The Death of the Mind

Debian v12 with codename bookworm was released as new stable release on 10th of June 2023. Similar to what we had with #newinbullseye and previous releases, now it’s time for #newinbookworm!
I was the driving force at several of my customers to be well prepared for bookworm. As usual with major upgrades, there are some things to be aware of, and hereby I’m starting my public notes on bookworm that might be worth also for other folks. My focus is primarily on server systems and looking at things from a sysadmin perspective.
Further readings
As usual start at the official Debian release notes, make sure to especially go through What’s new in Debian 12 + Issues to be…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://michael-prokop.at/blog/2023/06/11/what-to-expect-from-debian-bookworm-newinbookworm/

“After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development”, Debian 12, codenamed “bookworm”, has been released. The announcement has lots of details about package versions for desktop environments (6 are supported), kernel version (Linux 6.1 series), other package versions (compilers, graphics tools, office suites, languages, and more), architectures supported (8 for real hardware and 5 for cloud services), blends, and lots more.

This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as “obsolete”. 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for “bookworm” is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and is made up of 1,341,564,204 lines of code.
“bookworm” has more translated man pages than ever thanks…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/934361/

Two third-party Reddit apps have thrown in the towel over increased expenses

Social media community Reddit plans to lay off about 90 employees, amounting to about five percent of its 2,000-person staff.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/06/09/reddit_job_cuts_api_pricing_pushback/

The ruling elites through their corrupt media outlets are attempting to destroy Waters and intimidate other artists, performers and intellectuals from speaking out. This is a desperate and systematic attack on freedom of speech and artistic expression.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/08/fzcl-j08.html

Enlarge / The Reddit iOS app icon. (credit: Getty Images | Yuriko Nakao )
Reddit is getting ready to slap third-pary apps with millions of dollars in API fees, and many Reddit users are unhappy about it. A widespread protest is planned for June 12, with hundreds of subreddits planning to go dark for 48 hours.
Reddit started life as a geeky site, but as it has aged, it has been trying to work more like a traditional social network. Part of that push included the development of a first-party app for mobile devices, but the 17-year-old site only launched an official app in 2016. Before then, it was up to third-party apps to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1944464

There’s no way for me to know where your awareness starts with all this, so let’s just start at the beginning. Computer Shopper was a hell of a magazine. I wrote a whole essay about it, which can be summarized as “this magazine got to be very large, very extensive, and probably served as the unofficial ‘bible’ of the state of hardware and software to the general public throughout the 1980s and 1990s.” While it was just a pleasant little computer tabloid when it started in 1979, it quickly grew to a page count that most reasonable people would define as “intimidating”. In a world that saw hundreds of magazines and thousands of newsletters come…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543

One of the big topics in Postgres is bloat. It is something that every DBA comes across and in fact we have a few good posts on how to work with bloat in our blog. 
Update-heavy tables is a special case of data that due to business requirements needs to be updated frequently to stay relevant. Autovacuum may be a good solution for table bloat (you can check this post describing how to do that), however it does not help with index bloat. 
Pg_index_watch resolves this issue by automatically rebuilding indexes when needed. 
How it works?
With the introduction of REINDEX CONCURRENTLY in PostgreSQL 12 there was finally a safe way to rebuild indexes without heavy locks. At the same…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5Lz

Postgres 16 is hot off the press with the beta release last week. I am really
excited about the new feature that allows logical replication from standbys,
allowing users to:

create logical decoding from a read-only standby
reduce the workload on the primary server
have new ways to achieve high-availability for applications that require data
synchronization across multiple systems or for auditing purposes

A second relevant and exciting new feature coming in 16 is that replication
slots on a given standby persist the promotion of that standby to a primary.
This means that in the event of primary server failure and promotion of a
standby to primary, the replication slots will persist and the former-standby
subscribers will not be affected.
These two together give PostgreSQL a huge boost…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5Lx

I’m calling time on DNSSEC. Last week, prompted by a change in my DNS hosting setup, I began removing it from the few personal zones I had signed. Then this Monday the .nz ccTLD experienced a multi-day availability incident triggered by the annual DNSSEC key rotation process. This incident broke several of my unsigned zones, which led me to say very unkind things about DNSSEC on Mastodon and now I feel compelled to more completely explain my thinking:
For almost all domains and use-cases, the costs and risks of deploying DNSSEC outweigh the benefits it provides. Don’t bother signing your zones.
The .nz incident, while topical, is not the motivation or the trigger for this conclusion. Had…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.mattb.nz/w/2023/06/02/calling-time-on-dnssec/

Just when we didn’t think the state of Texas could get any more wacko on tech policy, this latest bill really suggests otherwise. House Bill 1181 is an age verification measure that is similar to what we’ve seen in the state legislatures across other red U.S. states.
You have an age verification proposal that is similar to Louisiana Act 440 and Utah’s Senate Bill 287 – all porn sites with users from these states must have a government ID or a credit card in order to verify age in order to watch age-restricted content. But, the bill itself takes an extreme turn in the guise of protecting the general public’s health.
House Bill 1181, introduced by a team of anti-porn legislators,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/01/texas-age-verification-bill-would-plaster-health-warnings-on-porn-sites/