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berthubert.bsky.social
Bert Hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦
@berthubert.bsky.social
2.3K followers 270 following 580 posts
Software developer, entrepreneur, former government regulator, current government advisor, amateur scientist, publicist. https://berthub.eu/ More active on Mastodon -> @[email protected] -> Nederlandse BlueSky @berthub.eu
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berthubert.bsky.social
This move (back) coincided with a noticeable degradation in GPS accuracy. Unsure what happened, but I've never seen something like this before in #GPS.
January 9, 2026 at 4:33 PM
berthubert.bsky.social
This is the official GPS status website with an *animated* banner for an urgent advisory about GPS moving to a different control center. gwcc-ws.cce.af.mil/gpsoc/
January 9, 2026 at 11:16 AM
berthubert.bsky.social
gwcc-ws.cce.af.mil/gpsoc/ if you accept the broken certificate, you can read this somewhat worrying statement:
January 9, 2026 at 11:04 AM
berthubert.bsky.social
Something was up with #GPS yesterday, self-declared accuracy worsened from ~2 meters per satellite to 4 meters. My #GNSS skills are a bit rusty, but here is what apparently happened, based on data from the galmon.eu station operators:
timeseries of per GPS satellite declared accuracy, mostly 2/3 meters at the start, then steadily rises to 4/5 meters, and then goes down again go 2 meters.
January 8, 2026 at 9:52 PM
berthubert.bsky.social
This draft blog post incidentally is titled "Yes, we're fucking fucked".
Here goes: The climate is already seriously out of whack. Even if we’d stop polluting now, we’d still be suffering the consequences for a century, or perhaps forever. Instead, we are steadily making things worse. We technically know how to stop emitting CO2, but we’re not doing it, since it is expensive and a hassle and people don’t want to believe it is necessary. Stopping harmful emissions & dealing with the climate consequences requires humanity to work together and do all kinds of smart and difficult things. Meanwhile, our governments have lost a lot of skills and are no longer able to do anything like that. And most of them also don’t want to, because.. .. voters have decided they Want Something Else and have mostly rejected ’normal political parties’ (and not without reason) Yet, the few things we ARE doing are undermining countries like Russia, who are not taking this sitting down, and are willing to wage war to stay relevant. In 2025, the US elected a president who promises a dictatorship. Many other countries are poised to vote fundamentally anti-democratic parties to power (the Netherlands, Germany, France), or have already done so. Meanwhile, climate change is even more real and devastating than often described, and it needs worldwide coordinated effort to address. Many autocratic political parties however promise us that climate change is all a hoax. Even the more democratic governments have been infantilised or weakened and are no longer able to provide technical leadership. Yet “climate control” will require just that.
January 4, 2026 at 10:43 AM
berthubert.bsky.social
From a long fermenting blog post draft. Venezuelan oil is not that interesting since it is tricky to process & thus very expensive, while oil demand is declining:
There are various ways of looking at this graph. We can lament that the 2023 pledge (in red) is not ambitious enough, or we could express justified doubt that we’ll even deliver on that. But there is a wholly different way of looking at it. To the government of an oil-state, this graph looks like an outright declaration of war. This graph represents national bankruptcy if not extinction for specific oil producing countries like Russia and Venezuela. So what would actually happen? If the oil cartels coordinate, they can slowly shutter their production in unity, and they’d all suffer equally and fossil prices would remain more or less as normal, except they’d sell less. We may already be seeing signs of such voluntary shuttering. But it won’t last. Saudi Arabia can produce oil for a few dollars per barrel. But Russia needs six times more money (~$30) before they make any profits. Both countries need seriously high oil prices to stay alive (>$80, $100 perhaps for Russia). Meanwhile, the world is electrifying loads of things, and if you manage to heat your house with solar or wind, you’d pay only $15-$30 to get the heat output of one barrel of oil. If you were driving a car and you manage to charge it from solar/wind, you are looking at costs oil would only reach at $7/barrel (this all pre-tax). You don’t have to be a green dreamer to see that any country that needs $80/oil to survive is looking at an imminent world of pain. Someone else (renewable energy) is competing at prices that are whole factors lower. And getting even lower.
January 4, 2026 at 10:31 AM
berthubert.bsky.social
"You don't miss much, do you?" getyarn.io/yarn-clip/39...
January 2, 2026 at 10:19 AM
berthubert.bsky.social
Sanction my #bEUret people, I dare you!
a smiling bert proudly wearing his bEUret!
December 23, 2025 at 10:26 PM
berthubert.bsky.social
And here the same for four-digit postcodes:
December 7, 2025 at 3:40 PM
berthubert.bsky.social
Plot of the Day. The Netherlands has a very fine grained and in many senses very good postcode system. People often try to use postcodes for geographical purposes, to cluster precincts. The PC system however is not meant for that. Here convex hulls around all 3 digit prefixes, which often overlap:
Convex hulls around all 3 digit postcode prefixes, which often overlap, but form a pretty map of The Netherlands.
December 7, 2025 at 12:49 PM
berthubert.bsky.social
From an upcoming post:
And all atomic bombs in the US are now manufactured/maintained in the Pantex plant. And this is a distressingly normal organization. They have Christmas parties and they have a very active Instagram page. If you go work there, you can get this photo taken with an atomic bomb. I don’t think it’s a real one, but it looks like one. It’s on Instagram and they have a super, super nice environmental policy. I mean, we’re building hydrogen bombs. But look at our windmills! But there is a lesson in here. You can see here, and we’ll see that repeat in the course of the presentation. Where did the atomic bomb come from? Of course, they used all these great scientists from the great universities.
November 30, 2025 at 6:51 PM
berthubert.bsky.social
I made a meme for this situation:
November 29, 2025 at 11:59 AM
berthubert.bsky.social
Preparing my talk over at Delft University tomorrow evening (you can still sign up here vvtp.nl/article/symp... ). I'll be presenting on the role of science in our (military) security. And I found out today that the Wassenaar Arrangement has this astounding logo:
Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies. The logo consists of the letters W A, within an oval that also says "Wassenaar Arrangement". It all looks decidedly 1970s.
November 19, 2025 at 2:13 PM
berthubert.bsky.social
Nou je het toch had over epistemologie ;-)
November 9, 2025 at 9:56 PM
berthubert.bsky.social
"We cannot possibly adjust enough .. and it is degrading to make the attempt":
“Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.” ― Christopher Hitchens
October 26, 2025 at 5:43 PM
berthubert.bsky.social
In The Hague we named a lane after this meeting: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...
Street sign saying "Laan van Reagan en Gorbatsjov", with a subtitle explaining this is named after the 1986 meeting that ended the cold war.
October 11, 2025 at 2:27 PM
berthubert.bsky.social
Work in progress...
September 19, 2025 at 9:12 PM
berthubert.bsky.social
"These days we'd call this setup an air-gapped sovereign computing solution"
An IBM XT computer, with some WordPerfect floppies. Text 'Air-gapped sovereign computing solution'.
September 9, 2025 at 1:06 PM
berthubert.bsky.social
Just scrolling through cert.europa.eu/publications... should make it clear to anyone that our software security situation is unsustainable.
https://cert.europa.eu/publications/security-advisories/2025
September 9, 2025 at 10:53 AM
berthubert.bsky.social
Still the case...
spice girls holding signs that say if you / wanna steal / my data / you gotta / be a U.S. based corporation
September 5, 2025 at 8:27 AM
berthubert.bsky.social
might be a good idea, but this version is too tailored for specific audiences. Also has this slide:
August 29, 2025 at 6:14 AM
berthubert.bsky.social
Doing a talk on the terrible state of cyber security tomorrow. This is one of the slides.
CITRIX <tm>
August 28, 2025 at 10:06 PM
berthubert.bsky.social
a slanted table showing Word, Excel and Powerpoint icons sliding towards the Microsoft OneDrive and thence to the NSA
August 28, 2025 at 9:30 AM
berthubert.bsky.social
Gene Strand Bias histogram for eubacteria and #archaea Eubacteria have clear replication forks. Genes prefer to huddle on the leading copying strand. Either they prefer that or they prefer that A LOT it appears. Archaea don't really. Data via skewdb.org (my project). /cc @ceesdekker.bsky.social
histogram showing a peak around 0 gene strand bias for archaea, and two peaks for eubacteria around 0.1 and 0.45.
August 23, 2025 at 9:30 AM
berthubert.bsky.social
Thank you volunteer translators! The brief #Chatcontrol piece has now been translated into German, French, Catalan, Castilian, Italian, Czech, Esperanto (!), Dutch, Bulgarian, Danish and Romanian! berthub.eu/articles/pos...
In short, led by Denmark, many EU member states are arguing for forcing WhatsApp/Signal/etc to inspect all our photos and links, using AI. If the AI is in any “doubt” if this might be child pornography, your photo, location, phone number & other details get reported to Europol and a local police force. What happens next is not specified, but your holiday in Cyprus might end up with you having to explain your photos over at the local police station. In Greek. Und hier auf Deutsch 🇩🇪🇦🇹🇧🇪. Et ici en français 🇫🇷 🇧🇪🇱🇺. Y aquí en castellano 🇪🇸, i en català, og her på dansk 🇩🇰, E qui in italiano 🇮🇹. Și aici în română 🇷🇴. In het Nederlands🇧🇪🇳🇱, v češtině 🇨🇿 , и на български 🇧🇬, kaj en Esperanto. If you translate this page to further languages (which would be very useful), please do let me know (bert@hubertnet.nl) so I can link to your work, or host it on my site. Here is the original Markdown. Thanks!
August 23, 2025 at 9:00 AM