29 April 2024 The Crux #91: Acquisitions and IPOs Are Back Things to note IBM is buying HashiCorp for $35 a share, in cash, for about USD $6.4 billion. I dug into some ways this could go over at Forbes.com. I have since learned that HashiCorp will sit under Rob Thomas as part of IBM Software, not as part of Red Hat, though it will apparently be left largely intact, as least to start with. Vault is where all the money is, so I’d watch that part closely, even though Terraform/OpenTofu gets a...
5 months ago • 6 min read
2 April 2024 The Crux #87: Open Source Backdoors Things to note An attempt to backdoor SSH was discovered over the weekend, via a library called xz. Kevin Beaumont wrote a good summary. A lot of people who were experts in bridges and civil engineering last week are now C programming and open source supply chain experts this week. For the vast majority of people, you don't have to do anything. Just wait for the more distractable elements to move on to whatever shiny object they see next while...
6 months ago • 10 min read
25 September 2023 Cisco buying Splunk, Microsoft continues to suck at cloud security, and Unity tries to unshoot its foot. Terraform fork OpenTofu gets a home, Instacart IPOs and the Arm IPO was pricey to pull off. Intel says the future is glass, and chiplets arrive in December. The ICC gets hacked, and MGM says its hack is over but it wasn't pretty while it lasted. Long reads on why editing text on your phone sucks and adventures in plumbing. My column is on the distractions of data and the...
12 months ago • 6 min read
11 September 2023 The Crux #61: The Cost of Open Source Governance Chrome is spyware now, and so is your car, but the UK might not break encryption for everyone just yet. Microsoft reckons CoPilot might get you sued, and explains some of how it lost its email keys and got Microsoft 365 hacked. Arm is poised to go public at ~$50 billion, Tower and Intel partner up in New Mexico, and China will pour 4/5 of an Arm into its own local chip slingers. Amazon about to get sued for antitrust just as...
about 1 year ago • 7 min read
14 August 2023 The Crux #57: HashiCorp Rethinks Open Source HashiCorp is changing the license for its products and lots of people are freaking out. Zoom has made changes after last week’s freakout. Who will cause next week’s freakout? Lots of chip news, including a new heavily subsidised chip fab in Germany and the US bans investment in certain Chinese chip and AI companies. Toshiba wants to go private as Arm gears up to go public and Hua Hong Semiconductor goes public a second time. India...
about 1 year ago • 7 min read
25 June 2023 The Crux #50: Infrastructure Hospital Pass This week I'm traveling internationally again so the news items are a tad truncated. However, I did have plenty of thinking time and enough room to swing a laptop on the flight, so I have an interesting column for you. A bunch of chip news, a few security flaws you'll want to patch, and Red Hat is trying to kill off downstream rebuilds of RHEL it seems. This week's tip is on building container skills in existing enterprise infrastructure...
about 1 year ago • 6 min read