siwyd

They speak of "QR-style" barcodes, but it's very unclear to me whether GS1 is actively pushing QR or DataMatrix as the preferred 2D barcode style. In medical devices and pharmaceuticals, both the 1D and 2D DataMatrix GS1 barcodes have been used extensively for quite some time so I would personally think DataMatrix is the way to go. I'm just a casual observer though. Is there anybody here that has more inside knowledge on what the game plan is?

I like the invalid. TLD. Naming things is hard and that's a good one to use when you need to provide a FQDN that serves no actual purpose. Case in point: Amazon CloudFront always requires you to provide an origin, even if you're not sending any traffic to it. So using something like "origin.invalid" makes it just a tad more self-explanatory.

Which one did you get? I was looking at Linux laptops with this CPU, but the line-up is very limited.

Meta doesn't operate in China though, for not wanting to comply with their requirements of state-controlled censorship. I could see them applying similar reasoning here on principle (my god, I just used 'Meta' and 'principle' in the same sentence, I must be high). Another tech company might jump in that hole of course.

With regards to E2E, I wonder how it would work when you want to chat with someone outside Belgium though. If I'm the person outside Belgium, I wouldn't want E2E to be disabled just like that. And if WhatsApp can only be used between Belgians, that's quite a hinderance.

Belgium doesn't care about Meta revenue and rightly so, but if a law would be the reason that Meta pulls the plug on Belgium, that seems like a cause for a possible serious political backlash.

I totally agree that it's probably worthwhile to implement some country specific logic for a user base of that size and ad revenue per user. But specifically with regards to this, I really can't imagine they would agree to do this. Suppose they do, it's probably not a bad guess that they would lose more users globally due to the bad publicity it would generate than they would lose by cutting off Belgium.

On the technical front, your examples are good and valid, but they seem like features that are pretty straight forward to feature flag per country. Something like disabling end-to-end encryption looks a lot more intrusive to me (without being a subject matter, feel free to correct me). Whatever WhatsApp built, they built it to enable end-to-end encryption on a global scale, to enable anyone from around the globe to send an encrypted message around the globe. Poking a hole in that seems non-trivial.

Wouldn't a company such as WhatsApp (Facebook) drop the Belgian user base in a heartbeat if they would actually be confronted with a law like this? My guess is they would much rather lose a few million users than having to deal with the bad publicity and the intrusive technical challenges that come with a requirement such as this.

Just picked up a mint condition E7470 (i5) with 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD and a new battery for €230. Decent Linux-friendly machine that should last quite a few more years normally. Dell Latitude machines are always worthwhile to consider, both new and second hand.

I'm really bad at keeping up with podcasts and On The Metal is the only one that managed to have me listen to all of the episodes.

FYI, the intermediate CA's signed by their new Root X2 certificate won't have OCSP URLs anymore.

Source: https://letsencrypt.org/2020/09/17/new-root-and-intermediate...

I bookmarked this once when stumbling across it: https://librehealth.io/. It's an open source Electronic Health Record keeping system, so sounds like it might suit your needs.

I also read this book a few weeks ago after having stumbled upon it in a HN reading list somewhere. Though enjoyable, I have to agree wholeheartedly with your statement about it being pretty repetitive. It started off really good but I was happy when I finished reading it.

I've always enjoyed reading Bryan Cantrill's stuff and watching his talks. That goes for this first episode of their new podcast as well. Interesting tidbits of computing history.

Just open the article in a private tab.

I see, thanks for the info.

Interesting. I only have experience with the occasional simple (manual) purge and I could verify the object was invalidated quickly. Can you elaborate on an example config where this goes awry?

Disclaimer: I work at a company that is both an Akamai and a Fastly client. I worked with Fastly first, then Akamai after. Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

There has definitely been a push to catch up, but I wouldn't say you're there yet. The Terraform provider for instance is not up to par with the Fastly one. Having attended an Akamai DevOps workshop not so long ago, there didn't seem to be an easy way to use the CLI tools to configure a property in an idempotent way in a CI/CD pipeline. Maybe things are different now.

Akamai has some advantages for enterprise customers though such as easy assignment of cost using the CP codes. That's very handy. The integration with Let's Encrypt is also very nice.

Fastly delivers in it's simplicity and documentation. Whatever use case you need, you'll most likely find it in their docs and on their blog. Being able to use VCL to configure your caching is in my opinion way easier (and with less limitations) than the Akamai rule tree (even if you don't have previous Varnish experience). Varnish's finite state machine makes it easy to configure and debug any kind of behavior you want. The Akamai rule tree has caused me quite a few 'WTF' moments. It's difficult to debug when something doesn't behave as expected and there's a certain amount of 'black magic' in the behaviors sometimes that makes it difficult to judge what the outcome will be.

The good thing is that both companies have different features and get pushed to incorporate features deemed useful by their customers at one or the other provider.

Not anywhere close. Your cache invalidation takes forever. Ability to assign tag objects does not exist. Engaging "professional services" to make a config change like it is 2002?

Akamai also has a fast purge these days, sub 5 seconds as well I believe. Works nicely.