Considering that we've moved from wire wrapping to being able to design and order multi-layer circuit boards, and we've gone from 74 series and basic PALs to CPLDs and FPGAs that regular people can program, I don't think what tinkerers can do will hit any barriers any time soon.
The ability to recreate classic computing is wonderful, both in preservation of history and in making things available to people who hadn't even been born when these machines were new :)
I really wish Troy would've put a little more thought in to this before deciding to host using a for-profit corporation based in the US that wants to be a monopoly.
Will Cloudflare sell data to US TLA agencies? Probably.
I've seen situations like these before. This is why off-site backups are so very important. I've also been in the same position of providing data from a backup that someone was intentionally trying to destroy to escape responsibility.
This story even hints at a common theme that happens even when people aren't trying to destroy data - that some people will tear down whatever they inherit, then blame their predecessors for the problems that result.
But if you don’t blame them it can also backfire. I inherited a bad codebase once and tried my best to improve it. But there was only so much time. When I left the guy after me blamed me for the still bad parts immediately.
It's a proud tradition, to gasp silently, mutter in anger as you run git blame, and only discover that you're the person who wrote the code about 20% of the time.
The solution is simple: go back in time and get legislation passed to mandate the release of source code for devices that the original manufacturer no longer intends to support.
That might be imposssible right now, and not just because of the time travel thing. While it's a good idea, and while people are working to get legislation passed that would prevent the forced obsolescence of products by companies requiring, then no longer supporting, public servers, for instance, companies would fight to the death any requirement to make their source available.
But the problem isn't only theirs - open source projects that are steered by corporations often lack the willingness to expend some work now in order to save work decades from now.
For instance, NetBSD moved to 64 bit time on all platforms using clever versioning to maintain compatibility with 32 bit timestamps. They did this on 32 bit architectures, too, back in 2012. [0], [1]
Linux, on the other hand, has no shortage of people who either want to drop 32 bit support entirely or who think that the work to modernize 32 bit support isn't worthwhile (because, in part, they've forgotten that embedded Linux is a thing, and they also don't care about people who can't afford modern hardware). The 64 bit time transition for 32 bit platforms has taken ages, but is thankfully finally underway. [2]
There's practically no hope for corporations. If they aren't given stuff that's already fixed (that is, if the fix isn't already baked in to the Linux they choose to use), they're certainly not going to "invest" resources in fixing things from the past. Heck - it took Google more than a week to fix issues with Chromecasts that came from bad planning. [3]
What can we do? Most people aren't going to decide on a purchase based on whether their product might stop working in 2038 unless we make it very easy for them. We should test more things and point out when products will fail. Of course, nobody is going to care if their wifi device bought in 2025 won't run in 2038, but if someone told you that a $50,000 car's infotainment system will stop working, they might care.
Compiling rust on a 32 bit system is a several year old issue. Enough of us made a fuss about it that the rust build system was fixed enough that this became possible again.
If rust doesn't compile on an i386 system with 4 gigs of memory, then that's very odd. I don't know much about rust, but I was still able to get it to compile for earmv6hf on a Raspberry Pi 3 with 1 gig of RAM. Perhaps the OpenBSD people need to try some of the things we've already figured out.
How does this work? Certain shitty email providers, like Gmail, will consider a forwarding email server the source of spam when their spam filter doesn't like what's forwarded.
I used to belong to Reddit's r/Diesel subreddit. I own a 40+ year old car with a small Diesel engine, and I hoped to trade advice, parts sources, tips, and so on.
A good number of the posts are about people squalking about "freedom" to "delete" the emissions systems, about how they have a "right" to pollute as much as they want, and some of them even think rolling coal is cool and is OK to do.
I personally take good care of my engine, and in spite of the fact that it predates most emissions solutions by decades, it's well tuned enough that I can't see smoke out the back even if I floor it and wind up the engine. After all, a properly tuned engine is one that properly burns all the fuel you put in to it.
So I left that subreddit, and I'm glad for it. That stupid worldview where we are intentionally ignorant of our impact on the rest of the world is uniquely ugly.
Now on to motorcycles: all those motorcycles with no mufflers or with mufflers that don't do much to quiet their engines piss me off. People claim the noise makes them "safe", but that fails to address the fact that if there were lots of motorcycles on the road and all of them were super noisy, the noisyness would lose all value. In other words, it's a solution that can only help a small number of people to the detriment of everyone else, and can't be applied fairly if more people did it. It's selfish.
Also, gasoline engines run better and burn fuel better with a proper amount of backpressure. All those motorcycles that idle like shit are wasting fuel and polluting the air, even if they don't put out black smoke like deleted Diesels do.
It all sucks. I just wish people would be a little less selfish and less self centered.
The ability to recreate classic computing is wonderful, both in preservation of history and in making things available to people who hadn't even been born when these machines were new :)