Six people, one operating system, and a great many opinions about OS design.
The Times of ferdiOS covers the ferdiOS operating system: its releases, its package management, its kernel, and the people who spend their evenings arguing about all three on mailing lists.
We publish when there is something to publish. There is no schedule and no wire service. Everything here is written by people who use the system they are writing about.
We correct errors in place and note the correction at the foot of the article. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it.
Magically appears whenever someone mentions “Qt”
Claims to have made ferdiOS during his interview, and turned the technical
round into a 30-minute motivational speech about
“time-to-market,” “move fast and break things,”, and “shareholder value”. We do
not understand what Sander means with “shareholder value” - we are a news publication
about a mobile Linux operating system, but nonetheless we got very motivated indeed,
and hired him as Editor-in-Chief.
Sander is allergic to Code-of-Conduct's, steering committees, and similar kinds
of seemingly irrelevant activities, and aims to protect this publication from such
nonsense.
Sander believes consumers ought to properly own their hardware, and dislikes
the practice of artificially making systems slower through software updates.
Sander believes the user should always be able to customize the OS
to their liking, and run whatever software they please.
Dismissed in May 2019 after setting the conference room on fire, somehow still around
Has been “temporarily” running the newspaper for seven years. Reads every article, changes three words, then claims he has substantially improved it. Believes every technology story should answer one question: “But does it actually fucking work?”
Will time your boot sequence whether you asked her to or not
Reviews nothing she has not first benchmarked. Arrives at every vendor briefing with a
stopwatch, a flame graph and the previous release still open in another tab, and asks the
one question nobody prepared a slide for: “what did it cost us?” Has a standing rule that
any feature which adds more than 40ms to cold start must justify itself in writing.
Believes most of what the industry calls innovation is a cache being moved somewhere else,
and that most of what it calls a rewrite is a cache being invalidated badly. Keeps a wall
chart of ferdiOS boot times going back to 1.2, annotated in three colours, and treats any
upward slope as a personal insult that will be answered in print.
Warm, fast, and slightly terrifying. Journalists ask her to read their drafts because she
returns them in under an hour; she maintains this is only because she never reads the same
paragraph twice.
Keeper of the spreadsheet
Specialises in companies that insist they have “nothing to hide.” This is generally followed by 47 emails from their lawyers. Maintains a spreadsheet called Things People Definitely Didn’t Want Us To Find.
Hunts for 0x41414141
Came to journalism the long way round: a decade of exploit development, a shelf of CTF
trophies, and one conference talk that got a vendor's lawyers on the phone before the Q&A
had finished. Reads firmware for pleasure. Reads press releases for the parts that were
removed.
Her review process is simply attacking the thing. If a device ships with a debug UART, she
will find it; if it ships with a hardcoded key, she will publish the model number and the
byte offset. Has a strict ninety-day disclosure policy and has never once been talked out
of the ninetieth day. Vendors who answer honestly get a fair hearing and a coordinated
timeline. Vendors who send a letter instead get the letter printed next to the bug.
Keeps a burner phone per manufacturer, tapes over other people's cameras uninvited, and
insists the most dangerous words in security are “nobody would bother.” Somebody always
bothers.
On the frontlines of VIM vs Emacs, tabs vs spaces, and KDE vs GNOME
Reviews hardware, software and occasionally the editorial team’s life choices. His professional methodology is simple: if a product requires a 14-step setup process, he considers setting it up an act of personal betrayal. Known for writing reviews that manufacturers describe as “unfair,” which is usually a good sign.
Corrections, tips and legal threats are all read by the same person, usually at the same time of night.