Weeknotes 2026.03
Posted on So 18 Jänner 2026 in Blog
What a week. I was debugging an issue with our internal container registry. The Garbage Collector is not working properly. It took me a while to find the reason why it was not working.
After some investigation it seems like it has to do with the cosign process.
The Garbage Collector doesn't remove images that are signed, even if they are deleted from the registry.
I still haven't figured out why it is not working properly, but at least I was able to resolve some space by replacing repositories with big images. If a repository is deleted, the Garbage Collector works fine.
Besides that, it was a week with a lot of meetings. On Thursday I had an online meeting with our client the whole day. That was quite exhausting.
Content:
Story of the week
Markus Winand shared a modern SQL article about Without Overlaps Constraints.
You could do this with postgres already with exclusion constraints, but with the use of btree_gist the without overlaps syntax is possible in Postgres 18.
DB2 supports this feature since 2013 and MariaDB since 2020.
Postgres and the world of data
QR-Codes
This week a blog post went viral that shows how to create QR-Codes with Postgres. All you need is pure SQL.
pqr.sql: Generate QR Codes with Pure SQL in PostgreSQL
Listen/Notify
Robins Tharakan has written a blog post about the perfomance improvments with LISTEN/NOTIFY in Postgres.
A recent commit speeds the use of LISTEN/NOTIFY up.
Turbocharging LISTEN/NOTIFY with 40x Boost
Clickhouse
Clickhouse announced this week a 400 million Dollar Series D round and the acquisition of Langfuse.
- ClickHouse raises $400M Series D led by Dragoneer to accelerate expansion across analytics and AI infrastructure
- ClickHouse welcomes Langfuse: The future of open-source LLM observability
Postgres Release Monitor
- credcheck v4.4 has been released
- Meet the New dotConnect for PostgreSQL Release
- pg_statviz 0.9 released with new features
- Introducing pgEdge Load Generator: Realistic PostgreSQL Workload Simulation
Security and Privacy
Digital Sovereignty
This week the new AWS European Sovereign Cloud was launched.
The ESC has no ties to the United States (beyond corporate ownership). Everything runs and stays in the EU, to help meet European sovereignty requirements.
A legal entity under German Law was set up, but it is owned by the AWS. Chris Ferris explains some of the technical boundaries of the ESC in his blog post.
- European Sovereign Cloud?
- AWS Launches European Sovereign Cloud: What You Need to Know and What You Need to Do
According to Reuters chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE are forced out of critical infrastructure like telecom networks.
EU moves to force the phase-out of Chinese suppliers from key infrastructure, FT reports
Smart Glasses
The BBC has a story about women being filmed with smart glasses and posted online. It is a little bit scary and dystopian.
'I was secretly filmed with smart glasses and then trolled online'
Linux Malware
Dan Goodin has a writeup about a new and very advanced Linux malware.
The malware is named VoidLink and is more of an ecosystem with more than 30 modules that can be enabled.
The primary target of the malware seems to be Linux machines in the cloud.
Never-before-seen Linux malware is “far more advanced than typical”.
Python Software Foundation
This week it was announced that Anthropic donates 1.5 million Dollars to the Python Software Foundation. The money will be used to improve the security of PyPI and CPython.
Anthropic invests $1.5 million in the Python Software Foundation and open source security
Data breach ticker
- Personal information of 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol agents leaked online
- BreachForums hacking forum database leaked, exposing 324,000 accounts
- Grubhub confirms hackers stole data in recent security breach
AI
AI is not slowing down
At least according to TSMC. They see a lot of demand for bleeding edge chips.
TSMC sees no signs of the AI boom slowing for at least two or three years
Grok
I mentioned the Grok "feature" to undress people already in the last two weeks (see Weeknotes 2026.02 and Weeknotes 2026.01). It seems like there is a little more progress.
- Elon Musk’s X will block Grok AI tool from creating sexualised images in places where it is illegal
- First US state takes action against xAI and Grok over sexualized AI images
Around the world
jQuery 4.0.0
20 years after the first release of jQuery, the team has released version 4.0.0. The dinosaur of the JavaScript libraries is still alive and one of the most popular libraries.
Ariane 6
There are plans to retrofit Ariane 6 as a rocket. The plan is to develop a reusable launcher.
ESA considers righting the wrongs of Ariane 6 by turning it into a Franken-rocket
Final Countdown
Launched in 1990 the Hubble Telescope could reenter Earth’s atmosphere as soon as 2029. According to the newest estimations. Hubble is responsible for some of the most impressive images of the universe.
Hubble Telescope’s Final Countdown: Could It Disappear Sooner Than Expected?