Posts

From running Eggdrop IRC bots on SUSE Linux 6.2 to watching SUSE cut 10% of its workforce in the name of AI. Is this technological progress, or just another corporate restructuring?

A football table, unlimited holidays and free Friday drinks won’t compensate for a poor salary. What really matters when experienced IT professionals consider changing jobs?

After years of working remotely, corporate harmonisation is bringing mandatory office attendance back. But sitting in an office has never been a measure of productivity.

PHP2Shell showed that a security decision is only as good as the technical understanding behind it.

Two critical PHP vulnerabilities exposed the gap between security reporting and operational reality. The systems stayed online, with tighter access controls.

VNG and IPO want open source requirements in public procurement to count as justified by default. A good step, but only if the law makes it stick.

Using AI to help you think makes you stronger. Using it so you don’t have to think makes you dependent on something you don’t understand.

An Italian AI startup claims it depends on no one. Nobody can say that. Sovereignty is a choice made layer by layer, with a way out on every layer.

The NetScaler zero-days raise a question that reaches beyond Citrix: when a national CSIRT warns some organisations before others, who decides who is worth protecting first?

Two NetScaler zero-days have Dutch hospitals and government taking their remote access offline, six years after the first Citrix-file. The patch is the easy part. The real question is why one appliance can hurt this much.

Broadcom’s removal of VMware’s VDDK shows why portability, not a paper exit plan, is what real infrastructure sovereignty requires.

Put two Linux people in a room and one word is enough. Put a manager in that same room and suddenly you need an interpreter. The interruption is not the problem. The context switch is.

Open source needs governance, but governance should protect the people who ship, not replace them.

Compliance is not security. The Cybersecurity Act should strengthen resilience, not put engineers in handcuffs.

A response to the NCSC Community piece on ‘open source, unless’, and why one line about transparency needing a watcher deserves more scrutiny than it got.

The 2026 hype says Proxmox has overtaken ESXi and Hyper-V. It has the direction right, but the vCenter comparison is still a little ahead of itself.

The hardest infrastructure decisions are not technical. They are operational.

We haven’t just outsourced our hardware; we’ve outsourced our technical problem-solving capability. The ultimate sovereignty question: when the system fails, who is allowed to fix it?

Return-to-office mandates are a systemic failure. Treating human infrastructure with the same flawed logic as bad server maintenance is why IT is burning out.

Most organizations don’t notice burnout. They notice silence. By the time they do, it is already too late.

The Odido breach did not end when the systems were patched. It continued wherever abandoned domains, forgotten mailflows, and expired infrastructure were still trusted.

Week four or five at home. A heart attack in 2024, a stent, medication. On paper everything is stable. The pain disagrees.

Why the current blind race for AI adoption is replacing human judgment with algorithmic black boxes, leading to systemic fragility.

A phishing simulation showed that even when people know what to do, there is often no correct decision to make. Organisations respond by managing reactions instead of fixing the conditions that caused the problem.

When one person consistently carries operational recovery, troubleshooting and undocumented infrastructure knowledge, organisations mistake dependency for stability.

Control over the runtime layer matters more than where data sits. That shift in ownership changes the legal and operational reality of DigiD.

Consent was never a banner. It was a runtime condition, and the platform kept tracking after refusal.

The audit passed. The certificate is on the wall. And your security posture is still held together with duct tape and good intentions.

France acts. The Netherlands watches. Digital sovereignty is not a vision problem, it is a lack of spine.

From a 9600 bps modem in Lelystad to the server rooms of XS4ALL and Leaseweb, I watched technical authority get replaced by compliance theater and PowerPoint circles. The operator didn’t retire. He got managed out.

The European Commission ran its infrastructure on AWS while writing sovereignty frameworks for everyone else. Now 350GB is gone. This was not a surprise.

A warning for organisations: summer fatigue increases security risk even when systems appear stable and operational.

A decade of Dutch digital sovereignty surrendered through procurement. From the failed Rijkscloud to the CLOUD Act, and now a state secretary who confirms it in writing and presses on anyway.

Mobile authenticator vulnerabilities expose a fundamental truth. Securing the endpoint OS while leaving the phone untouched is security theater. Here is what actually works.

Exploring the hidden workload, compliance mirages and burnout risks faced by senior specialists in enterprise IT environments.

How Fortinet’s licensing changes force Linux engineers into costly VPN workarounds, creating operational risk.

When corporate systems lock you out of your own email history, scripting your archive is the only way to keep control of the evidence.

ISO 27001 documentation can give a false sense of security, leading to compliance illusions and enterprise risk.

AI is not just automating technical work; it is hollowing out the craft that makes systems trustworthy.

A post-mortem of Dutch digital sovereignty failures, exploring enterprise and systemic IT accountability.

Using Arch Linux isn’t inherently more efficient. Here’s why tech efficiency is about practices, not distro choice.

A case study of institutional failures in cybersecurity and governance, highlighting systemic risks in enterprise IT.

How burnout and gamification create easy targets for social engineering attacks on enterprise admins.

How collective IT negligence and geopolitical decisions expose systemic risks in digital sovereignty.

SSH infrastructure is often treated as stable, but neglect can create hidden vulnerabilities in enterprise environments.

How EU policies, digital sovereignty, and cloud dependencies put member states at systemic risk.

The Dutch government’s digital autonomy strategy promises independence but risks reinforcing old dependencies.

Cloudflare, AWS, and Azure outages show that centralized dependency risks affect modern infrastructure.

Practical AI prompt frameworks and examples for sysadmins and tech professionals to generate actionable repeatable results.

Pro-Russian hackers exploit Linux VMs inside Windows to bypass EDR, creating a critical security blind spot.

A reflection on engineering integrity versus corporate bureaucracy and the commitment to remain hands-on.

The EU’s digital initiatives like CBDC and Chat Control raise questions about privacy, control, and IT workload.