a very interesting article about an attempt to have Isaac Asimov be part of a group of scientists attempting to think outside of the box. In this article...

Deze reactie is als PDF ook te vinden op de site internetconsultatie.nl. Ook kan er tot en met 16 januari nog gereageerd worden. Aan de minister van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties, H.G.J Bruins Slot en aan minister van Defensie, K.H. Ollongren Betreft: Tijdelijke wet onderzoeken AIVD en MIVD naar landen met een offensief cyberprogramma...

Deze pagina is mede tot stand gekomen door kritisch commentaar & feedback van Marien Boonman en Hidde Brugmans & anonieme experts. Dank! En mochten er desondanks fouten zijn -> bert@hubertnet.nl We beginnen simpel, een woonhuis zonder zonnepanelen, verbruik minder dan 10.000kWh/jaar. Je elektriciteitsrekening bestaat (volgens de regels geldend op...

This is a refreshed & expanded copy of a very old page I hosted outside of this blog. I recently ran into “silent NaNs” again, and thought it might be a good idea to republish this advice here. A small post that documents something that almost no one appears to know. And if you do anything with floating point, you do need to know. Exceptions In C...

Dit artikel verscheen in iets andere vorm in de Volkskrant. Hier een versie met klikbare links ter onderbouwing: Recent presenteerde het kabinet een nieuwe wet die volgens de Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens inhoudt dat alle banktransacties van alle Nederlandse rekeninghouders gemonitord zullen worden in één gecentraliseerde database, met gebruik van...

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. Feedback is very welcome on bert@hubertnet.nl. I’d also like to thank the many proofreaders, but all mistakes remain mine! In the world of (high) technology, Europe is exceptionally weak at innovating. There are many ways to explain how this came to be, and a lot of the...

UPDATE: Nu ik niet meer werk voor de TIB kan deze uitleg van de nieuwe wet weer online. Via dit artikel zijn interviews en podcasts te vinden met meer context. UPDATE: Het rondetafelgesprek op 5 april 2023 in de Tweede Kamer is hier te bekijken en hier te lezen. En hier mijn spreektekst met voetnoten. Het kabinet heeft een wetsvoorstel...

A brief review of Stefan Zweig’s 1942 book “Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers”, which I read in the earlier English translation by Benjamin W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger (public domain copy). There is also a more recent translation by Anthea Bell, The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European. It too appears to be excellent. ...

So in these wild times, the “ten year interest rate” is suddenly in the news again. But what does this mean? There is no committee that sets these rates, but it is also not something you can just measure. While you’ll find various other explanations of how to calculate the 10 year interest rate online, this may be the geekiest one, and definitely...

This is a page about some of the mechanics of ‘big data’, specifically how to store, transfer and process perhaps 100s of millions or billions of rows/events. Although some people think big data starts at 65k rows, at which point Excel used to lose it, I’m talking about gigabytes of data here. Infrastructure for this kind of thing abounds. Data...

I’ve seen some mediocre automated translations of my Dutch language resignation statement go round. To prevent any confusion, please find the story here in English: Until today I was one of the three members of the board that checks warrants for the Dutch intelligence and security services. This board is called “Toetsingscommissie Inzet...

Vandaag was mijn laatste dag als lid van de Toetsingscommissie Inzet Bevoegdheden Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdiensten (TIB), de commissie die vooraf bindend toetst of de voorgenomen inzet van de zwaarste bevoegdheden van de AIVD en MIVD rechtmatig is. Update: Onderaan dit artikel staat een uitgebreid media overzicht De reden voor dit vertrek is...

Recent is er een nieuw wetsvoorstel gepresenteerd bedoeld om de AIVD en de militaire MIVD meer ruimte te geven om onderzoek te doen naar landen met een offensief cyberprogramma. Op deze pagina bespreek ik de zwaarste bevoegdheden die de diensten hebben om hun werk te doen. De Wet op de Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdiensten 2017 (‘Wiv’) is een...

In the world of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), change tends to happen very slowly and cautiously. It is therefore quite exciting how many new features Galileo, the “European GPS” has been rolling out lately. Earlier I wrote a little bit about the High Accuracy Service (HAS), whereby the Galileo satellites themselves provide properly...

A week ago, I finally got round to implementing an idea I’d been toying with for years: what if your computer made a little bit of noise every time it sent data to Google? From studying logs, I’d long known just how many sites send all your visits and clicks to (at least) Google, but a log that you have to manually create first and then analyze...

(scroll down for my two talks if you are in a hurry) As I write this I’m suffering from severe post-camp blues. Every four years the Dutch hacker community organizes a stupendously large multi-day campsite event, with ample international help. To a large extent, “everyone” is there. And this time, like every time, people who originally decided...

Eerder dit jaar spraken Kustaw Bessems en ik elkaar in een aflevering van de Volkskrant podcast ‘Stuurloos’ (reservelink). In een uitzending van meer dan een uur behandelden we waarom het zo moeilijk is voor de overheid en grote bedrijven om mensen te werven die ergens echt veel vanaf weten, en die mensen vervolgens ook te behouden. Ik had me...

As presented on the 24th of May 2022 at the European Energy Law Seminar 2022 organized by the Dutch Energy Law Association (NeVER), in cooperation with the University of Groningen’s Centre of Energy Law and Sustainability and the University of Oslo’s Scandinavian Institute of Maritime Law So before we delve into the fascinating relation between...

Hi everyone, A brief note, I’ve written a book, and the content is nearly done. You can read all about it here. The first 90% of the project went well, but I need (well paid) help with the remaining 90% to turn it into a decent book. This is a ‘for profit’ book, but it will be given away for free to schools, universities and readers/students...

In an earlier post I presented a naive model for estimating Dutch electrical solar power generation numbers. It turns out that the Dutch electrical power generation numbers are an even bigger mess than I appreciated. It appears that “everyone knows” that the numbers are confusing, incomplete and perhaps even wrong. But somehow this state of...

As part of my coping mechanisms, I like to make graphs of important things I worry about. Recently with the Russia-inflicted horrors in Ukraine, I’ve been looking at the torrent of Russian gas being bought by Europe. This turned into a live plot that shows just how much money we are sending to Russia. In that post, I also dwell on how we are...

The horrors of the Russian war on Ukraine continue unabated. Every eurocent we send to Russia is an intolerable assault on the senses. The world buys lots of things from Russia. For some of these, if Europe does not buy them, someone else will. But there is one major exception: natural gas. Over the past few weeks I’ve been automating graphs that...

So I love academia, and I also built two businesses. When I dropped out of studying physics to focus on my company, I assumed I knew everything, since I had studied physics! Turned out that if you enter the world of commerce, it is very bad if you are visibly confused about the difference between business development and sales. It does nothing...

And we’re back! As noted in part 1 and part 2 I thought it might be possible that I had discovered something interesting in biology. Lacking an academic peer group, I had decided to use a series of blog posts to gather feedback and to keep myself honest. I’m very pleased to report that this process worked! I just received word that Nature...

If you programmed something and it turns out to be too slow, often you’d like to farm out the work to multiple threads. At this point you typically have a few choices: use some kind of producer/consumer pipe half-ass it by dividing the work into n chunks and launch n threads and hope for the best rely on one of the magic parallelization solutions...

Na mijn vorige deprimerende stukje over ons stompzinnige Coronabeleid gooi ik het nu over een wat positievere boeg. Want het lijkt er soms wel op alsof er geen enkele vooruitgang geboekt is, en we hier nooit meer uit gaan komen, maar dat is echt niet zo. Foto van Ivan Diaz op Unsplash Om met het begin te beginnen, de coronacijfers zijn hoger dan...

Echt, ik trek het niet meer. Regeren is vooruitzien. Ik denk dat we dus niet regeren in Nederland. Corona is, ook na twee jaar, nog steeds een ontwikkelend ding. Het virus, de vaccins, de reacties van mensen, ze blijven ons verbazen. Maar een ding is inmiddels wel constant: geïnformeerde mensen in de buitenwereld zien maanden van tevoren...

This is a lightly edited transcript of my keynote over at NANOG 83, so please accept my apologies if some of the wording is not (yet) as clear as it should be! The original video, including Q&A can be found on NANOG’s Youtube channel Hello, and welcome to this presentation on who controls the internet, and if they actually should. As you can see,...

Ik schreef er eerder over, hoe werf je nieuwe collega’s. Het stuk is weer actueel nu het zo moeilijk is om aan personeel te komen, of om mensen zelfs maar te behouden. Medisch personeel verlaat de werkvloer – (C) Luis Melendez Sinds 1999 neem ik mensen aan of hielp ik bij werving, voor de overheid, mijn voormalige bedrijven & die van anderen,...

Het heeft even geduurd, maar er is weer een Coronaupdate. Wederom dank aan iedereen die met vragen kwam. Hoe gaat het nu? Ik durf het niet te zeggen. In veel landen gaan de cijfers omhoog. In de UK zijn ze al tijden en tijden torenhoog. De vaccins houden goed stand tegen ernstige ziekte (zie verderop). Maar of de cijfers nog veel verder omhoog...

Hello and welcome to this introduction of the SkewDB. This open (downloadable) database contains details of GC skew, plus a dozen other skews, for all 28,000 bacterial chromosomes available through the NCBI genomes service. The database is created using the open source Antonie DNA software. There is also an online viewer that includes graphs. GC...

And we’re back! As noted in part 1, there is the possibility I’ve discovered something interesting in biology. Lacking an academic peer group, I’m using a series of blog posts to gather feedback and to keep myself honest. Because chances continue to be high that as an outsider I am deluding myself. The full backstory can be found in part 1...

So, I think I may have discovered something interesting in biology! Professional scientists know this feeling all too well. Exhilarated that it looks like you might be the first person ever to know something, but worried sick that it might not be real. Also, you might be fooling yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. And even if it is...

Ik ben een heel tevreden klant van KPN Internet. Om diverse redenen gebruik ik de Experia Box niet, maar ik wil wel graag TV kunnen kijken met de KPN Interactieve TV Set Top Box. Vroeger ging dat “vanzelf goed”, tegenwoordig is daar wat werk voor nodig. In augustus 2021 werkten deze instructies goed, maar er kunnen dingen veranderen bij KPN...

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. Earlier this year I was very happy to be interviewed by Thomas Ramge for Germany’s Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (SPRIND). Many podcasts are just two guys talking to each other, but here Thomas brought along a lot of expertise & spent serious time preparing,...

Some new minor leap second drama is coming up, and for once we can

Recent barstte het weer los, de felle discussie tussen artsen en dikke mensen. Een belangrijk onderwerp, maar ook een onderwerp waarover een hoop zomaar geroepen wordt. Veel artsen en beleidsmakers zien een foto van dikke mensen en roepen “Zucht, leefstijl”. En dan vraag ik me weleens af, hebben jullie ook maar één te dikke vriend of vriendin met...

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. Recently I participated in a very useful panel that aimed to demystify European digital sovereignty. Even though we spoke for more than an hour (video), we obviously were not able to fix all of Europe’s sovereignty problems! The event was organized by Scaleway (previously...

Een extra update, twee weken na de vorige, want er is al weer voldoende te vertellen. Deze keer weer een aantal vragen op verzoek: De cijfers stijgen ineens heel hard, wat betekent dat? Is het veilig om naar evenementen te gaan? Zou mijn dochter/zoon zich moeten laten vaccineren? Werken de vaccins nog wel? Wat de f is er aan de hand met de...

UPDATE: Zoals gezegd had ik Eneco om een reactie gevraagd en die is gekomen. In het kort, Eneco vertelt me dat de website een onjuiste weergave van zaken gaf. De teksten zullen aangepast worden. Het niet instemmen met ieder kwartier meten & analyse van gebruik zal geen effect hebben op het automatisch doorgeven van meterstanden voor de rekening...

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am no friend of the surveillance capitalism that currently powers the web. It is becoming well-neigh impossible to develop any software or host any content without some component tracking your users & sending data to third parties. Even though I try very hard not to fall for this, periodically I...

In de vorige Corona update eind mei schreef ik over “delta”, toen nog bekend als de Indiase variant: Het is helaas te vroeg om nu een eindoordeel te vellen over deze variant. Wat we wel weten is dat in de UK de vaccins prima standhouden - de overgrote meerderheid van de mensen in het ziekenhuis is ongevaccineerd. Dit is nog steeds waar. Toch...

Afer 8 years, I have updated this this post for 2021-era Linux (and also to fix bitrotted links). I am extremely joyful to report that the (hard) problem from 2013 appears to have been solved! There is a small addendum at the end to reflect this happy news. Back in 2013, I started writing code to do a simulation of biological system, and I got...

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. Europe’s communication needs are currently almost exclusively delivered by Chinese hardware that connects us to US-based platforms. For a variety of reasons, this is not a good idea. As stated recently by Charles Michel, President of the European Council, “Interdependence...

Reeds vorig jaar verschenen, maar zonder de aandacht gekregen te hebben die dit boek verdient. Uitgeverij Prometheus, 460 pagina’s. bol.com, amazon.nl & kindle “Een spoor van vernieuwing” laat zich lezen als memoires van een markante topambtenaar, maar ook als een interessante geschiedenis van de ontwikkeling van de rampenbestrijding, de...

Recently I was doing some work decoding the new Galileo High Accuracy Service data. In short, this new service will allow Galileo (“European GPS”) users to achieve decimeter-level accuracy, which is nice. This “HAS” data is transmitted highly redundantly by making good use of Reed-Solomon encoding. To work with this data, I attempted to learn...

Ja daar zijn we weer! De vorige update uit maart was getiteld “Licht aan het einde van de tunnel”. Nou wil ik niet al te veel pochen, en resultaten uit het verleden bieden geen garanties voor de toekomst, maar het klopte allemaal best behoorlijk. De spectaculaire daling in ziekenhuiscijfers kwam in werkelijkheid een week later dan ik verwacht...

Wir haben Coronamaßnahmen, aber Menschen weigern sich, mitzuhelfen. Es gibt effektive Impfungen, aber Menschen verkünden laut, diese niemals nehmen zu wollen. In diesem Text bringe ich einige Vorschläge, wie du einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Aufklärung der Menschen leisten kannst. Ja, genau du. Viele Leser meines Blogs sind die “Haustechniker” in...

This page is nothing special, I put recipes there I look up from time to time on the monstrous ad-laden recipe sites that also tell me your life story. I use cups because they aren’t the worst. Dutch Baby First: Heat cast iron pan, heat oven to 220C. Ingredients: 3 large eggs 1/2 cup of full fat milk 1/2 cup of flour tablespoon of sugar / vanilla...

I love Europe, and I want to see the European Union succeed. I also love the Internet, and I want to see it thrive as well. And it therefore pains me that it now appears that the European Union might inadvertently be picking an ugly fight with “The Internet”. UPDATE: I am EXCEPTIONALLY happy to report that through robust engagement with European...

This part of the history of PowerDNS is mostly about our business adventures & merger with Open-Xchange. The technical history of this period is described in part 3a. Business In 2013, PowerDNS was in a crucial phase. Existing business was going well, but we were receiving pointed signals there was trouble on the horizon. Some existing customers...

Reading a good book is a great joy. And recommending a good book is almost as enjoyable. I've long been fascinated by books on espionage, and this contributed in no small part to me eventually joining the Dutch intelligence world. On this page you'll find a collection of 'Useful Spy Books' that can help understand the world of intelligence and security agencies

Er is in Nederland een levendige discussie gaande of we in moeten zetten op kernenergie of niet. Afhankelijk van wie je spreekt is kernenergie een groene en noodzakelijke manier om onze CO₂-doelen te halen, of is het overbodige onzin. Ik ben een groot gelover in het idee van kernenergie. Maar onze auto’s en huizen kunnen we niet aandrijven met...

Brief post, in response to the many many many technical people that propose to print their own mRNA vaccines “now that the source is out there”. I’ve spent a lot of time individually explaining why this is unlikely to happen any time soon, and I thought it a good idea to explain it here as well. Mountains of details on how the vaccines are...

UPDATE: Back in December 2020 when this article was first posted, I noted that some receivers might not be able to deal with the advent of production signals from the eccentric satellites. This has indeed proved to be a problem for U-blox F9 series receivers in a specific configuration. The application note links to this article (thanks!) and...

En toen was het toch weer tijd voor een Corona Update, de eerste sinds november 2020. Doordat er zoveel nieuws is geweest over varianten en vaccins is het zicht een beetje kwijt op waar we nu zijn. En dat is des te vervelender nu de cijfers weer omhoog lijken te gaan. Daarom een samenvatting die eigenlijk heel rooskleurig is, zelfs met de...

In short, if you need engaging in-depth articles on your scientific project, your research breakthrough or the grand new technical/space/molecular/medical thing you are building, you can hire me! (Semi-)Popular science writing I do a lot of what I call “(Semi-)popular science writing”. My recent article dissecting the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2...

In previous posts I described how the two currently approved mRNA vaccines both use ‘modified nucleosides’ to enhance their efficiency. Meanwhile, a company called CureVac has created an mRNA vaccine that uses regular, unmodified, RNA. It is currently being tested in large scale trials. In this post I explain what the challenges are with this...

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. Periodically I read about governments or institutions wanting to stimulate innovation, often to achieve a certain (worthy) goal. Frequently, the far larger amounts of money that other countries or continents are spending on innovation are then bandied about as...

There are lots of calls to invest in improving cybersecurity. But it struck me that it doesn’t work like that. Not getting hacked is not so much a question of buying the right stuff. It is a question of doing the right things and understanding what you are doing. It is easy to demand that people ‘invest’ in something. You can even supply them...

Hi everyone, With apologies for flooding the airwaves and timelines with way too many posts and tweets, here’s one more post, the last COVID-19 related one for a while. I’ve been trying to provide high quality answers to the many questions I receive via email and various social media. I’ve also been trying to help many many people that found...

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. Hi everyone, This is a transcript of my presentation over at the European Microwave Week 2020, actually held in 2021. You can find the video here and the slides here. I’d like to thank Frank van Vliet, general chair of the EMW, for inviting me to do this talk. The words...

Translations: 中文, 日本語 As a followup to Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine, here is a look at the genetic code behind some of the other vaccines. I recommend at least skimming the earlier post before delving into this one, unless you are already fluent in modified mRNA bases and protein expression...

Translations: ελληνικά / عربى / 中文 (Weixin video, Youtube video) / 粵文 / bahasa Indonesia / český / Català / český / Deutsch / Español / 2فارسی / فارسی / Français / עִברִית / Hrvatski / Italiano / Nederlands / 日本語 / 日本語 2 / नेपाली / Polskie / русский / Português / Română / Slovensky / Slovenščina / Türk / український / Markdown for translating...

Updates: 12th of September 2021: I’m writing a book on DNA! If you want to become a beta reader, or have suggestions, I’d love to hear from you! 8th of January 2021: This article has been revised and updated, scientifically and in terms of dead links. Revision made by Tomás Simões (@putadagravidade / tomasprsimoes@gmail.com). Feel free to contact...

Translations: ελληνικά / عربى / 中文 (Weixin video, Youtube video) / 粵文 / bahasa Indonesia / český / Català / český / Deutsch / English / Español / 2فارسی / فارسی / Français / עִברִית / Hrvatski / Italiano / Nederlands / 日本語 / 日本語 2 / नेपाली / Polskie / русский / Português / Română / Slovensky / Türk / український / Markdown for translating...

In this page I want to offer some guidance how you can be useful in spreading good Corona information, specifically about vaccines. Importantly, many readers of my blog are the technology help desk for their families - the people that help fixing the wifi, install new computers and generally are useful for solving complex problems. That makes...

UPDATE: Deze post was ooit geschreven voor de toenmalige Corona(vaccin) situatie. Maar, hij is inzetbaar voor ieder ontspoord of ontsporend familielid of contact. De grote lijn blijft hetzelfde - iemand roept allemaal rare dingen en beïnvloedt zo de rest. Onderstaand verhaal gaat over hoe je dit nuttig om kan draaien. We hebben Coronamaatregelen,...

NOT Bu yazı, https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ adresindeki yazının Türkçe çevirisidir. https://gist.github.com/ugurkoltuk/2f87d8038d4fd42f4c6ad13472966797 Hoşgeldiniz! Bu yazıda, BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA aşısının kaynak kodunu karakter karakter inceleyeceğiz. Bu yazıyı...

All BNT162b2 vaccine data on this page is sourced from this World Health Organization document. This is a living page, shared already so people can get going! But check back frequently for updates. Translation: Français / 日本語 In short: the vaccine mRNA has been optimized by the manufacturer by changing bits of RNA from (say) UUU to UUC, and...

Translations: ελληνικά / 中文 / Deutsch / Français / Hrvatski / Italiano / नेपाली / Polskie / Português ¡Bienvenidos! En esta publicación daremos una mirada carácter por carácter al código fuente de la vacuna de ARNm de BioNTech/Pfizer al SARS-CoV-2. Quiero agradecer a la gran cantidad de personas que se tomaron el tiempo de revisar que este...

(artikel asli ditulis oleh Bert Hubert) Selamat datang! Pada artikel ini, kita akan mengamati kode sumber dari vaksin mRNA BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 berdasarkan ciri-ciri. Saya menghaturkan terima kasih banyak kepada sejumlah besar orang yang meluangkan waktu untuk mempratinjau artikel ini untuk memastikan keterbacaan dan ketepatan. Seluruh...

Vertalingen: ελληνικά / عربى / 中文 / 粵文 / bahasa Indonesia / Català / český / Deutsch / English / Español / Français / עִברִית / עִברִית2 / Hrvatski / Italiano / नेपाली / Polskie / русский / Português. / Română / Markdown for translating Mogelijk ook interessant, en minder technisch: Hoe werken de nieuwe (mRNA) Corona Vaccins, of dit item op BNR...

Benvenuti! In questo post daremo uno sguardo, carattere per carattere, al codice sorgente del vaccino a mRNA BioNTech/Pfizer contro il SARS-CoV-2. Vorrei ringraziare le molte persone che hanno donato il proprio tempo a rivedere le bozze di questo articolo per migliorarne la leggibilità e la correttezza. Tutti gli errori sono miei, ma vorrei...

Αποκωδικοποιώντας τον πηγαίο κώδικα του εμβολίου κατά του Κορωνοϊού (BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine) Καλώς ήρθατε! Σε αυτήν την ανάρτηση, θα ρίξουμε μια ματιά χαρακτήρα-προς-χαρακτήρα στον πηγαίο κώδικα του εμβολίου BioNTech / Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA. Θέλω να ευχαριστήσω τον μεγάλο αριθμό ανθρώπων που αφιέρωσαν χρόνο στην προεπισκόπηση αυτού...

Translations: ελληνικά / عربى / 中文 (Weixin video, Youtube video) / 粵文 / bahasa Indonesia / český / Català / český / Deutsch / Español / 2فارسی / فارسی / Français / עִברִית / Hrvatski / Italiano / Magyar / Nederlands / 日本語 / 日本語 2 / नेपाली / Polskie / русский / Português / Română / Slovensky / Slovenščina / Srpski / Türk / український / Markdown...

Willkommen! In diesem Artikel werden wir einen Blick auf den Programmcode des BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Impfstoffes werfen, und zwar Zeichen für Zeichen. Ich möchte Allen danken, die zur Korrektheit und Lesbarkeit dieses Artikels beigetragen haben. Für alle Fehler zeige ich mich trotzdem selbst verantwortlich, und würde von ihnen gern...

In this part of the history of PowerDNS, I talk about the technical developments from 2013 to 2020. Over these years many fascinating business & hiring developments also happened, but these are described in a separate post, part 3B of the PowerDNS History. Here are the earlier parts: Part 1, Part 2 For context, the 2013-2020 era is what I would...

Kerstdiner met de familie, moeten we dat nou wel of niet doen dit jaar? Ooit studeerde ik in Delft. Niet dat ik m’n studie daar afgemaakt heb, maar ik heb er toch nog wat geleerd. Een van de dingen die ik daar opgestoken heb is dat je een kerstdiner prima in maart kan houden. Studentenhuizen, jaarclubs, disputen en dergelijke ontdekten met...

As COVID-19 drags on, I’ve tried to stay optimistic about scientific and medical developments. By highlighting research, I have hoped to explain (in Dutch and English) how various things will work to defeat COVID-19, and how to look out for your health. But all this time I’ve been frustrated about the things we are not doing, or are not doing...

This is part two of the PowerDNS history as I recall it. As noted in part one, some of this stuff is rather old, and it is entirely possible I am misremembering things. Please do let me know if you find any important omissions or mistakes! At the end of 2002, beginning of 2003, PowerDNS as a going concern was gone. There were no more employees,...

Dit is waarschijnlijk de laatste keer dat ik zal bloggen over mijn nieuwe (part-time) baan. Met ingang van 1 december ben ik één van de drie leden van de commissie die lasten voor de Nederlandse inlichtingen- en veiligheidsdiensten toetst, de Toetsingscommissie Inzet Bevoegdheden (TIB). Als een van de civiele of militaire inlichtingen- en...

So this is likely the last time you see me blog about my new (part time) job. (Nederlandse versie hier). Starting December 1st, I am one of the three members of the board that checks warrants for the Dutch intelligence and security services. This board is called “Toetsingscommissie Inzet Bevoegdheden” or TIB. If either of the civil or the...

Hi everyone, I have often told the history of PowerDNS, or at least how I recall it, during talks and presentations. As I am about to truly leave DNS and PowerDNS, I thought it was high time to document my recollections. Since this is a 20+ year old story right now, it is very possible I have forgotten or misremembered important things. Do let me...

Recently I revamped my home internet, and (hopefully) temporarily ended up with a modem that needs to be power cycled from time to time. We’re working on getting it fixed, but in the meantime I needed a solution for automated power cycling. There are various ways to turn the power off or on from a Linux computer, and some of these are very...

Op verzoek van iemand uit de elektriciteitswereld, een stukje over de “Gevangen Regelgever”, beter bekend als “Regulatory Capture”. Heel in het kort is dit een zeer veel voorkomende situatie waarbij een toezichthouder (of regelgever) langzaam maar zeker de wereld gaat zien door de ogen van de sector waar toezicht op wordt gehouden. Dit leidt dan...

Er zijn nu twee vaccins die meer dan 90% effectief lijken te zijn tegen Corona. Dit is heel hard gegaan, maar dat is goed te verklaren. Universitair Hoofddocent en kinderarts Patricia Bruijning heeft het hier heel duidelijk uitgelegd. In het kort, we hebben zo snel vaccins want: Het SARS-CoV-2 virus is een relatief makkelijk doelwit om een vaccin...

Ik heb hier een Twitter-draadje van Patricia Bruijning omgezet naar een webpagina, waardoor het verhaal wat makkelijker te lezen is voor mensen zonder Twitter. Dr Bruijning is Universitair Hoofddocent epidemiologie bij UMC Utrecht maar is ook kinderarts. Ze weet dus goed waar ze het over heeft en ook hoe de praktijk werkt. En ik ben erg blij dat...

Ja, daar zijn we weer! Voor het eerst [sinds juli](https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/corona-update-eind-juli/) weer een Corona Update. Er is inmiddels weer genoeg te melden: vaccins, tests, cijfers, medicijnen en vitamine D. Vaccins Om te beginnen, wow. En nog een keer wow. SINDS VANDAAG ER ZIJN TWEE WERKENDE VACCINS! En nog gekker, ze zijn in...

As the world focuses on the terrible (but improving) Dutch COVID-19 numbers, I also see a lot of people interpreting the numbers badly. But we can hardly blame folks since most data is only described in Dutch. And even in Dutch the descriptions can be very confusing. So here goes. NOTE: Corrections and additional links & sources are very welcome...

Don’t take this too seriously. As part of my coping mechanisms, I try to understand the latest (Dutch) COVID-19 figures. I documented where to get the raw data and what they mean in an earlier post. Please note I am not trying to make any kind of point with this data, not positive, not negative. I have no agenda, please do not read this as me...

Around a million years ago (it feels like) but actually 9 months ago I delivered a brief talk on end to end encryption for the European Internet Forum at the European Parliament. Update: in February 2024, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in rather strong words that forcing providers to break end to end encryption violates human rights....

The European Global Navigation Satellite System Galileo has recently been suffering from frequent "almost disruptions", most likely partially due to Corona, and possibly also due to Brexit, but in any case due to some historical stinginess. Before I explain what is going on, I should hasten to say that most days of the week, Galileo is working...

Welcome to part 3 of my series on OSNMA, the proposed Galileo Navigation Message Authentication protocol. This part can be read independently from part 1 and part 2, but it might be useful to read the introduction to part 1. This post attempts to explain GPS (GNSS) jamming and spoofing, so it might be a useful read even if you don’t care about...

We horen veel over hoeveel mensen er nu besmet raken met COVID-19. Tegelijk viel het tot begin oktober erg mee met de ziekenhuisopnames en sterfgevallen. Ik kan ook niet verklaren hoe dat precies komt (het is niet alleen leeftijd), maar ik wil het in dit artikel wel hebben over “de zonlichtvitamine”, vitamine D. Want nu in september hebben we net...

Recapping from part 1: Galileo will soon add cryptographic signatures to the navigation messages. These cryptographic signatures are made with symmetric cryptography, which means clever techniques are required to prevent receivers from impersonating the network. The key to the technique is first signing messages, and only later disclosing the key...

Position, velocity and time (PVT) information can be a ’nice to have’, but in other circumstances knowing place and time has legal or military importance as well. Heavy vehicles for example are typically outfitted with tachographs that track driver speed and/or location. This has importance for rest regulations, but also to check if loads are...

Toch weer een kleine Corona-update, vrij snel na de vorige van 1 juli. Want poeh, gaat het nou ineens weer mis in Nederland? Of valt het mee? Moeten we allemaal aan de maskers en komt het dan goed? En gaan de vaccins en medicijnen ons redden voor de winter? In tegenstelling tot vele roeptoeters heb ik daar ook allemaal geen zekere antwoorden op,...

GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou (Global Navigational Satellite Systems, GNSS) are miracles of engineering. And within any complex system hide surprises and unsuspected complications. In this post I go over how we resolved an odd observation: that everyone (including major institutions) reported that one of the Galileo satellites (E24) appeared to...

Hi everyone, Disclaimer: this is a review of a free sample I got sent by Uputronics. I recently spotted on Twitter that Uputronics had launched a GPS/RTS Raspberry Pi Expansion Board, and that they were looking for worthy projects to test it. I thought our Galileo/GPS/BeiDou/GLONASS monitoring project galmon.eu might be worthy and Uputronics...

I have a longer story brewing, but in this post I want to briefly announce the “Galmon.eu unofficial Weekly Performance Report”. This is a blog post version of an earlier Twitter thread. I’m very proud to present the first full Galmon.eu Weekly Galileo Report! And the good news is: it was a good week with very little to report. The email has just...

Nu het RIVM gestopt is met dagelijkse updates vond ik dat het tijd was dat gat dan maar te vullen, al is het maar voor een dag. Een nieuwe Corona Update “hoe gaat het nu met”. De vorige was alweer van 21 april! De “Ik ben geen expert, maar toch”-factor Een boel dansleraren en opiniepeilers zijn inmiddels COVID-19 experts. In deze post heb ik erg...

When COVID-19 burst on to the scene, tests quickly showed that the everyone was susceptible - no pre-existing antibodies were found that bound to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This led to dire predictions that over 80% of the population might eventually fall ill. Now more than six months in, this has not happened, and it does not appear to be close to...

Welcome to this post, in which we’ll be taking a trip through the wild and bumpy ride that has been Vitamin D & sunlight research over the past few decades, and what it might mean for COVID-19. As with my previous post, before any non-specialist attempts to write something on COVID-19, we should wonder: are any actual experts already writing on...

It turns out that so far, I have written over 44000 words on COVID-19. I’ve tried very hard to only report the best and most trustworthy science, but I did strive to include interesting new insights that were not yet mainstream. As an example, I spoke about vitamin D and sunlight real early, which now indeed appears to be a thing. No guarantees...

This post is dedicated to lab technicians everywhere doing the difficult work institutes and hospitals rely on to investigate disease and keep us healthy. Lab work requires high precision, deep understanding, is physically demanding, and can even be dangerous. Although our healthcare systems & universities would come to a grinding halt without...

Before any non-specialist attempts to write something on COVID-19, we should wonder: are any actual experts already writing on this, and if not, why not. Enough badly informed stuff has already been published by amateurs that before posting we should be certain we are actually being helpful. October 2022 UPDATE: I've removed the rest of this...

Een spontane wetenschapsupdate, omdat het Moederdag is, en speciaal voor iedereen die het nu zonder zijn of haar moeder moet doen. Want, we dragen allemaal letterlijk een beetje onze moeder bij ons! Deze post is dankbaar geïnspireerd door deze Twitter thread van Efra Rivera-Serrano, PhD. Bron: Efra Rivera-Serrano, link Ons DNA is een mix van dat...

Het RIVM, het “Outbreak Management Team” en het kabinet werken samen aan gedegen adviezen. Uiteindelijk worden dit ook wel de juiste adviezen, al blijft men soms lang aan oude dingen hangen: mensen zonder symptomen zijn niet besmettelijk (oeps, toch wel), maskers hebben geen zin (oeps, ze helpen wel voorkomen dat je andere mensen besmet)....

Ik blog al maanden over SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka “het coronavirus”, waarbij ik grotendeels dingen uitleg en verwijs naar positieve ontwikkelingen. Ook zijn er stukjes over medische experimenten, over ons immuunsysteem en recent iets korts over het vermoedelijke belang van goede ventilatie om COVID-19 besmettingen tegen te gaan. Ik houd van de...

Ja, daar zijn we weer. Bij het beëindigen van de serie dagelijkse Corona updates had ik aangekondigd nog terug te komen als er weer wat te melden was. Bij deze een aflevering “hoe gaat het nu met”, met daarin nieuws over hoe het verder gaat met eerder gemelde ontwikkelingen. Daarnaast twee stukjes op veler verzoek: hoe gaat het met het testen en...

bert@hubertnet.nl / @bert_hu_bert / LinkedIn Very quick post. The Dutch government just launched a tender for “digital technologies that can help with Corona”. The tender includes words on privacy sensitive contact tracing, it explicitly refers to PEPP-PT, the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing project. Responses are due on Tuesday...

As many countries are now managing to drive down their COVID-19 epidemic, thoughts are turning to how to manage the outbreak beyond the “lockdown”. The restrictions we live under now do appear to work, but for multiple reasons, they’ll be hard to maintain. When the epidemic was small, it was possible to trace every new infection and isolate...

Ik heb op Facebook beloofd iedere dag een "Corona Update" te sturen met ontwikkelingen die hoopgevend zijn, terwijl ik het wel realistisch houd. Hier verzamel ik de updates zodat ze ook buiten Facebook te bekijken zijn. Er is genoeg nieuws om je zorgen over te maken dat ik het nodig vind ook dingen die kunnen helpen te belichten. Mensen die me...

Many many possible medicines are being touted as possibly being helpful in fighting COVID-19. Here’s a small list where we have some initial results or at least anecdotes: (hydroxy)chloroquine, with azithromycin or zinc: This is the “tech-bro” favorite right now, partially based on recommendations from Elon Musk and Donald Trump, two noted...

(On this page in Dutch I post daily bits of realistic but hopeful Corona news. Here is a somehat rough translation of an article on our immune system I posted there, because I think it might also be useful for people that don’t speak Dutch). Wednesday, April 1st COVID-19 can only live thanks to us. Viruses cannot reproduce independently, they...

Hello and welcome to this stream of consciousness I dare to call "the Corona Science Journal". Latest update: 30th of March 11:34 UTC. View history of this page [on GitHub](https://github.com/ahupowerdns/corona-science/commits/master) ([RSS](https://github.com/ahupowerdns/corona-science/commits/master/corona-science.md.atom)), where you can also...

(On this page in Dutch I post daily bits of realistic but hopeful Corona news. Here is a somehat rough translation of an article on antibodies I posted there, because I think it might also be useful for people that don’t speak Dutch). Friday March 27: antibodies on demand? Those who have read the previous posts will recall that antibodies from...

Several sites are now shipping “COVID-19 self test kits” or perhaps “Coronavirus self test kits”. These claim to detect the virus in 10 minutes based on a drop of blood. These rapid self-test kits are currently: Likely fake Even if not fake, they do NOT test for the virus, they do NOT do what you think they do Even if they do what they are...

Gisteren verscheen het rapport “Patiëntveiligheid bij ICT-uitval in ziekenhuizen” van de Onderzoeksraad voor veiligheid. Omdat ik een bescheiden bijdrage heb geleverd aan dit rapport voel ik me geroepen een stukje te schrijven over wat in het rapport het “ICT-fundament” wordt genoemd. Voor de volledige duidelijkheid, wat ik hier schrijf heeft...

Here is a rough comparison between the reported genomes of SARS and 2019-nCoV ("Wuhan virus"). This is the output of an old but still interesting

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. In a break from the usual GPS/Galileo, DNA and C++ posts, here is a bit on 5G and national security. It turns out that through PowerDNS and its parent company Open-Xchange, we know a lot about how large scale European communication service providers work - most of whom...

Welcome to the Galmon project! Our goals are to monitor the major Global Navigation Satellite Systems, including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou, but also Space Base Augmentation Systems like WAAS, EGNOS and GAGAN. Galmon is an open source & open data project with a community of over 30 station operators running more than 50 receivers. Some...

Last year I wrote a post listing what I had been doing in 2018, because it turned out it was a lot, so much that it was useful to summarise it somewhat. This year there is less to report, but people have wondered what I’ve been up to. And I’ve learned that if you leave room for speculation about your intentions, wrong answers tend to come up....

What is life? This question keeps many people awake at night and has led to rafts of definitions, some involving features (procreation, metabolism and so forth), some involving chemistry, entropy or energy flux and some are of a more philosophical bent. A BBC article noted there are over 100 definitions of life and it claims all are wrong. And...

Note: This article covers a lot of well-trodden ground, although this post has the benefit of 1) being rather brief and 2) advancing slightly on from earlier work. Noam Chomsky wrote 39 dense pages of philosophy on this subject in “Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden”. Evolutionary’s leading light Ernst Meyr wrote a whole book called “What...

Dear anonymous internet user, dear corporate employee hiding behind a gmail.com address, dear “GitHub account with a single issue”, Thank you for your interest in my free software, my project or the documentation I wrote for you. I am happy to hear you want to ask a question, have a problem, or perhaps even inform me of a new requirement you...

This page collects links to raw and live sources on how well the planet, including its vital infrastructure, is doing right now, potentially visualised attractively. But the key thing is, we want Real Data, from the most direct sources. Sources are expected to be realtime or at least updated frequently. Mere estimates of things based on...

By bert hubert / bert@hubertnet.nl This post is an excerpt of a far longer post on Galileo, its structures and the cause of the outage. Here we’ll only focus on the outage - the potential underlying reasons behind it are described in the full article. Since the week-long outage in July I’ve been fascinated by Galileo and, together with a...

By bert hubert / bert@hubertnet.nl In this post I want to document some mostly non-technical aspects of the EU’s Galileo Satellite Navigation Network. I will also share some observations on how things are going, and perhaps how they could be improved. NOTE: A shorter version of this article, focusing only on the July outage, can be found here....

The Netherlands is struggling with a shortage of primary school teachers, which as a nice side effect means that I get ample opportunities to do technical propaganda in the name of education. This is a quick writeup of a lesson on how GPS (or in general, satellite based navigation) works. I’d like to thank Jasper Vos and Michel Dingen of OBS De...

Note: For context, please see this article on the Economist Job. I also want to thank Job Snijders who was of great help in writing this article. How the Internet Leaks A few weeks ago large swathes of the internet stopped working around the world. The cause was quickly found: a computer networking mistake over at a specialty metals company based...

Note: For context, please see this article on the Economist Job. This is a condensed and updated version of my earlier post On the pan-genome. Towards a multi-stranded genome Given that the completion of the human genome project was announced in 2003, one could be forgiven for thinking the kinks would have been worked out by now. It turns out...

Over the holiday, I ran into this job advertisement from The Economist: The Economist is looking for a new Science and Technology correspondent. Knowledge of the field, an ability to write informatively, succinctly and wittily, and an insatiable curiosity are more important attributes than prior journalistic experience. Please send a CV, a brief...

By bert hubert bert@hubertnet.nl / @bert_hu_bert / https://galmon.eu/ Late July 2019, Galileo, “the European GPS” suffered from a week long outage. I’m a proud European, and I think we should have our own well-functioning navigation system, so I tried to figure out what was going on. Surely someone was monitoring this stuff in public? I come from...

Hi everyone, As noted previously I’ve gone all in on GNSS monitoring. GNSS is the generic term for GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou satellites. Eventually a big blog post will come out, but meanwhile you can see the results on galmon.eu. A few days ago, an unknown GLONASS satellite started transmitting signals on slot R26 and I tried to figure...

I’ve recently been spending quite some time on the EU’s Galileo Navigation Satellite System. In this post you’ll find some rough notes on things I’ve found out, both about how to receive data & how to understand the Galileo ephemeris parameters. Feedback is very welcome on bert@hubertnet.nl or @bert_hu_bert! I’m no Galileo specialist, so I am...

In this post I want to shine a light on an important development within the world of DNA which shows how much DNA and the world of computing are now intertwined. It turns out we share important problems, like in this case: file formats. Note: I expect to be posting more DNA material as part of my efforts to write a book on this fascinating...

I’ve been using gnuplot since.. like forever. It is one of my best friends in plotting data and discovering what is going on. But for all its greatness, you do tend to run into a wall - once you step outside the things gnuplot is good at, suddenly large heaps of awk, sort, unique and odd shell scripts are required to get to the next level. This...

In previous articles, I’ve waxed rhapsodic about how great C++ is. I also noted there however that every language, C++ included, has its dark sides. Some languages have an unavoidable pervasive dark side, like being slow or hard to multithread, for C++ that dark side is mostly its complexity. In this post I want to zoom in on a specific ‘gotcha’...

This is a more personal post than I usually write, and it was prompted by several people asking what I had been up to lately. It turns out that it is somewhat of a story. It is a long story too. Since the beginning of 2018 day to day management of PowerDNS is now truly in the hands of professionals. I’m very proud to report that PowerDNS has not...

Yesterday, NASA landed its InSight mission on Mars, and it all worked! The landing happened between 8 and 9PM local time, but I wanted to share the excitement with my kids’ classmates from school (aged between around 9 and 10), so I needed something that worked remotely. NASA provided a wonderful webcast in English, and although many children...

John Ousterhout, of TCL fame, has written a book that is as small (literally) as it is important. Weighing in at 178 none too big pages, it takes us on an inspired trip through what John has learned over the decades. There is no shortage of thought on programming. There is also no shortage of people doing programming. What is rare however is a...

Linus Torvalds has long been one of my heroes. The invention of Linux & the subsequent development of Git were technical and organizational miracles. You could fill a book simply by quoting examples of Linus dissecting technical problems to their components and making it obvious what should happen. However, over the past decade, Linus’...

In part 5 we discussed smart pointers, placement new and the powerful move constructor. As you may have gathered by now, parts 1 through 5 were a pitch to sell modern C++ to existing C specialists. To do so, I tried to show the best and most immediately useful parts of C++. Note: part 1 is here. As noted earlier, no language is perfect, and not...

I recently wrote a series of posts called ‘Modern C++ for C Programmers’. I mentioned in the introduction: “I hope to convince C programmers to give ‘2017 era C++’ (which is entirely unlike 2003 C++) another good look. (…) My goal is that when you go look for a new language to learn (say, Go or Rust), you will hopefully consider modern C++ as...

2018 is an exciting time to be a programmer, with so many good “full service” programming languages to choose from: C, C++ 2017, Go, Python, Rust and who knows Swift too. Programming languages are complicated beasts - even the simplest languages have specifications that run (or would run) in the hundreds of pages, and once you include everything,...

Welcome back! In part 4 we went over the nitty-gritty of lambdas and how to store them, we explored the relation between the various C++ algorithms and containers, plus we took a stroll through some non-standard containers with exceptional capabilities. Note: part 1 is here. In this probably final part 5, we’ll be going over some of the most...

Welcome back! In part 3 I discussed classes, polymorphism, references and templates, and finally built a source indexer out of basic containers that achieves 60MB/s indexing speed. In this part we continue with further C++ features that you can use to spice up your code ’line by line’, without immediately having to use all 1400 pages of ‘The C++...

Welkom! Veel bedrijven en scholen in mijn omgeving worstelen op dit moment met het vinden van personeel. Sinds 1999 neem ik mensen aan en help ik bij werving, voor mijn eigen bedrijf & dat van anderen, maar ook voor scholen en instellingen. En als ik eerlijk ben, ik ben er inmiddels best goed in. In ieder geval ben ik onvoorstelbaar trots op de...

Welcome back! In part 2 I discussed basic classes, threading, atomic operations, smart pointers, resource acquisition and (very briefly) namespaces. In this part we continue with further C++ features that you can use to spice up your code ’line by line’, without immediately having to use all 1400 pages of ‘The C++ Programming Language’. Various...

Welcome back! In part 1 I discussed how std::string and std::vector interoperate with C, including with the C standard library qsort call. We also discovered that the C++ std::sort is 40% faster than C qsort because C++ is able to inline the comparison function. In this part we continue with further C++ features that you can use to spice up your...

Welcome to part 1 of Modern C++ for C Programmers, please see the introduction for the goals and context of this series. In this part we start with C++ features that you can use to spice up your code ’line by line’, without immediately having to use all 1400 pages of ‘The C++ Programming Language’. Various code samples discussed here can be found...

Ahhh.. meetings. The one old school company thing that survives in this agile, open-office, ‘remote first’, nomadic worker world. And it is easy to see why: the ‘meeting’ is the last guaranteed way to get everyone to pay attention for an hour, or at least, pretend to. It still is rare for people to fake attending two meetings at the same time in...

Comments are very welcome on bert@hubertnet.nl or @bert_hu_bert. Update: several constructive remarks have been used to improve this text. Thanks! In this post I will attempt to fully explain the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in an accessible way. I decided to write it up after I realised it took me more than a day to figure it out, even...

Welcome to Kolmo There are three avenues to learn about Kolmo (GitHub). There are two Youtube videos, one from the most excellent NLNOG 2017, the other from the equally excellent UKNOF 38. These videos explain a lot of the the history and the ‘why’ behind Kolmo. There is also the kolmo.org website, which is ‘self-hosted’ by the ws Kolmo-powered...

Some brief notes on making ethernet cables With thanks to the most excellent NLNOG for a lot of mostly correct advice! Friends will tell you “crimping” ethernet cables is easy. Most of your friends either have overly rosy memories, or have practiced on 200 cables before telling you it is now easy. It is not easy. This page is for if you have a...

Onlangs vond ik via LinkedIn een advertentie voor de vacature ‘Senior Category Manager Domestic Appliances’ bij bol.com. Hierin stond zoveel wartaal dat ik het de moeite vond een ‘best of’ selectie te delen op Facebook. Daar vond men het ook erg grappig. Desondanks is het de moeite waard de vacature te decoderen: wat staat hier nou eigenlijk? Of...

DNA: The Code of Life At the most magical SHA2017 gathering I gave two presentations, “DNA: The Code of Life” and the followup, “DNA: More greatest hits” (slides). The first presentation was recorded by the wonderful CCC C3VOC streaming crew, the second one by my friend Bart Smit (who is also wonderful). Without making this post too long, I want...

(Don’t) drop the hint: communicating with technical people This post is a subset of the presentation “Escaping the data center — tales from a recovering manager”. Video, slides. When we communicate at the office, we frequently do not directly say what we mean. A common conversation might go like this “Hey John, we did a survey and it turns out...

On IP address encryption: security analysis with respect for privacy Frequently, privacy concerns and regulations get in the way of security analysis. I’m a big fan of privacy, but I’m also a big fan of security and preventing people from getting hacked. If you are hacked you have no privacy either. Per-customer/subscriber traces are extremely...

On Linux vDSO and clock_gettime sometimes being slow Like the previous post on this somewhat dormant blog, I want to share an oddity I discovered that no search engine could really find for me - even though once I found what the problem was, it turns out I was by no means the first person to discover this. Some system calls that are used...

So no matter how pretty your code, eventually someone will benchmark it and demand top performance. Squeezing microseconds is a very addictive and even destructive activity. It ruins your evenings, destroys your ability to converse with human beings and typically leaves your code in a mess. No programmer can escape it however: the world demands...

A meandering walk through innovation that also reviews a book This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. I care deeply about innovation. It is literally where the future comes from, but it is a curious thing. Innovation and its more powerful partner, invention proceed at a snail’s pace. “In a world where change is...

How many hours for multithreading the server? Or: dealing with overly detailed project planning Many developers, me included, dread that moment. Someone sits down with you and wants to know how many “hours” each step of the project will take. And of course the thing is, if you are doing something that has been done many times before, you might be...