December 31, 2024
Although the definitions of Open Source are related to specific software characteristics (i.e., the license), the reality is much more complex.
Open-source is way more related to a social contract that the software’s creator and its users morally sign than the definition might lead you to believe.
This social contract’s key aspect concerns the software’s current license and the licenses of future versions.
This is because although users of open-source software usually do not pay to use it, they incur high costs to do so.
Examples of those costs are training costs and potential costs to replace a certain technology should it become unavailable in the future.
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November 30, 2024
I often talk with people about Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in public cloud contexts, and I discover that their idea of what those SLAs are is often distorted.
I believe SLAs need to be approached with a healthy dose of skepticism.
In reality, they often provide little meaningful recourse when things go awry.
There are two big issues, in my opinion, with the SLA provided by many companies, including the hyperscalers:
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October 26, 2024 - Milano, IT
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July 24, 2023
This website is hosted on AWS S3 and uses AWS CloudFront as CDN.
I use a couple of AWS Lambda@Edge functions to make AWS CloudFront a little brighter.
When I decided to self-host a Fediverse instance, it became immediately evident that I would have to set up WebFinger on my domain to be able to use my root domain as the account domain.
There is documentation on the web on how to set up WebFinger, but it is aimed at different setups, so I had to configure it myself.
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May 24, 2023
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has evaluated the legality of Facebook’s (now Meta Platforms) data transfer for over 10 years.
In those 10 years, we have seen the Irish DPC trying to avoid ruling on the matter multiple times and the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) forcing them to do it.
We now have a final ruling on the matter, which is unfavorable to Meta.
In fact, in addition to having to stop the data transfer within 5 months and having to move back all data within 6 months, Meta has to pay a € 1.2 billion fine.
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October 10, 2022
Every so often, I have a conversation with someone, and we end up in a sub-conversation around the differences between products and technologies.
This phenomenon frequently happens to me because I consider a product and a technology two completely different things.
At the same time, many people use them interchangeably when discussing IT products and technologies.
I think this distinction’s value is clearly distinguishing the solutions that are resilient to a single entity failure and those that are not.
Suppose the producer of a product goes out of business or, for any reason, will not do additional business with you.
In that case, you lose the ability to buy that product and, sometimes, even use it completely.
This limitation does not apply to a technology since you should be able to access it, regardless of the specific vendor.
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September 26, 2022
In the last few months, we have witnessed multiple European Data Protection offices weigh on the legitimacy of Google Analytics.
Back in January, I’ve published a post that touched on the topic but was not really about Google Analytics.
So, let’s start looking at what happened, why Google Analytics seems to be so interesting for the European Privacy authorities, and finish with some guessing on what could happen in the next few months.
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May 23, 2022
We have seen a massive increase in the “real world” dependency on digital services in the last few years.
This process will probably continue in the future, and we are not ready for it.
In the same few years, we have seen a lot of cases where digital services went offline or got hacked.
In a society that relies more and more on digital services, we can not afford such services not to be available or secure.
Although security is essential, I want to focus on availability for now.
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March 21, 2022
One of the first issues that I had to solve when I started to use gRPC was how to inject a DB connection pool to the function handling the request.
The DB connection injection is needed because creating a new SQL connection every time there is a new gRPC request (and tearing it down at the end) is a massive waste of resources.
Also, this approach could limit the scalability of the API since the database probably has a limited number of connections it will accept.
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November 26, 2021
In the last few weeks, I’ve heard from many - mainly not technical - people the expression “Web3”.
In a way, it is excellent that people that are not tech-savvy start to learn about the Web, how it works, and where it might go, since they are using it consciously or not to perform the majority of tasks in their lives.
The issue I have with this, though, is that no one of them could explain how it would work or why they are so confident that the future is going in that direction.
The only thing they could associate with Web3 was that cryptocurrencies would be the future, and their value would go to the moon.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog