Thought Bricks

Once again, YouTubeTV is in a battle. This time, they have a disagreement with Disney over the fees for carrying their channels. The channels include stuff I don’t watch (Disney Channel, ABC News, Freeform, etc.) as well stuff I do (the ESPN family of channels). One of the reasons I cut the cord was to pay (at least a little) less and deal with less of the nonsense hassles you have to with cable (call them once a year and threaten to cancel to keep your payment the same).

I was glad to see Hashicorp go public the other day. They make some really great tools and I love Terraform. Packer and Vagrant are also very useful tools. It’s nice that an open source company is getting this kind of a splash. I’m thinking about buying some shares but I might wait for a little bit of a pullback. A $15 billion dollar market cap seems steep. I’ll revisit in early 2022 to see what it looks like then.

TechRepublic has some nice things to say about Firefox 95 and it’s RLBox technology. I talked about it the other day. It isn’t a fix for all possible browser security issues it is a step in the right direction to insulate the browser from problems in software supply chain and keep the baddies at bay. In general, TechRepublic likes Firefox so the positive press isn’t too surprising, but it’s good to see Firefox get some coverage for making important security improvements.

The first run of the backup to iDrive Cloud took about 24 hours for about 90GB of data. That’s pretty slow. The good news is that I won’t have to do that very often and the subsequent run was less than an hour. By Speedtest, I should be getting a little over 9Mbs. So, the backup time roughly makes sense. An hour is fine for the incrementals so this should be OK.

I’m searching for a new backup solution. I got rid of my Synology NAS and want to have a cloud based backup. On my main Linux system, I’ve got about 90GB of data in my home directory that are at least somewhat important to me. The leading contenders are Borg and restic. They both seem good but restic has more flexibility with respect to backends so I’ll try that first.

Bass Pro Shops called off the aquisition of Sportsman’s Warehouse after it was challenged by the FTC and various state attorneys general. This is a good sign that the FTC is back in the business of challenging mergers that are anticompetitive. We would be much better off if we still had four major mobile phone companies, five major network airlines and more competition in Big Tech. It’s the rampant mergers and anticompetitive behaviors in the latter than has really killed the Good Internet as we used to know it.

One of the new features in Firefox 95 is component sandboxing in RLBox. The idea is to provide some level of protection across functional boundaries within the application. This is done by using WebAssembly to create a sandbox where modules can be called without exposing the memory space to attacks. It’s an interesting concept and the documentation on the RLBox site describes it quite well. I haven’t used Firefox 95 for long, but it doesn’t seem to have had any deleterious effects.

I wrote about WireGuard last year. It’s a simple and secure VPN solution that works very well. Since it’s part of the Linux kernel now, settting it up is a breeze. I’m a fan and if I need to deploy a VPN, this is the first solution I would look at. The Register has an article about WireGuard that describes how it got into the kernel. It’s an interesting yarn. Long story short, Linus loves it so it’s in.

I’m a fan of cool maps. For years, I had the famous map of Napolean’s March to Moscow by Minard on my wall (what happened to that?). We’ve also got a few historical maps framed in our house. It’s always interesting to see how maps created before arial and satellite photography depict a coastline. This is an interesting animated map that shows all of the ships at sea. It was produced by Kiln.

I’ve recently subscribed to an email newsletter by Matthew Levine that I’m really enjoying. It’s mostly inside baseball stuff about finance which is tedious at times but the writing is very good. I love this quote from a recent article: One rough model that you could have for modern corporate finance is that most senior corporate executives are mostly in the business of maximizing cash flows for shareholders, because that is what they were trained to do, but lots of shareholders are actually interested in something else.