bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:

Stopping anthropogenic climate change is terraforming on "easy" mode.

Until we can sort out global warming we have no business considering terraforming Mars.

bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦 (@bert_hubert@eupolicy.social) 2 Posts, 0 Following, 5 Followers · Software developer, entrepreneur, former government regulator, current government advisor, amateur scientist. https://berthub.eu/

Hi everybody - this account will soon migrate to @bert_hubert@eupolicy.social - with many thanks to the fosstodon.org maintainers for many years of great service.

@gnss_changes The status display on https://galmon.eu/ is none too happy. Every row with an IOD > 127 means a satellite is broadcasting 'vintage' orbital data. As in, old.

NOTICE ADVISORY TO GALILEO USERS (NAGU) 2025016 DATE GENERATED (UTC): 2025-05-07 13:15 NAGU TYPE: GENERAL (NOTICE) NAGU NUMBER: 2025016 NAGU SUBJECT: TESTING ACTIVITIES NAGU REFERENCED TO: N/A START DATE EVENT (UTC): 2025-05-12 06:00 END DATE EVENT (UTC): 2025-05-19 16:00 SATELLITE AFFECTED: ALL EVENT DESCRIPTION: USERS ARE INFORMED THAT DUE TO TESTING ACTIVITIES, THE OPEN SERVICE AND THE HIGH ACCURACY SERVICE WILL EXPERIENCE DEGRADATIONS UP TO TEMPORARY DISRUPTION OF SERVICE FROM 2025-05-12 AT 06:00 UTC. THE COMPLETION OF THE TESTING ACTIVITIES IS ESTIMATED TO BE ON 2025-05-19 16:00 UTC. DURING THIS PERIOD THE SIGNAL IN SPACE IS EXPECTED TO DEVIATE FROM THE MINIMUM PERFORMANCE LEVELS DEFINED IN THE PUBLISHED OS AND HAS SERVICE DEFINITION DOCUMENTS AND SIGNAL IN SPACE INTERFACE CONTROL DOCUMENTS.

@gnss_changes Here is what the Galileo agency mailed round last week. Not easy to understand what they mean, and I guess this is by design:

Happy bats in the margin

Bodl. Library MS. Ashmole 304; 13th century; England, St. Albans; f.47v @bodleianlibraries.bsky.social

The bot is making a lot of noise about Galileo, the EU GPS. This is because Galileo is being very weird and is clearly running on outdated orbital data. It might still be accurate enough though. This was announced very cryptically last week that there would be “deviations”. Galileo […]

Tracking-free audience statistics - Bert Hubert's writings As regular readers of this blog will know, I am no friend of the surveillance capitalism that currently powers the web. It is becoming well-neigh impossible to develop any software or host any content without some component tracking your users & sending data to third parties. Even though I try very hard not to fall for this, periodically I discover that my sites also embed things that embed things that potentially leak your details to third parties.

@briankrebs True - I do keep track of if people make it to the end of articles. This informs me if I should spend more time on making things readable or not. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/tracking-free-audience-statistics/

@briankrebs Thanks, been at it for a bit! I also took a lot of inspiration from your talk in Rotterdam many moons ago on the whole spam ecosystem. Was an eye opener. The conference with the boat where I understand you had an interesting meeting afterwards!

Do the things that are meaningful while you can, because gosh it makes a difference

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As I type away into the void, hoping to achieve something, I sometimes wonder if it is worth it. Do people read this stuff? There are now 222 articles on https://berthub.eu/articles/ and sometimes one of these gets read really well. But what about the "back […]

[Original post on fosstodon.org]

OK, I'm going to hammer on this one. Five days might not seem like much to get 700,000 signature, but I've seen petitions get to 1 million in a day to save baby seals, so why not this one.
We have 4 countries above the threshold, but even if you're in those, your signature can make a different […]

I celebrate my 50th birthday today 🥳! I used to be quite dramatic about this prospect but thanks to some recent health setbacks in my family (from which we are now thankfully recovering well it appears) I’ve come to realize that my life, even at 50, is quite a feast!

"My next TRUTH will be one of the most important and impactful I have ever issued. ENJOY!"

I too have an important announcement tomorrow! It is good news, so no worries.

Students not merely cheating with, but utterly relying on AI in "a society that treats schooling as [nothing more than] a means to a high-paying job" is deeply concerning as AI may actually make you dumber:

"research shows that when students off-load cognitive duties onto chatbots, their […]

I've written an unhealthy amount of words on "the cloud" and specifically Europe's woes. In the post below I tie many articles together into a hopefully useful overview. It may be good to know that nothing what I write on the cloud is novel or original, I mostly hope to report things as they are […]

Tweet from @Judiciary GOP: Kanye. Elon. Trump.

In hindsight they were right. This is exactly what Republicans are now.

ESA reports K482SA reentered between 0604 UITC (seen by radar on pass over Europe) and 0732 UTC (not seen by European radars on the next orbit). Roskosmos reports that reentry was at 0624 UTC over the Indian Ocean, but with no details on how they conclude that.

LEO sat disposal is a new environmental disaster brewing, mostly because of the actions of a single private company, but really, it's everyone's operating procedure in LEO. Just burn those sats up in Earth's atmosphere when they're done! They just disappear! And if they don't, they probably […]

During my time in the European Parliament, I attended a crucial final negotiation between Portuguese, Danish, German, Romanian and French MEPs, only to discover there had been a mixup and we would have no interpretation (translators) for the meeting.

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Happy Europe Day from Brussels! Today marks 75 years since Europe's Nations chose peaceful cooperation over war. On Europe Day I wanted to share a personal anecdote about that cooperation.

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However, you can still deliver services without US clouds There are governments and companies that have concluded that it is no longer possible to do anything IT or computer related without using one of the big three US cloud providers. This conclusion comes from some circular reasoning however. There are indeed software developers that no longer function without US cloud support. And these developers will indeed tell you there is no life outside of Microsoft/Google/AWS. Europe however still has a lot of capacity to build software based on servers instead of on specific cloud services. I outlined this in Cloud Naïve: Europe and the ‘Bijenkorf’ Megascaler. Massive outsourcing has made organizations somewhat helpless Many organizations have over the years outsourced a lot of their IT. Even very information heavy things like banks have decided that IT and computing are not their core competence. They are now realizing they were wrong about this. However, it is very common to first outsource non-core competences, and then not know when to stop. It is extremely difficult to stop doing 80% of what you did while remaining good at the 20% you must retain. If you have no native IT skills left, you end up depending 100% on someone else’s skills, most likely from the cloud. I expand on this hard problem in Your tech or my tech: make up your mind quickly.

I have improved the cloud overview article with headlines that should make things somewhat clearer. Previously it was a bit of a wall of text. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cloud-overview/

This clip must be shown in schools and shopping centres in all regions of eastern Germany. The hapless German reporter asks whether it would have been possible to commemorate the end of the war alongside the Russians, "not necessarily hand in hand", but […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

"Make war not just unthinkable, but materially impossible." Today marks 75 years since the Schuman Declaration.

A bit of European history to be proud of. Let's cherish it.

I've written an unhealthy amount of words on "the cloud" and specifically Europe's woes. In the post below I tie many articles together into a hopefully useful overview. It may be good to know that nothing what I write on the cloud is novel or original, I mostly hope to report things as they are […]