What happened to RubyGems, Bundler, and the Open Source drama that controls the internet infrastructure.#Features
How Ruby Went Off the Rails
For the past couple of weeks, a community of developers who use the programming language Ruby have been closely following a dramatic change in ownership of some of the most essential tools in its ecosystem with far reaching impacts for the worldwide web.If you’re not familiar with Ruby or the open source development community, you probably haven’t heard about any of this, but the tools in question serve as critical infrastructure for gigantic internet services like GitHub, Shopify, and others, so any disruption to them would be catastrophic to those companies, their users, and vast swaths of the internet.
On September 19, Ruby Central, a nonprofit organization that manages RubyGems.org, a platform for sharing Ruby code and libraries, asserted control over several GitHub repositories for Ruby Gems as well as other critical Ruby open source projects that the rest of the Ruby development community relies on. A group of open source developers who had contributed to those projects and maintained them for years had their permissions suddenly revoked. When these developers announced on social media that their access was taken away, many Ruby developers saw the decision as a betrayal of their years-long contributions to the Ruby ecosystem and open source principles more generally. Others accused Ruby Central of succumbing to corporate pressure from companies like Shopify, which they claimed wanted more control over the project.
In some ways, this whole affair is an example of why this stuff gets really messy when people start getting paid
I’ve spent the last week talking to people who had direct involvement with Ruby Central’s decision, the contributors who were ousted, and developers in the Ruby community. I’ve heard accusations of greed, toxic personalities, and stories about years-long feuds between people, at times in open disagreement, who ultimately govern some of these important open source tools.RubyGems.org and other critical Ruby tools have so far not been interrupted during this transition, but the incident sheds light on a basic truth about the internet and open source development: Much of the technology we use every day and take for granted is being maintained by a small number of developers who are not compensated for that work or get paid very little when compared to salaries at big tech companies. Open source development continues to make much of the internet possible, but as some of these tools become more important and financially valuable, they’re subject to more scrutiny and pressure from the community, organizations, and companies that rely on them.
“In some ways, this whole affair is an example of why this stuff gets really messy when people start getting paid, and once you start introducing formal organizations and employees and nonprofits and lawyers and all this kind of complexity,” Mike McQuaid, developer of the popular package manager Homebrew, which is built with Ruby, told me. McQuaid has talked to and offered to mediate between Ruby Central and the ousted maintainers. “This is a textbook case of what happens when there's this conflict between what companies want, what nonprofit individuals want, how much responsibility people have when they take money, who gets control and when. How much democracy versus just ‘I have the power to do something, therefore I'm going to do it.’”
With Ruby developers can download and use self-contained packages of code that add different functionalities to a Ruby project. These packages are called gems, and are distributed primarily via RubyGems.org, where developers can upload gems they’ve developed or download gems from other developers.
The ability to download gems and plug them into different projects is very useful and convenient for Ruby developers, but can create complications. Different gems are developed by different teams and are updated at different times with bug fixes and new features, and might not necessarily be compatible or play well with one another as they evolve.
This is where Bundler comes in. As its website explains, “Bundler provides a consistent environment for Ruby projects by tracking and installing the exact gems and versions that are needed.” So, for example, if a developer is building a Ruby project and wants to use gems X, Y, and Z, Bundler will pull the versions of those gems that are compatible with one another, providing developers an easy solution for what Bundler describes as “dependency hell.”
Bundler is an open source project that was initially developed by Yehuda Katz, but the GitHub repository for the project was created and was administrated by André Arko. In 2015, Arko also founded a nonprofit trade organization named Ruby Together, which raised funds from developers and companies that use Ruby in order to maintain Bundler and other open source tools.
I will not mince words here: This was a hostile takeover
RubyGems.org, the site and service, is governed by Ruby Central, a nonprofit founded in 2001, which also organizes several Ruby conferences like RubyConf and RailsConf. In 2022, Arko’s Ruby Together and Ruby Central merged, “uniting the Ruby community’s leading events and infrastructure under one roof,” according to Ruby Central’s site. Bundler’s and RubyGems.org’s work often overlapped both in their goals and the developers who worked on them, but operated across two different GitHub organizations, each with its own repositories. To streamline development of these open source projects, Bundler also joined the Ruby Gems GitHub organization in 2022.In 2023, Ruby Central established the Open Source Software Committee, which according to its site oversees RubyGems, Bundler, and RubyGems.org, focusing on infrastructure stability, security, and sustainability.
A confusing and central point of disagreement between Ruby Central and the maintainers it ousted on September 19 is rooted in the merging of Ruby Together and Ruby Central and the difference between Rubygems.org the service, essentially an implementation of the Ruby Gems codebase on an AWS instance, which both parties agree Ruby Central owns and operates, and the Ruby Gems the codebase that lives in the same GitHub organization as Bundler.
According to a recording of a mid-September Zoom meeting which I obtained between Marty Haught, Ruby Central’s Director of Open Source, Arko, and the other ousted contributors, Ruby Central maintains that the codebase and GitHub organization became its responsibility when Ruby Central merged with Ruby Together in 2022. The ousted contributors’ position is that members of Ruby Central, like Haught, can be owners of the GitHub organization, but that ownership of the RubyGems codebase and other projects in the GitHub organization belong to the contributors, who don’t have a detailed governance model but historically have governed by consensus.
Arko made this argument to me in a recent interview, but also outlined that argument in a blog post, where he also shared the merger agreement between Ruby Central and Ruby Together. It shows that Ruby Together would dissolve and that Ruby Central would be in charge of raising and allocating funds for development, but does not explicitly say Ruby Central takes ownership of the RubyGems and Bundler projects or the GitHub organization.
To make matters even more complicated, Arko was at once a contributor to these open source projects, a contributor to RubyGems.org the service, an owner of the GitHub organization, and an advisor to Ruby Central’s Open Source Software Committee.
In May, Arko resigned his position as an advisor to Ruby Central’s Open Source Software Committee, but continued his work as a contributor. Arko told me he resigned his advisory role because of Ruby Central’s last minute invitation of David Heinemeier Hansson, better known online as DHH, as a keynote speaker at RailsConf.
Arko told me he objected to that decision because of DHH’s “horrifying, racist, misogynist, politics” and DHH’s “personal vendetta” against him. In 2021, back at Motherboard, we reported that many employees at DHH’s company, Basecamp, quit after his decision to ban any discussion of politics at work, which many employees saw as squashing discussion about race, bias, and diversity. Arko told me that DHH’s “personal vendetta” against him stemmed from Arko not wanting to support a certain feature DHH wanted added to Bundler, after which DHH demanded Arko be removed from the Ruby Together board.
The current controversy erupted on social media on September 19, when one contributor to the open source projects in the RubyGems and Bundler GitHub organization, Ellen Dash, announced that Haught, Ruby Central’s Director of Open Source, revoked GitHub organization membership for all admins on the RubyGems, Bundler, and RubyGems.org maintainer teams. At that moment, their permissions and access to the GitHub organization were revoked, meaning they could no longer make any changes or contributions to the code, and Haught, representing Ruby Central, took control.
“I will not mince words here: This was a hostile takeover,” Dash said in a public “goodbye” letter they shared online. “I consider Ruby Central’s behavior a threat to the Ruby community as a whole. The forceful removal of those who maintained RubyGems and Bundler for over a decade is inherently a hostile action. Ruby Central crossed a line by doing this.”
The news was seen by many developers in the Ruby and open source community as betraying the dedication and labor that Dash, Arko, and other maintainers put into these tools for years.
Ruby Central, meanwhile, describes the move as one centered around security.
“With the recent increase of software supply chain attacks, we are taking proactive steps to safeguard the Ruby gem ecosystem end-to-end,” Ruby Central said in an explanation of its decision. “To strengthen supply chain security, we are taking important steps to ensure that administrative access to the RubyGems.org, RubyGems, and Bundler is securely managed. This includes both our production systems and GitHub repositories. In the near term we will temporarily hold administrative access to these projects while we finalize new policies that limit commit and organization access rights. This decision was made and approved by the Ruby Central Board as part of our fiduciary responsibility. In the interim, we have a strong on-call rotation in place to ensure continuity and reliability while we advance this work. These changes are designed to protect critical infrastructure that power the Ruby ecosystem, whether you are a developer downloading gems to your local machine [or] a small or large team who rely on the safety and availability of these tools.”
404 Media has covered the kind of recent supply chain attacks targeting open source projects that Ruby Central is referring to. Earlier this month, a critical JavaScript development tool Node Package Manager (NPM), was targeted by a similar supply chain attack. But not everyone in the Ruby development community bought the explanation that security was at the heart of the recent moves. One reason for that is a public statement from a Ruby Central board member and treasurer Freedom Dumlao.
On Substack, Dumlao apologized for the sudden change and how it was communicated.
“If Ruby Central made a critical mistake, it's here,” he wrote. “Could these conversations have been happening in public? Could the concerns we were hearing from companies, users and sponsors have been made more apparent? Probably. But I remind you we don't have a ‘communications team’, no real PR mechanism, we are all just engineers who (like many of you I'm sure) go heads down on a problem until it's solved.”
Dumlao reiterated that RubyGems and Bundler are critical infrastructure that are now increasingly under the threat of supply chain attacks, and said that the companies that rely on them “count” on Ruby Central do everything it can to keep them and their users safe.
However, Dumlao also said that Ruby Central was under “deadline” to make this change.
“Either Ruby Central puts controls in place to ensure the safety and stability of the infrastructure we are responsible for, or lose the funding that we use to keep those things online and going,” Dumlao wrote.
In a September 22 video message in response to criticism about its decision to remove maintainers, Ruby Central’s executive director Shan Cureton described a similar dynamic. She said “sponsors and companies who depend on Ruby tooling came to us with supply chain concerns” and that “Our funding and sponsorships are directly tied to our ability to demonstrate strong operational standards. Without those standards in place, it becomes harder to secure the support needed to keep maintainers paid, organize events, and provide resources for developers at every stage of their journey.”
Since Shopify is one of the primary sponsors and funders of Ruby Central, this led some in the Ruby community to believe that Shopify was exerting pressure on Ruby Central to make this change.
“That is not how it happened, and I wish I had been more careful with my wording in that blog post,” Dumlao told me in a Linkedin message when I asked him if Ruby Central was under pressure from Shopify to make these changes.
I just don't think that there's any other plausible explanation than Shopify demanded this.
After I gave Dumlao my number so we could do a phone interview, I got an email from Cindi Sutera, who was recently brought on as a spokesperson for Ruby Central."Ruby Central’s mission is to keep the infrastructure that Rubyists rely on stable, safe, and trustworthy,” she told me. “As part of a routine review following organizational changes, we identified a small number of accounts whose privileges no longer matched current role requirements. The Board voted that it was imperative to align access with our privilege policy to keep the infrastructure that the Ruby community depends on stable. This is our mission.”
Sutera said that the board approved “a temporary administrative hold on certain elevated permissions” while it finalized operator agreements and governance roles.
“To move quickly and transparently, we imposed a clear deadline to complete operator agreements and close gaps,” she said. “We could have communicated earlier that we felt it necessary to move quickly and wish we could have given the community more time to prepare for this action. And now, here we are committed to completing this transition for the stability and security of the Ruby Gems supply chain. More updates are coming as we work through security protocols and stabilization efforts.”
“There’s literally only one company providing the money that is keeping Ruby Central open, and it is Shopify,” Arko told me. “And so I just don't think that there's any other plausible explanation than Shopify demanded this.”
When I asked Arko why he thought Ruby Central removed him, if it wasn’t for security reasons, Arko said: “totally unprovable speculation is Shopify’s CEO is best friends with DHH, who hates me.” DHH is also a Shopify board member.
“Thanks for the invitation, but not my place to weigh in a lot on this while they're working through these changes,” DHH told me in an email when reached for comment. “But I support them taking steps to secure and professionalize the supply chain work they're doing.”
Shopify did not reply to a request for comment.
As this episode spread on social media, I talked to several people associated with Ruby Central who told me the board was acting in the interest of the RubyGems and the Ruby community. Two sources who asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation said that Arko was difficult to work with, questioned how he used funds raised by Ruby Together, and claimed that a new Ruby version manager he’s working on, rv, means he has a conflict of interest with his work on RubyGems and Bundler.
Arko acknowledged to me he heard he’s been difficult to work with in the past. He said that sometimes he’s been able to reach out to people directly and resolve any issues, and that sometimes he hasn’t. He rejected the other allegations, and said that Ruby Together’s financials have always been public.
“It has always been fully public, and the amount has been fixed at $150 an hour for 10 years,” he said, referring to the amount contributors got paid to work on Bundler. Arko added that nobody has ever been paid for more than 20 hours a week, and that the most he’s been able to raise in a single year is $300,000 to pay eight different contributors. “Nobody has gotten a raise for 10 years.”
"As a matter of policy, we don’t discuss individual personnel,” Sutera, the Ruby Central spokesperson, said when I asked if Arko was removed from the GitHub organization because of his previous behavior. “Our recent actions were organization-wide governance measures aimed at aligning access with policy. Our priority is maintaining a stable and secure Ruby Gems supply chain."
McQuaid, the developer of Homebrew and who followed the controversy, told me that even Arko’s harshest critics wouldn’t deny the contributions he’s made to the Ruby community over the years.
Regarding Arko’s blog post about his removal, McQuaid told me it’s good that Arko is crediting other people for their contribution and that he’s following open source principles of community and transparency, but that “his ‘transparency’ here has been selective to things that benefit him/his narrative, he seems unwilling or unable to admit that he failed as a leader in being unwilling or unable to introduce a formal governance process long before this all went down or appoint a meaningful successor and step down amicably.”
The fundamental disagreement here is about who “owns” the GitHub organization that houses Bundler and RubyGems. Technically, Ruby Central was able to assert control because Hiroshi Shibata, a member of the Ruby core team and one of the contributors who has owner-level permissions on the GitHub, made Haught, who revoked the others’ access, an owner as well. Any owner can add or remove any other owner, but when Ruby Central’s board voted to make this change Haught acted immediately and removed Arko, Dash, and others.
However, Arko fundamentally disagrees with the premise that Ruby Central has the right to govern the GitHub organization in any way, and believes that it has always belonged to the group of contributors who had access up until September 19.
Arko said that even if Ruby Central gave him his permissions back, he would not consider the matter resolved until Ruby Central stopped claiming it owns Bundler “but I am definitely not going to hold my breath for that one.”
“When people really care, they're passionate and they're enthusiastic and they argue, and that often looks like drama,” McQuaid, the developer of Homebrew, said when I asked what he thinks this entire affair says about the state of open source development. “But if I had to pick between having the enthusiasm and the drama or losing both, then I'd probably pick the enthusiasm and the drama, because in some ways, the system is somewhat self correcting. Even the stuff that's going on right now, people are having essentially a very public debate about what role do large companies or nonprofits or individual maintainers have in open source. To what extent does someone's level of contribution matter versus what type of person they are? I think these are valuable discussions to be having, and we're having them in the open, whereas if it was in a company, this would all be in a meeting room or with an HR department or in a leadership offsite or whatever.”
A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy
What a week it's been as a Ruby Central Board Member.Freedom Dumlao (Freedom’s Substack)
TikTok: The art of the (non) deal
IT'S MONDAY, AND THIS IS DIGITAL POLITICS. I'm Mark Scott, and I bring you an exclusive first look at the latest Star Wars epic coming to a cinema near you later this year.
— The United States has a deal to shift ownership of TikTok's US unit to American owners — or does it?
— Some of the biggest social media companies are speaking out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to online safety.
— Artificial intelligence is expected to boost global trade by at least a third by 2040, according to estimates from the World Trade Organization.
Let's get started
Ask Hackaday: How Do You Distro Hop?
If you read “Jenny’s Daily Drivers” or “Linux Fu” here on Hackaday, you know we like Linux. Jenny’s series, especially, always points out things I want to try on different distributions. However, I have a real tendency not to change my distro, especially on my main computer. Yet I know people “distro hop” all the time. My question to you? How do you do it?
The Easy but Often Wrong Answer
Sure, there’s an easy answer. Keep your /home directory on a separate disk and just use it with a new boot image. Sounds easy. But the truth is, it isn’t that easy. I suppose if you don’t do much with your system, that might work. But even if you don’t customize things at the root level, you still have problems if you change desktop environments or even versions of desktop environments. Configuration files change over time. Good luck if you want to switch to and from distros that are philosophically different, like systemd vs old-school init; apparmor vs SELinux. So it isn’t always as simple as just pointing a new distro at your home directory.
One thing I’ve done to try out new things is to use a virtual machine. That’s easy these days. But it isn’t satisfying if your goal is to really switch to a new distro as your daily driver.
The Reason
The reason this came up is that I generally like KDE and was using Kubuntu for a number of years. They tend to lag a bit on the KDE desktop, so when KDE came out with Neon, I was sold. However, since they were both based on Ubuntu/Debian, there was a mostly working upgrade path to convert a Kubuntu installation to Neon.
Fast forward to today. Neon has been suffering lately. I hear there is one volunteer keeping it running. KDE has decided to shift focus to a new distro that does things I’m not crazy about (immutable system; Wayland). So it was time to hop again.
I’d heard that OpenSUSE was good at keeping up with KDE, and the rolling release of Tumbleweed appeals to me. So I made the switch.
The Hard Way
I am in no way suggesting you do this. It was a bad idea, and while it worked, it was a lot of effort. Even so, it only worked because I have way more disk storage than I need: my root file system is way under 3 TB, and I have about 9 TB of RAID as my primary hard drive. Of course, you should be backed up. But if you’ve ever had to restore from a backup, you know that’s no fun. Better to have it and not need it.
So what did I do? I used kvm to stand up a virtual machine, and then I installed Tumbleweed on it. I turned off the btrfs features since I didn’t plan to use them. Then I set about matching my Neon desktop. All the KDE settings. All the strange systemd services and timers I have set up. The systems I use to run my own dynamic DNS. As much of everything as I could think of.
I got to the point where working in the VM was comfortable. My browsers and all my other tools were ready and configured.
You know I forgot something. I knew too, so I wanted to save things for reference. First, I booted from a live image and made a copy of my entire root file system under /NEON. Then I rebooted and created a new virtual machine and booted a “live” ISO file on it.
A Hard Day’s Night
The next step was to copy the snapshot of the /NEON directory into the VM. Sure, I could have used LVM snapshots or, if I were still using btrfs, a snapshot from that. But I have plenty of disk space, especially after pruning off some very large directories from the copy.
The key to this, by the way, is using the nbd program to mount the VM’s disk image. You do need the nbd module loaded, if you have it as a module, and then you export it using nbd. From there, you get a device you can mount just like any other. I’d explain it, but you really shouldn’t be taking this as instructions. Still, if you need to do it, [shamil] has a good, concise explanation.
Of course, the new VM won’t boot. You have to bind mount all the running directories (like /run and /proc) to the right mountpoint and then chroot into the mounted file system. Once there, you can rebuild your init image and run grub. After that, you should be able to boot into the old Neon system in the new VM.
The Beauty of It…
So at this point, I had not made any changes to my main OS. I had a copy of it for backup purposes, and I was able to boot into a clone of it using a VM. I could also boot into the target system with a different VM.
The next step was to boot to a live image again and nuke nearly everything on the root file system except for /NEON, and the VMs, of course, which were on separate drives.
I thought about running the Tumbleweed installer and then copying files from the VM, but instead I decided to just do it by hand. I copied the files from the new VM over to the real root drive, using nbd again. Then I had to do the whole bind/mount/chroot/reinstall steps again.
Did It Boot?
It did, in fact, boot up. There were a few glitches, mostly due to self-inflicted problems. When I restored some large directories and some SSD-based temporary directories, I created some SELinux problems that were fun to track down. I had, of course, forgotten a few things installed deeply, too. But that wasn’t a problem. I could still go grab stuff from /NEON or even boot the Neon install up in the VM to compare things.
I am about to the point where I will delete the extra copies of things. I’ve already released the Tumbleweed VM. But it occurs to me: I won’t do this again. That leads to my question for you. If you distro hop, how do you do it? Let us know in the comments. Then again, current thinking is to have a minimal system and then put everything in its own container anyway.
Again, I beg you, don’t follow my example. This was way too much work and risk. But I’m also crazy enough to relocate /usr.
10″ LEGO Tyre is Practical Nostalgia
If there’s one thing that has come to define the generations after the baby boom, it’s probably nostalgia. It’s heavily marketed and weaponized by the market: yearning for better, simpler times seems to be a core thread of the consumer economy these days. [Makerneer] combined his xilennial love of LEGO bricks with the flat tires on his log splitter to produce a 10″ TPU tyre will never go flat, and provide a dopamine release every time he sees it.
The tyre is a custom model to fit his particular rims, but he does provide STEP and F3D files if you’d like to try modifing it for your own purpose — they’re at Step 6 of the Instructable. Props to [Makerneer] for truly open-sourcing the design instead of just tossing STL files online. His build log also takes the time to point out the ways he had to modify the LEGO tyre profile to make it amenable to 3D printing: notably chamfering some of the tread pattern to eliminate bridging, which is a bit of a no-no with TPU.
As you can see in the (unfortunately vertical) demo video below, it’s a bit quite a bit squishier than a regular run-flat tyre, but that was part of [Makerneer]’s design goal. He didn’t like how rigid the non-pneumatic tyres he’d tried were, so endevoured to design something himself; the whole LEGO thing was just for fun. If you wanted to replicate this tyre with a bit less skoosh, you need only tune the infill on your print.
While only time will tell how long this LEGO-inspired add-on will continue adding whimsy to [Makerneer]’s log-splitting, we have tests to show it will outperform any other plastic he might have printed. This project is probably more practical than a 3D printed bicycle tyre, which doesn’t even have the side benefit of whimsy.
youtube.com/embed/_iNaEs9MEEw?…
Two Decades Of Hackaday In Words
I think most of us who make or build things have a thing we are known for making. Where it’s football robots, radios, guitars, cameras, or inflatable textile sculptures, we all have the thing we do. For me that’s over the years been various things but has recently been camera hacking, however there’s another thing I do that’s not so obvious. For the last twenty years, I’ve been interested in computational language analysis. There’s so much that a large body of text can reveal without a single piece of AI being involved, and in pursuing that I’ve created for myself a succession of corpus analysis engines. This month I’ve finally been allowed to try one of them with a corpus of Hackaday articles, and while it’s been a significant amount of work getting everything shipshape, I can now analyse our world over the last couple of decades.
The Burning Question You All Want Answered
A corpus engine is not clever in its own right, instead it will simply give you straightforward statistics in return for the queries you give it. But the thing that keeps me coming back for more is that those answers can sometimes surprise you. In short, it’s a machine for telling you things you didn’t know. To start off, it’s time to settle a Hackaday trope of many years’ standing. Do we write too much about Arduino projects? Into the engine goes “arduino”, and for comparison also “raspberry”, for the Raspberry Pi.
What comes out is a potted history of experimenter’s development boards, with the graph showing the launch date and subsequent popularity of each. We’re guessing that the Hackaday Arduino trope has its origins in 2011 when the Italian board peaked, while we see a succession of peaks following the launch of the Pi in 2012. I think we are seeing renewals of interest after the launch of the Pi 3 and Pi 4, respectively. Perhaps the most interesting part of the graph comes on the right as we see both boards tail off after 2020, and if I had to hazard a guess as to why I would cite the rise of the many cheap dev boards from China.
The Perils Of The Corpus Maintainer
The astute among you might wonder why the figures on the graph above are not higher, because surely we have featured more Arduino or Raspberry Pi projects than that. And here we touch on a problem faced by anyone working with data. It comes down to this: are we looking at spotting the trends from the data, or absolute figures? When I built this corpus, I had to make two choices, one over how much I was allowed to stress Hackaday’s infrastructure, and the other in how much computing power and physical storage space I was prepared to give the project on my bench. I lack a computing cloud for my work, instead I have to rely on silicon and spinning rust I own, and to that there’s a finite limit.
Thus in building this corpus I reasoned that the more important words pertaining to each story would be nearer the start, and restricted myself to the title and first paragraph of each Hackaday piece, or about a hundred words. It’s definitely enough for trend analysis, but for obvious reasons if the word you are looking for is way down in the third or fourth paragraph, you’ll be disappointed. Furthermore if this technique angers you, don’t look too closely at how your oscilloscope samples higher frequency waveforms.
World Events Playing Out On Our 3D Printers
Do you remember the period in which governments were in a panic about not having enough ventilators? We had quite a few stories on the subject at the time, and they appear in the corpus. Fortunately it was pretty soon understood that home made ventilators would be dangerous so we were right to be cautious covering such projects.
Language Evolving Before Our Very Eyes
When I started on my corpus software projects, I was interested in the relationships between words because I had spent a while working in the search engine business. Later on I became interested in using the same techniques to spot trends in news content which is what has sustained my interest, but there’s another use for these techniques.
In the dictionary business, lexicographers use corpus engines to track developments in language, and we can see that in action in Hackaday too. When did you first hear the term “Retrocomputer”? We’ve all been fooling around with old computers for years now, but in our corpus it first appeared in 2012. Since then it’s had a few ups and downs, but it remains on an upward trajectory. For the graph I combined all the various forms of the word, “retrocomputer”, “retrocomputing”, and so on.
So What’s Under The Hood?
Computers are not clever in themselves, they are merely very good at repetitively doing something you tell them to, for many hours without complaint. In this case, my computer is analysing and indexing a large body of text, and the way I’m doing it was arrived at over quite a few iterations. It’s a product of the hardware I had when i started work on it, an Intel Core laptop which was quite flashy for the mid-2000s, and then later a pair of always-on Raspberry Pi boards with USB hard drives. My problem was that if I tried to use any of the available databases to store my index they would quickly become unusable due to its immense size, so I arrived at a technique using flat files instead.
You can run a version of my software yourself, it can be found in my GitHub repository. The processing script takes the text and splits it into sentences and words, then stores frequency and collocate data as a huge tree of small JSON files on a hard disk volume, the reasoning being that the filesystem is an extremely fast way to retrieve data categorised by directory and filename.
The version I’ve used only deals in single word phrases, but other versions have extended the directory tree based index to support multi-word phrases. You can also plumb in a part-of-speech tagger if you wish. The result is a fully functional corpus engine that can run on an original Raspberry Pi 1, not bad considering that it can mine multi-million-word corpora in an instant. Mine has the task of continually updating a corpus of news data, allowing me to watch events unfold in real time.
Now. Over To You
I have spent a lot of time over the last month getting the Hackaday corpus together and ready for analysis, and then more time gathering the data for and writing this story. I’ve only been able to show you a small amount of what’s in this trove of data, so perhaps there are trends you’d like to see explored. Use the comments below to request, and maybe I can show them in a follow-up.
Mini Laptop Needs Custom Kernel
These days, you rarely have to build your own Linux kernel. You just take what your distribution ships, and it usually works just fine. However, [Andrei] became enamored with a friend’s cyberdeck and decided that he’d prefer to travel with a very small laptop. The problem is, it didn’t work well with a stock kernel. So, time to build the kernel again.
Of course, he tried to simply install Linux. The installer showed a blank screen. You might guess that you need to add ‘nomodeset’ to the kernel options. But the screen was still a bit wacky. [Andrei] likens troubleshooting problems like this to peeling an onion. There are many layers to peel back, and you are probably going to shed some tears.
He did turn to ChatGPT for some help, but found there were many hallucinations, so it was sometimes helpful and sometimes not. What follows is a detective story with many twists and turns.
He finally decided he needed a custom kernel and had to learn the steps. If you haven’t done it, it really isn’t that hard. If you are trying to get “close” to another existing kernel, you can read /proc/config.gz to get a list of how the person who built your kernel set it up (even if that someone was you).
The custom kernel worked. Sort of. The screen finally turned on, but it was rotated 90 degrees. Not too convenient. A few more options paid off. Along the way, he mentions a few common debugging procedures, like divide and conquer or testing kernels on a virtual machine before moving to real hardware.
The culprit turned out to be an errant video module. But… there was still no sound or touchpad. That caused even more detective work that uncovered some confusing documentation. At the end, he has a mostly working machine, although he didn’t have sleep mode, and the machine tends to run hot. He’s ok with that. We often find that we have similar problems with things like orientation sensors, although the situation is improving.
Of course, building the kernel is a far cry from writing new code for it. If you want to get your feet wet, maybe start with an old version. You can even find some automation scripts that help you get straight to debugging your code.
youtube.com/embed/6iqRg_rB6lQ?…
Vulnerabilità critica in GoAnywhere MFT di Fortra: CVE-2025-10035
I ricercatori di WatchTowr Labs hanno segnalato attacchi attivi a una vulnerabilità di elevata gravità nel sistema di gestione del trasferimento file GoAnywhere MFT di Fortra. Il problema, identificato come CVE-2025-10035, è un errore di deserializzazione nel componente License Servlet che consente l’iniezione di comandi non autenticati. Lo sfruttamento richiede una risposta di licenza contraffatta con una firma valida.
Fortra ha informato i propri clienti dell’interruzione il 18 settembre, ma ne è venuta a conoscenza circa una settimana prima e non ha specificato come avesse ricevuto l’informazione o se fosse già a conoscenza dell’exploit.
Nel frattempo, un rapporto di WatchTowr cita “conferme attendibili” di attacchi a partire dal 10 settembre, otto giorni prima della pubblicazione dell’avviso ufficiale. Per questo motivo, i ricercatori hanno sollecitato un cambiamento nella valutazione del rischio e il riconoscimento del fatto che gli aggressori spesso sfruttano i bug molto prima che vengano emessi gli avvisi di sicurezza.
L’analisi delle tracce di hacking ha rivelato che, dopo aver sfruttato la vulnerabilità, gli aggressori hanno eseguito comandi sul server senza autorizzazione, creato un account amministratore nascosto chiamato “admin-go” e lo hanno utilizzato per creare un utente web con diritti di accesso legittimi.
Questo utente ha quindi scaricato e avviato componenti aggiuntivi. Tra i file scoperti c’erano “zato_be.exe” e “jwunst.exe”. Quest’ultimo è un binario legittimo per il programma di amministrazione remota SimpleHelp, ma in questo caso è stato utilizzato per il controllo persistente sui sistemi infetti.
Gli aggressori hanno anche eseguito il comando “whoami/groups”, salvando i risultati in un file chiamato test.txt per una successiva trasmissione. Ciò ha permesso loro di determinare i privilegi dell’utente corrente e di mappare i percorsi all’interno dell’infrastruttura.
Al momento della pubblicazione, Fortra non aveva ancora commentato i risultati di WatchTowr. Il fornitore ha rilasciato correzioni nella versione corrente 7.8.4 e nel ramo di supporto 7.6.3. Si consiglia vivamente agli specialisti di aggiornare i propri sistemi e, come misura temporanea, di limitare l’accesso a Internet alla console di amministrazione. Inoltre, lo sviluppatore consiglia di controllare i log per individuare eventuali errori contenenti la stringa “SignedObject.getObject”, che potrebbe indicare tentativi di exploit.
L'articolo Vulnerabilità critica in GoAnywhere MFT di Fortra: CVE-2025-10035 proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.
Laureati in informatica senza futuro! Migliaia di CV ignorati e addio stipendio a 6 cifre
Nel mercato del lavoro IT si stanno verificando tendenze allarmanti. Sempre più laureati in informatica non riescono a trovare lavoro, nemmeno con il salario minimo.
Un tempo, una laurea in informatica era considerata un lasciapassare per una carriera ben retribuita con prospettive di rapida ascesa. Ma i licenziamenti di massa nelle principali aziende tecnologiche, insieme all’introduzione di nuovi strumenti che eliminano la necessità di conoscenze tecniche approfondite, hanno cambiato radicalmente le regole del gioco.
Le storie dei giovani professionisti sono demoralizzanti. Un laureato dell’Università dell’Oregon ha dichiarato di aver inviato quasi seimila curriculum e di aver sostenuto tredici colloqui in due anni, senza mai ricevere una sola offerta. È stato persino rifiutato da una catena di fast food perché non aveva “l’esperienza richiesta“.
Alcuni hanno affermato di aver fatto domanda per centinaia, e in diversi casi migliaia, di posizioni lavorative nel settore tecnologico presso aziende, organizzazioni non profit ed enti governativi. Ma molti laureati in informatica hanno affermato che la loro ricerca di lavoro, durata mesi, si è spesso conclusa con una profonda delusione o, peggio, con aziende che li hanno abbandonati.
Zach Taylor ha dichiarato al New York Times che, da quando si è laureato nel 2023 in informatica presso l’Oregon State University, ha presentato domanda per quasi 6.000 posizioni lavorative nel settore tecnologico, ed è stata una delle “esperienze più demoralizzanti che abbia mai dovuto affrontare”.
Taylor non è l’unica. Secondo il sito indipendente di monitoraggio dei licenziamenti Layoffs.fyi, nel 2024 sono stati licenziati oltre 150.000 dipendenti del settore tecnologico in 551 aziende tecnologiche. Al momento della stesura di questo articolo, nel 2025 erano stati licenziati 88.964 dipendenti del settore tecnologico in 199 aziende tecnologiche.
In questo contesto, molti studenti e giovani professionisti stanno iniziando a mettere in discussione la professione scelta. Secondo i sondaggi, un terzo dei laureati ritiene che la propria formazione sia stata uno spreco di denaro e metà della Generazione Z si pente della specializzazione scelta.
Grandi aziende tecnologiche come Amazon, Google, Meta, Lenovo e Intel hanno licenziato una parte considerevole della loro forza lavoro nel 2024, e i licenziamenti continueranno anche nel 2025. Microsoft, ad esempio, ha annunciato a luglio che taglierà altri 9.000 dipendenti dopo una
serie di licenziamenti avvenuti all’inizio di quest’anno.
Sebbene l’idea alla base dell’intelligenza artificiale fosse quella di automatizzare le attività manuali e aiutare i lavoratori a concentrarsi su attività a maggior valore aggiunto, alcuni lavoratori temono che li sostituirà completamente, e questo sta già accadendo.
Tuttavia, gli esperti sottolineano che la domanda di specialisti non scomparirà del tutto.
Nei prossimi anni, saranno richiesti esperti in sicurezza informatica, tecnologie cloud e analisi dei dati. Inoltre, il mercato attribuisce sempre più importanza non solo al diploma, ma anche alle competenze pratiche, comprovate da corsi, tirocini e progetti pratici.
Mentre i laureati si chiedono se l’era degli stipendi a sei cifre nel settore IT sia finita, il mercato del lavoro si sta ristrutturando e nuove regole impongono ai professionisti di essere molto più flessibili e disposti ad apprendere nel corso della loro vita.
L'articolo Laureati in informatica senza futuro! Migliaia di CV ignorati e addio stipendio a 6 cifre proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.
Gli USA vogliono hackerare Telegram! Il caso che fa discutere di privacy e giurisdizione
Il Dipartimento di Giustizia degli Stati Uniti ha ricevuto l’autorizzazione del tribunale per condurre un’ispezione a distanza dei server di Telegram nell’ambito di un’indagine sullo sfruttamento minorile. La mozione del pubblico ministero ha affermato che questa misura era necessaria a causa del rifiuto dell’azienda di collaborare con le forze dell’ordine e di rispondere alle indagini ufficiali.
Il giudice ha concesso l’autorizzazione all’utilizzo di una tecnica di accesso remoto specializzata che consente di inviare una serie di richieste ai server di Telegram. Queste richieste costringono il sistema a restituire informazioni sull’account di destinazione, inclusi messaggi e dati associati.
La decisione è stata riportata da CourtWatch, citando documenti del tribunale; tuttavia, i link diretti non sono stati inclusi nella notizia perché i documenti contengono informazioni personali identificabili.
Secondo il documento, le informazioni scaricate devono essere archiviate sul dispositivo dell’investigatore all’interno della giurisdizione in cui si svolge il processo.
È stato inoltre sottolineato che non saranno effettuati ulteriori tentativi di accesso all’account senza un’ordinanza separata del tribunale. Pertanto, si tratta di un accesso remoto una tantum all’infrastruttura di Telegram allo scopo di scaricare la corrispondenza e altro materiale necessario per il caso.
Questo caso è un esempio lampante di come le autorità statunitensi utilizzino l’accesso diretto a server stranieri per ovviare alla mancanza di collaborazione dell’azienda.
Tali azioni stanno accendendo il dibattito sulla portata dell’autorità delle agenzie di intelligence, sulla giurisdizione transfrontaliera e sulle implicazioni per gli utenti di app di messaggistica che si dichiarano immuni al controllo esterno.
L'articolo Gli USA vogliono hackerare Telegram! Il caso che fa discutere di privacy e giurisdizione proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.
Mentre Windows 10 va in pensione Windows 7 raddoppia le installazioni in due mesi
Windows 7 è stato uno tra i migliori sistemi operativi di casa Microsoft, e moltissimi ne decantano ancora oggi le doti di stabilità. Ma Microsoft ha interrotto il supporto di questo prodigio dei sistemi operativi da gennaio 2020.
Secondo le statistiche di Statcounter aggiornate a settembre 2025, il sistema operativo Windows 7, da tempo fuori produzione, ha raddoppiato la sua quota di mercato tra i sistemi operativi Microsoft negli ultimi due mesi.
Nel frattempo, la quota di mercato di Windows 11 è cresciuta notevolmente, trainata dai nuovi acquisti di PC e dalle migrazioni dal precedente Windows 10, il cui supporto terminerà a ottobre 2025.
Secondo StatCounter, la quota di mercato globale di Windows 11 ha superato quella di Windows 10 nel luglio 2025. A settembre, la sua quota di utilizzo era del 50,74%, rispetto al 43,09% di Windows 10.
Illustrazione: Statcounter
Lanciato nel 2009, Windows 7 ha mantenuto la sua quota di mercato per gran parte dell’anno, fino ad agosto. Il suo utilizzo è cresciuto dal 2,02% di luglio al 3,59% di agosto. E a settembre aveva raggiunto un “rivoluzionario” 5,2%.
Naturalmente, questo non significa che gli utenti di Windows 10 stiano passando in massa a Windows 7 invece di aggiornare a Windows 11. Qualunque siano i fattori che determinano l’aumento di popolarità di Windows 7, i numeri sono impressionanti, soprattutto considerando che Microsoft ha interrotto il supporto per il sistema operativo a gennaio 2020.
L'articolo Mentre Windows 10 va in pensione Windows 7 raddoppia le installazioni in due mesi proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.
Neues Polizeigesetz in Berlin: „Abkehr von der grundrechtsfreundlichen Politik“
netzpolitik.org/2025/neues-pol…
Neues Polizeigesetz: Berliner Senat will Verhaltenscanner gegen Bevölkerung einsetzen
netzpolitik.org/2025/neues-pol…
Bundes-Klinik-Atlas: „Es muss immer um die bestmögliche Versorgung von Patienten gehen“
netzpolitik.org/2025/bundes-kl…
Pirate News: BPD Drones Over Boston?
Steve, Joe and James discuss HorizonMass/BINJ effort to use public records requests to determine if the drones over the Boston Dominican Parade and Caribbean Carnival were owned by the Boston Police Department. We also discussed the Trump administration’s recent efforts to censor free speech and an ex-Florida sheriff’s deputy attempt to spread disinformation from Russia.
youtube.com/embed/rHy8jXfhQVw?…
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Some links we mentioned:
- Our Administrative Coup Memory Bank;
- Our Things to Do when Fascists are Taking Over;
- Did The BPD Fly A Surveillance Drone Over The Dominican Parade? They Won’t Tell Us.
- Disney Plus Subscribers Quit in Droves Over Jimmy Kimmel Axe;
- 2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators;
- Russian fake-news network, led by an ex-Florida sheriff’s deputy, storms back into action with 200+ new sites.
Image Credit: CC-By-2.0 image via Wikipedia Commons by Maurizio Pesce.
Gazzetta del Cadavere reshared this.
“Non condivido la tua idea, ma darei la vita perché tu la possa esprimere.”
paiono passati mille anni.
Cammino sinodale: Nacci (Facoltà Teologica Pugliese), “fatica a passare dall’analisi alle proposte pastorali nella catechesi” - AgenSIR
“Emerge la fatica di uscire dalla fase di analisi per arrivare a definire delle proposte pastorali concrete”.Andrea Regimenti (AgenSIR)
In Cisgiordania i coloni stanno cercando di prendersi tutto
Abbiamo assistito a una loro incursione in una casa palestinese: sono sempre più frequenti, producono un effetto storico, e le autorità israeliane stanno sempre dalla stessa parteIl Post
ho paura la chiesa abbia mentito a tutti per coprire i crimini della loro dittatura bigotta e sganciarsi dal fascismo ...
ora che tutti hanno dimenticato il rechskonkordat con hitler ed i patti latrinanensi con mussolini, ed il genocidio del vaticano in croazia, tornano ad essere a gonfie vele nazi kluk kluks klan fasci ...
peraltro una sinistra non bigotta non vincerebbe mai nulla in un paese con il 90% di bigotti ...
Rai dove sei?
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo
articolo21.org/2025/09/rai-dov…
Auspichiamo che “No other land” vada in onda il prossimo 7 ottobre in prima serata su Raitre, come previsto in un primo momento (trasmetterlo due settimane dopo, dunque fuori contesto, non avrebbe senso), che per certi episodi incresciosi, sempre più frequenti a dire il vero, qualcuno si scusi, che la qualità venga tutelata, che ci
Il rapporto dell'amministrazione Trump con le criptovalute, volano delle tre muse del trumpismo: deregolamentazione, corruzione e criminalità
Nel Wyoming, il presidente della Commissione Bancaria del Senato, Tim Scott, ha dato il suo consiglio "numero uno" all'industria delle #criptovalute: "licenziate i legislatori che vi ostacolano". L'industria l'ha preso a cuore e sono nati numerosi super PAC pro-criptovalute con oltre 220 milioni di dollari pronti per le elezioni di medio termine, quasi il doppio di quanto speso nel settore delle criptovalute nel 2024.
@Politica interna, europea e internazionale
Issue 93 – Undermining deregulation
Democratic lawmakers sound corruption alarms while crypto PACs gear up for the midtermsMolly White (Citation Needed)
#Moldavia, il trucco delle elezioni
Moldavia, il trucco delle elezioni
I risultati delle elezioni parlamentari di domenica in Moldavia non sono mai stati realmente in dubbio nonostante i sondaggi più credibili indicassero seri problemi di tenuta per l’ultra-screditato partito europeista di governo della presidente/mario…www.altrenotizie.org
Come dargli torto.
Medvedev: 'la Russia non ha bisogno di una guerra con un'Europa al degrado' • Imola Oggi
imolaoggi.it/2025/09/29/medved…
imolaoggi.it/2024/09/14/ucrain…
Se un governo ostile aglii occidentali abolisce partiti e persone contro il governo, vengono subito chiamati dittatori. Se lo fa un governo amico degli occidentali, automaticamente e diventa sinonimo di civiltà, democrazia e protezione. Che strana questa democrazia, dipende da dove viene applicata e da chi...
Elezioni Moldavia, vince il partito europeista • Imola Oggi
imolaoggi.it/2025/09/29/elezio…
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