2026-01-22 04:30:09
Dinsdag 27 januari om 18:30 is er in Den Haag in de Tweede Kamer een rondetafeloverleg over de consequenties van de (beoogde) overname van Solvinity voor DigiD. Er komen diverse sprekers, onder andere namens Bits of Freedom, de Dutch Cloud Community, Clingendael, NLDigital (big tech), Stichting Digitale Infrastructuur Nederland. Ook zijn Brenno de Winter en Paul Timmers van de partij. En ik ben er ook. En u kunt ook komen! Schrijf je wel hier in vooraf!
2026-01-20 15:40:09
Hier een lijst organisaties die voor hun primaire missie totaal afhankelijk zijn van Amerikaanse clouds, en waarbij de maatschappij ontwricht zou worden als ze hun werk niet meer konden doen, bijvoorbeeld door sancties over Groenland. Dit omvat bijvoorbeeld wel de veiligheidsregio’s en het UWV, maar niet het ministerie van economische zaken. Want als bij het departement EZ het licht uitgaat is dat vervelend, maar we kunnen wel een paar weken zonder nieuw beleid.
2026-01-10 18:08:02
Europe is experiencing a crisis of digital autonomy. Our dependence on US big tech has been growing for decades and is now nearly total, at a time when worries about our former ally are no longer theoretical. Might we, like the International Criminal Court in The Hague, find ourselves locked out of our own mailboxes if we say something that is upsetting to the US government? This post was written in response to an article in the Financial Times.
2026-01-07 20:00:00
Ten, twenty years ago customers over at large corporations would often ask me what hardware they’d need to run my software. As software developers, we’d tend to be rather blasé about such questions: “whatever you have lying around!”. If pressed, we’d say you’d need this much RAM and that much storage. We thought we were doing our users a tremendous favor by being so flexible. Yet, customers were very much not happy with our responses.
2026-01-04 06:00:02
Brief post on a somewhat vexing and irritating C++ problem I ran into some time ago. I hope that this page will help other people deal with this problem more quickly than I did. I’ve long used std::basic_string<uint8_t>, an unsigned char string, for fiddling with bits. You could use a regular char string, but especially when doing cryptographic or sub-byte operations, it is more convenient to not have to deal with sign bits.
2025-12-23 18:20:00
As the year draws to an end now is a good time to review where we are with Europe’s cloud situation, and what has been achieved. One thing is certain, a lot has happened, and also quite a lot has become clearer. tl;dr: Great strides have been made in 2025, especially in convincing people that something must be done, and outlining what that might be. Industry buyers are not going to lead us since they mostly care about next quarter’s results.
