Recent Feature Articles

Oct 2026

The Outage

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At my employer, we use a service called Coveralls, which is a code coverage reporting tool that hooks into your CI pipeline. It takes your lcov reports and gives you some insights, and also makes it easy to cause the CI pipeline to fail if newly added code doesn't have reasonable coverage.

I have no strong feelings about the tool, but on February 24th, our CI jobs started failing, and our CI step that talked to Coveralls was the culprit. Coveralls had gone down. That happened to us, and a lot of other people. It was a widespread outage impacting anybody who used their service.

11 comments - Last comment @ 2026-10-21

A Vat of Terrible Experiences

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Taxes are a royal pain for everyone. Amazon has found a unique way to make them even worse, as Kris W. attests:

I recently bought a €9.61 kitchen knife on Amazon Spain. My card was charged €7.94 instead. After some investigation, I discovered that Amazon had applied an old VAT registration number I'd added to my personal account years ago, and had classified my purchase as a VAT-exempt intra-EU business transaction. The invoice even contained my business address from 2022, which no longer appeared anywhere in my account settings. I just wanted to remove the VAT number so I could go back to buying kitchen utensils without accidentally generating international tax paperwork.

26 comments - Last comment @ 03:12

The Frist Line of Defense

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We don't cover a lot of security issues here, simply because they're not usually funny. But sometimes, they are. So here's a quick hit about some recent ones.

We start with a very bad month for the Danish social security system, the Central Register of Persons (CPR). Last week, they detected a breach which exposed the personal details of 8.8m people. Per the Register article, a cybersecurity specialist correctly pointed out that treating your ID number as if it were a secret was a terrible idea in the first place, but unfortunately, so many systems have grown up around the idea that full knowledge of your state issued ID number as proof of identity, that the security expert is screaming into the wind. They're right, but it's going to take a lot to change.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2026-10-21

Racing Trains

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Robert G sends us a WTF from the outside, but I think we can come up with some hypotheses about what actually happened.

Robert was traveling by train. For complicated train reasons, the car he was seated on was not actually scheduled to continue with the train he was booked to ride, the replacement car missed its scheduled arrival, and the result was that Robert was left at a station needing to rebook his travel.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2026-10-16
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