I’m sure that many of you heard about a backdoor in xz util that allows specific people to get root access if Linux is configured to allow incoming SSH connections. There are a lot of systems like that because it is a typical configuration for pretty much every Linux machine. Fortunately, it was caught quickly, and as far as we know there were no real hacks made via that backdoor.

But it reveals a lot of problems and most of them are typical for open-source development.  I would like to review them and to explore if these problems apply to the closed-source world.

Let’s start with the obvious problem. You rarely get paid for developing open-source projects. Most of

Recently I found that IPv4 for Lighsail will cost more from the 1st of May. And I decided to switch my test site to IPv6 only. I followed the guide that states that I had to create a snapshot and then restore it to an IPv6-only instance. Then I decided to connect to it via SSH and check that everything works fine.

To my surprise, I cannot connect to it. I tried everything and nothing worked. Then I tried to ping it and it also did not work. To make a story short eventually, I found that the issue was in my main OpenWrt router.

And then I remembered that I did something special in old versions of OpenWrt

Some time ago I wrote a series of posts about the Amazon Lightsail product. I really like Lightsail for simplicity and because for $3.5 I can create a fully functional virtual PC with a static IPv4 address. This way I can add an A record in my DNS server and point you to this virtual PC.

But recently Amazon changed conditions and IPv4 is not free anymore. By default, it will cost $1.5 per month. It is not a big deal by itself but it effectively increases the price from $3.5 to $5 which is more than a 40% increase. Previously it was impossible to compete with Lighsail, but for $5 there are way more offers.

Today I installed an update to my Tesla that allows me to test Full Self Driving (FSD). And it is just amazing what it can do. The car practically drove me to work and back. But there are quite a lot of things that make my blood pressure rise.

The first thing was relatively minor. The car did a left turn and stayed in the leftmost lane. And for some reason maintains a speed 5 miles below the limit for quite some time. I had to manually accelerate it. And once or twice the car went over lane markings. There were no cars in the adjusted lane so it was not a big problem.

The next was not as good.

Currently, Tesla is selling a Full Self Dring (FSD) package for $12 000. Previously it was $15 000 but it was just insane. And recently Tesla sent an email to customers in the US to let them know that they can test it for a whole month for free. Obviously, they want to sell more of it, but I cannot quite understand who is supposed to be the intended audience for such a product.

Any Tesla can keep the lane and have adaptive cruise control and it works very well. Well, almost well until there is phantom braking but it does not happen often. These 2 things may not look like much but on long trips, it is what helps

Like many other people, I am watching YouTube. And as everybody knows, in YouTube videos, you can see Google Ads and very often, creators promote some product or brand. And recently I saw quite a lot of promotions for VPN services.

And many such VPN ads promote the VPN as a means to protect your privacy and data. But it actually doesn’t do any of that. Well, to be 100% honest VPN can protect your privacy, but not for the average person because it requires strict discipline. But it 100% cannot protect your data.

VPN is short for Virtual Private Network. A typical use for VPN is a means to connect to your work environment from your home computer. Instead

As I wrote before I did a 1000-mile trip in a Tesla Model Y and it was no difference in time if I did it in a traditional car. In fact, it will take longer because petrol stations are rarely close to any good food places like restaurants, so I will have to refill my car and then drive to restaurants while in Tesla I can drive to a supercharger and a restaurant is always nearby.

But my first trip could be a fluke and it could be a perfect combination of different factors. But recently I did a second trip to the same place and back, I just did circle in different direction. And as in first time

Some time ago I decided to buy a new charger with at least 2 USB ports. And because we all live in a new bright USB-C era, I decided that it is time to buy a charger with USB-C ports to be future-proof. But to my surprise, all charges with USB-C ports cost way more than with USB-A ports.

At that time I attributed it to the manufacturer's greed to get more money on the new standard and I bought a charger with one USB-A and one USB-C port. But as it turns out, they cost more because of a completely different reason.

Thanks to this video, it turns out that a USB-A port can deliver a maximum of

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  • .NET

And just for perspective, we have 824 C# projects and when someone thinks about converting, they may believe that they need to convert all these projects to support .NET X (where X >= 5), change the build system, etc.

It turns out that there is an easy way to do and it allows us to do proof of concept very quickly and then test compatibility. And to do this you need to do nothing. Yep, you heard me right. Our application is a native application that loads .NET Framework runtime and then loads .NET Framework assemblies.

It turns out that all we need to do is to change the .NET Framework loader to load .NET 6 runtime. It is described