Hell Gate is my favorite New York City-focused news outlet. The coverage is good and the writing tends to be exceptional. When they redesigned their website in July last year, they added a new "FYI" section, which is usually one to two sentences with a link to a story about…
Since its first version, SecureDrop has run on the Ubuntu Server operating system. Ubuntu provides security fixes and updates for each long-term support release for five years; SecureDrop currently uses Ubuntu 20.04 “Focal.” As of May 2025, that version will no longer be supported, so all servers must migrate to…
I've been using my reMarkable 2 a lot more recently, and have gotten started with actually hacking on it. It's a bit overdue, since the main reason I purchased it in the first place was that it is built on top of Linux and doesn't require any special jailbreaking/rooting. I…
I recently completed my third year working on SecureDrop at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Time flies when you're having fun; and not coincidentally, this is the longest I've ever held the same position at a job. In terms of numbers, by the end of 2024, I had made…
I'll be attending RustConf in Montreal this week so I wanted to take a moment to describe how we're using Rust in SecureDrop. Historically SecureDrop has always been a primarily Python project accompanied by bash scripts and then HTML/CSS/JS for the web interface. Aaron Swartz's first commit to SecureDrop was…
I recently released 5.0.0 of my grr tool that makes working with Gerrit easier. It is an alternative to git-review; I personally think grr is more straightforward to use, but I also haven't used git-review since 2014 when I first got frustrated enough to create grr. I had let it…
I like Simon Willison's framing of using large language models (aka LLMs, aka "AI") to enable side quests of things you wouldn't normally do. Could I have done this without LLM assistance? Yes, but not nearly as quickly. And this was not a task on my critical path for the…
A number of tools hosted on Toolforge rely on the replicated MediaWiki databases, dubbed "Wiki Replicas". Every so often these servers have replication lag, which affects the data returned as well as the performance of the queries. And when this happens, users get confused and start reporting bugs that aren't…
tl;dr: You can now chat in #wikimedia-rust:matrix.org and reach folks on IRC Nearly a year ago, the official Libera.Chat <-> Matrix bridge was shut down. There's a lot that went wrong in the technical and social operation of the bridge that the Libera.Chat staff have helpfully documented, but from a…
If you visit my blog (most likely what you're reading now) and have JavaScript enabled, you should see a magnifying glass in the top right, next to the feed icon. Clicking it should open up a search box that lets you perform a very rudimentary full-text search of all of…
It's been nearly 10 years since I created this blog and for that entire time it's been using the Pelican static site generator. It's been pretty good, but lately I've wanted to improve and change some things, so I've taken the opportunity to rewrite it from mostly scratch. b2 is…
I haven't been very good with writing about what I've been working on in SecureDrop-land, but here is: Migrating SecureDrop’s PGP backend from GnuPG to Sequoia over on the SecureDrop website. You should read it, and then come back to read the rest of this. We had been discussing Sequoia…
There was recently a request to generate a report of featured articles on Wikipedia, sorted by length, specifically the "prose size". It's pretty straightforward to get a page's length in terms of the wikitext or even the rendered HTML output, but counting just the prose is more difficult. Here's how…
I landed file upload support in the mwapi (docs) and mwbot (docs) crates yesterday. Uploading files in MediaWiki is kind of complicated, there are multiple state machines to implement and there are multiple ways to upload files and different options that come with that. The mwapi crate contains most of…
I was intending to write a pretty different blog post about progress on mwbot-rs but...ugh. The main dependency of the parsoid crate, kuchiki, was archived over the weekend. In reality it's been lightly/un-maintained for a while now, so this is just reflecting reality, but it does feel like a huge…
