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 provide … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 bee … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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, d … | Continue reading
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’ … | Continue reading
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 wi … | Continue reading
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 v … | Continue reading
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 beken … | Continue reading
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 her … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 Mar … | Continue reading
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 a … | Continue reading
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 di … | Continue reading
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 it … | Continue reading
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! Hello, and welcome to this presentation on who controls the internet, and if they actually should. As you can see, I cov … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
By bert hubert bert@hubertnet.nl / @PowerDNS_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 … | Continue reading
Leap seconds are controversial things. Since the Earth does not rotate at a steady rate, over time the Earth could get ahead or behind “atomic time”. Whatever solution you propose for this, someone is going to be unhappy.I take no position on what the best thing to do is here, ex … | Continue reading
A meandering walk through innovation that also reviews a bookI 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 the only … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 is natur … | Continue reading
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 Ree … | Continue reading
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”.What is going on? A n … | Continue reading
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.BusinessIn 2013, PowerDNS was in a crucial phase. Existing business was going well, but we were receiving pointed … | Continue reading
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 dema … | Continue reading
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, and lately, rejoining it in some fashion. If you h … | Continue reading
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 i … | Continue reading
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 t … | Continue reading
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 justification.And I … | Continue reading
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 spo … | Continue reading
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 med … | Continue reading
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.Below you can find a lightly edited transcript - it is still presentation style, so here and there the sentences ar … | Continue reading
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. In short: the vaccine mRNA has been optimized by the manufacturer by changing bits … | Continue reading
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 will get described in a separate post, part 3B of the PowerDNS History. Here are the earli … | Continue reading
ελληνικά / Deutsch / PortuguêsWelcome! In this post, we’ll be taking a character-by-character look at the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine. I want to thank the large cast of people who spent time previewing this article for legibility and correctness. Al … | Continue reading
Welcome! In this post, we’ll be taking a character-by-character look at the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine. I want to thank the large cast of people who spent time previewing this article for legibility and correctness. All mistakes remain mine though, … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
Last week, Galileo unexpectedly started transmitting production signals from two eccentric satellites. In this post I explain the background of the situation and the unique orbit of these satellites. I also cover why these new production signals may be good news, but that the com … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
(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 … | Continue reading
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.Because of my new job, I will soon no longer be able to opine on these things as easily. Given the uph … | Continue reading
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 sho … | Continue reading