Get a mix of old-school internet, hands-on tech advice, and deep thoughts from a systems engineer on topics ranging from pseudo-terminals to the latest tech. Also, you'll have fun reading it.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #28!
I’ve been working with computers for most of my life, and especially on *nix systems. It always surprises me how much there is to learn. It’s always interesting to read about the history of some part of the OS that you thought you understood, and learn something new. That happened when I was reading the following article:
Tales From a Core File - Lessons from the Unix stdio ABI: 40 Years Later
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Hello, and welcome to issue #27!
This week is an exciting week for all the Apple fans out there. A lot of new changes, as is the custom for WWDC. We finally got the announcement of the move to Apple Silicon (Apple’s own ARM processors), which has been a rumour for some years now. If you are a macOS developer and are interested in building universal binaries that will run on both the Intel and ARM processors, you can apply to the Universal App Quick Start Program. The program costs $500.00 (USD), it includes a small computer with the new ARM processor, which sadly is owned by Apple and you have to return. But if you are interested, and meet their criteria, you’ll have fun playing with it before anyone else.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #26!
Did you manage to see the launch of SpaceX first crew mission? It was a success! There were 10.3 million concurrent watchers on the stream, that’s massive. If you somehow miss it here is the link to space.com article, it includes videos. It was cool to watch. It felt like the beginnings of a sci-fi story.
Anyways, Important news for humanity aside. There was also other important news around. In the previous newsletter (#25), we talked about the new unc0ver jailbreak for iOS. This week Apple released new updates, iOS 13.5.1 and iPadOS 13.5.1, that fix the kernel bug that allowed this exploit. You can read the release notes here. I guess some people won’t be wanting to apply that patch if they’re going to jailbreak their phones.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #25!
How is your week going? I hope you are doing ok.
A lot of exciting news this week. First, there is a new jailbreak for iOS. Whatever your stance might be with jailbreaking. I’m always impressed by the depth of knowledge and ingenuity of the jailbreaking community. Many people view it as something wrong and illegal. But it has some real security benefits, it allows researchers to deep dive into iOS and help find vulnerabilities that otherwise would be known only to bad actors. As the famous security researcher Patrick Wardle shown on his research used in a NYTimes article. He used a jailbroken phone to continue the analysis he was doing on an app suspected of spying his users. Very interesting stuff, if you are into Apple security, you should check his writings.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #24!
I wonder why we always seek novelty. Maybe it is because there is the illusion that this new thing might finally be the perfect solution without tradeoffs. I began many years ago to explore Linux because it might be different than MS Windows. Then I changed to macOS because it was the solution over both. And now, I’m exploring more about FreeBSD because it’s more integrated. In any case, it is fun to explore different topics and learn about different technologies. And who knows, maybe after exploring enough we can help make our options better and finally get us closer to a “perfect solution”.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #23!
How are things your way? I hope that coping1 well with the changes and keeping safe. Things are quite different from what I expect them to be by this time in the year. I was hoping this year I was going to make a significant career change, but there is no international travel, and things seem to be slowing down. So, who knows what the future might bring.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #22 of the Newsletter.
How is life? I hope everything is going well. I’ve been enjoying my time exploring FreeBSD Jails, and ZFS. FreeBSD is such an interesting Operating System. The sense of integration is quite refreshing.
In contrast to what I sometimes feel when working on Linux, many areas of the system feel disjointed. Everything works, but you have to know all the peculiarities on how each different distribution and each of the various groups responsible for different code bases work. Anyways, if you would like to explore FreeBSD, have a look at the FreeBSD Handbook (FreeBSD documentation is quite good).
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Hello, and welcome to issue #21!
How is everything going? I hope you and yours are safe. What a crazy world we are living in now, right? I guess every generation thinks they are living a period that will change history. Who knows, maybe this time the changes that will come after all this will make us change the world to be a better place.
Anyways, with everyone working remotely, the Internet has become the backbone of our society. It’s incredible how commonplace has everything related to the Internet has become. We assume everyone knows how to access any website, or even stream video.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #20.
I’m back! Between work and learning, I haven’t had much time to write a proper blog post for the last few weeks. I also don’t want only to post because it’s the weekend. I like to write something that it’s useful and not just to tick a box.
So this week there’s no post either, but I’m working on some security-related posts that I’ll share with you when they are ready.
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Hello,
Welcome to issue #19, I hope you had a good start of the month.
As you might have noticed by my latest posts, I’ve been exploring the exciting field of cybersecurity. I’ve always enjoyed understanding the base components of what makes our cyber “life” work. Understanding the base components also ties up nicely with infoSec. So this week I wanted to share with you a couple of links related to cybersecurity. I believe that being aware of security makes us better developers and cyber-citizens.
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