Weeknotes 2026.34

This week we had a kind of field trip with our summer intern. He wanted to see one of our other offices and wanted to enjoy the view.

At work, I was finally able to upgrade our deployment pipelines to use mTLS for getting secrets into the container workloads.

Yesterday was the first of four games between the Springboks and the All Blacks. It was an intense match, with a win for the All Blacks. In 90 seconds the Springboks gave the game away with two yellow cards.

Credit to Oracle

According to Michael Stonebraker, one of the reasons Postgres got so popular is the lack of governance and investment by Oracle in MySQL. On the other side, big vendors like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are all offering databases that are Postgres wire-format compatible. And Postgres is an extraordinary example of open-source software.

Postgres pioneer credits Oracle with helping his database take over the world

Amazon

A hidden airtag solved a mystery. Rare books are used to train AI models, and afterward they are trashed.

Hidden Airtag reveals Amazon is trashing rare books to train AI

Open-weights models

Qwen has become the world’s most downloaded open model with over 3 billion downloads. And Google has announced that Gemma has passed a billion downloads.

• Qwen is the world’s most downloaded open model, by a smaller margin than Alibaba says
• Google says Gemma has passed a billion downloads

Data breach ticker

• Poland probes MyDr healthcare software breach potentially affecting 19 million people
• Nearly 750k had financial info, SSNs leaked in South Carolina loan company breach
• Lincoln, Maine, town office closes after cybersecurity incident encrypts network files
• Hacker leaks 40GB of alleged UK National Grid infrastructure data
• Hacker claims 3.6 million Azure account records stolen from major companies
• Latvian officials resign after cyberattack exposes data on 1.2 million people
• Electronic health record company CareCloud says 3.7 million people affected by breach
• Berlin cuts two state ministries off government network after security breach
• Pokémon Center data breach exposes customer info, cancels some orders
• French tax authority says break-in exposed data of 600K, including some private messages
• SickKids data breach exposes employee and job applicant info
• Hundreds of leaked AWS keys give full control over corporate accounts
• U.S. Bank says breach claims related to fourth-party incident