Planeta Libre en Español

Ohai, I have some pending, encrypted mails to answer. And some of my answers for the next few days (particularly to what pertains to the current in-discussion vote on LLM usage in Debian ) will be unsigned, even though I’d like otherwise. My desktop system at work is showing some data corruption, and I’m slowly backing up my data. Fortunately, it seems I haven’t lost any data, but still, given I’m letting rsync run until it starts spewing I/O errors, then power down and let the machine cool a bi...

This post is an unpublished review for Subscription Bombing • Email under Attack One of the most important inputs one can have when designing a response strategy against a security attack is a good characterization. This article describes a relatively newly described attack mode (subscription bombing), hypothetizes on the motivations that can lie behind it, and presents some countermeasures that can be taken by different actors to reduce its impact. At its core, suscription bombing is a classica...

Yay! Finally it’s that time of year — DebCamp is underway, and soon it will be time for DebConf! 🎉🥳 As it is by now tradition, it’s my task to coordinate the DebConf26 keysigning party. And, as usual, I have set up the list of DebConf26 keysigning maps for everybody involved. So, if you are taking part of DebConf, make sure to: Find yourself in the keysigning map . Are you a part of the listing? If you are not there, log in to the DebConf26 management system and edit the Personal Information se...

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for systemd for Linux SysAdmins , a book published in Apress systemd. Yes, in full lowercase. If there was ever a technology to cause controversy in the Linux world, this is it. Since its inception in 2010, systemd’s goals were set quite high: to replace the vital part in every Linux system that takes care of the system boot process. It quickly reached maturity, allowing it to be adopted as the main init system in most major distributions just five yea...

Today we went to see a theater play in UNAM’s Cultural Center, very near our home. No, not inside any of the theaters — in the square just between Sala Nezahualcóyotl, Foro Sor Juana and Sala Carlos Chávez. . So, yes, not only we had fun, but we had fun for free! UNAM’s El Carro de Comedias is an itinerant theater company that often presents in this same spot (but you can see the stage is foldable, and they do have presentations elsewhere, of this same play even). I went with my family, and we e...

I am a teacher. Since January 2013, I have been teaching the “Operating Systems” course at the Engineering Faculty of UNAM . And yes, that means May and November are highly stressful months, where I have to review the work done by my students and… sigh … come to the difficult decisions leading to a numerical score that will, in very very short, represent the 64 hours they spent listening to me talk and how they shaped their understanding, plus the countless (in the sense that I cannot count them...

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for Heads we win, tails you lose — AI detectors in education , a article published in Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management • Routledge Taylor&Francis Group Educators throughout the world are tasked with the difficult requirement of evaluating student work, making sure the grades meaningfully reflect the students’ understanding of the subject, and that a graded assignment maps to the relevant work used in solving it. After the “eruption...

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for As Answers Get Cheaper, Questions Grow Dearer , a article published in Communications of the ACM This opinion article tackles two much-discussed issues: the impact of large language models (LLMs) on job displacement, and workplace productivity. The authors begin by making a comparison, likening the effects of LLMs on knowledge-intensive work to that of photogrpahy on early 19th-century artists. While the invention of photography didn’t result in pa...

Finally, some light at the end of the tunnel! As I have said in this blog and elsewhere, after putting quite a bit of work into generating the Debian Raspberry Pi images between late 2018 and 2023, I had to recognize I don’t have the time and energy to properly care for it. I even registered a GSoC project for it. I mentored Kurva Prashanth, who did good work on the vmdb2 scripts we use for the image generation — but in the end, was unable to push them to be built in Debian infrastructure. Maybe...

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for The Innovation Engine • Government-funded Academic Research , a article published in Communications of the ACM David Patterson needs no introduction. As the brain behind many of the inventions that shaped the computing industry (repeatedly) over the past 40 years, when he put forward an opinion article in Communications of the ACM targeting the current political waves in the US, I knew I had to write this review. Patterson worked for a a public uni...