The Iron Sysadmin

This week on Hot Takes and Cold Storage: AI policy wars, a legislative win with an asterisk, and a supply chain security milestone that deserves more attention than it’s getting. 🔥 HOT TAKES California and Colorado carve Linux out of age verification laws, but California’s bill simultaneously expands age-gating to the open web. The EFF isn’t happy. Flatpak’s next architecture may require systemd,...

Welcome back to Hot Takes and Cold Storage! After a brief hiatus around Red Hat Summit season, Nate is back with a packed episode. Hot Takes: Microsoft quietly added Copilot as a co-author to VS Code git commits — even with AI tools disabled. They reversed it after developer backlash, but it’s another reason to consider VSCodium. The Dutch government has launched its own self-hosted Forgejo instan...

Stop letting tech giants trample your privacy. In this week’s recap, we’re diving into the latest controversy surrounding Discord user privacy and their new “Teen by Default” age verification system which might already be shadow-surveilling you via AI. We also have some positive news: Mastodon is finally fixing its onboarding friction to help decentralized social media go mainstream, and ASUS is l...

3D Printer DRM: Washington State Proposal The Issue: A proposed bill in Washington State would require 3D printer manufacturers to include firmware that identifies and blocks the printing of firearm parts. The Penalty: Violations could carry up to five years in prison and a $15,000 fine. The Concern: While the “spirit” is to prevent unregistered firearms, Nate points out this is already illegal. T...

Is 2026 the year of the Linux desktop? Join Nate, the Iron Sysadmin, as we break down ZDNet’s 2026 predictions, the rise of immutable Linux distributions like RHEL, and why users are ditching Windows. In this week’s news recap, we explore the evolving landscape of open-source software and digital freedom. We discuss the growing “Rust-in-the-kernel” movement, the reality of immutable operating syst...

This week on the Open Source News Recap, we dive into a major conflict at the heart of the open-source community: FFmpeg vs. Google over AI-generated bug reports. What responsibility do billion-dollar tech companies have to community-maintained projects like FFmpeg? Plus, we cover significant announcements from the enterprise Linux space, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10.1 and 9.7 rele...

In this week’s Iron Sysadmin Open Source News Recap, Nate breaks down the biggest tech stories, including the controversial arrival of Quote Posts in Mastodon 4.5, now with anti-harassment controls. We analyze why Linux gaming is surging on Steam, recently surpassing MacOS. Plus, we cover Nvidia’s move into open-source drivers with the new Nova project for their next-gen accelerators , and dive in...

Join Nate for this week’s open-source news recap, covering a major milestone in Linux gaming viability, a significant shift in the Ubuntu display server, and an update on a fan-favorite Netflix show. The episode also reminds listeners about the upcoming DevCon 610 pub crawl and highlights a funding initiative supporting the open and free internet. Intro & DefCon 610 Announcement Reminder to ma...

Link for the DEF CON 610 Hacker Pubcrawl: https://www.meetup.com/defcon610/events/311572906 On to the news: We can’t not talk about AWS. https://www.techpolicy.press/amazon-cloud-outage-reveals-democratic-deficit-in-relying-on-big-tech/ Technical details: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2025/10/23/aws-outage-new-analysis-explains-what-went-wrong-and-why/ An issue with Dynamo-db caused...

It’s END OF 10 week (let’s talk about that) F-Droid facing developer identification issues after google’s software verification announcement. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/f-droid-project-threatened-by-googles-new-dev-registration-rules/ More NPM supply chain attacks, this time from North Korea https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/north-korean-hackers-target-crypto-221509651.html D...