Technology Short Take 196
Welcome to Technology Short Take 196! Just in time for the US Memorial Day holiday, I am back with another list of articles related to various data center technologies like networking, security, operating systems, and applications. You will find articles on VPNs, Linux local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerabilities, browser quirks and workarounds, the death of Terraform (again), and so much more. Enjoy your weekend reading!
Networking
- Andrew Ward shares an Ansible role to block abusive subnets using IPSet.
- From this article on switching to WireGuard from Tailscale, I learned about Headscale (an open source implementation of the Tailscale control plane).
Servers/Hardware
- Doug Dawson looks at some innovations that continue to improve computing power. Doug’s article includes a few items I hadn’t yet heard of.
Security
- Bitwarden confirmed a compromise of its CLI package on NPM.
- First, we had CopyFail. Now we have Dirty Frag and Fragnesia.
- Daniel Stenberg talks about how Mythos found a single vulnerability—yes, just one—in
curl. - I don’t really have words for this…security incident? That doesn’t seem like the correct way to describe such a massive oversight, especially when you realize it happened to a cybersecurity agency. “Oops” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

For years, enterprise cloud networking was built around a simple assumption: pick a primary cloud provider, connect the data center to it, and expand from there.