webpackage VS multipass

Good stuff. Still, drives me a bit nuts that we package/HTTP Signed Exchanges, Message Signatures, and web archiving all have very similar but different versions of the same thing.

Webpackage has a lot of stuff that seems super cool to me. Alas it seemed mainly to be a small handful of engineers & most seemed to have moved on from the effort. https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/issues/713

Given the frosty response in the comments they got I guess I'm not shocked, but in general it feels like web standards could use better long term care, that they often don't get, alas.

Some of the navigating into a bundle stuff is indeed not presently happening.

But there's a bunch of specs for signed exchanges & subresources that underpin & allow resource exchange, and which do have recent drafts. Webpackage seems to be doing OK ish. But yeah we bundles specifically do seem to be all expired.

https://github.com/WICG/webpackage#specifications

Cool idea, but what I'm really hoping is that webpackage gets properly developed and integrated with browsers eventually. Unfortunately it probably won't happen, a tiny chunk of Google showed interest but that's about it.

With certificate transparency, I dont think SXG's expiration s a real barrier to adoption. The hardnosed shitty browser attitude aroumd right now: it will collapse in the face of onvious utility, other people will implememt more aspirational & liberal systems. This stance is untennable im the face of the obvious huge value of being able to lool at old signed content, particularly when coupled with certificate transparency systems. This conservative standard will is just a minimal & onvious agreeable starting place, but adoption will give way to expansion, given the immense user value of signed content. I say this as a core core protester against these pathetic loserly expiration timeouts[1].

I get maybe not putting all your chips in SXG basket. I disagree with a bunch of the protest: this seems like a sensible, basic, obvious layered enhancement to the existimg web. Safari & Mozia are as is the modd today being terrible shits as usual, the regressives.

Contrasting ADX versus SXG just feels so wild, because SXG is a small refinememt to a vast world spanning & complete ecosystem of technology that has already taken over the planet. And ADX is an standalone completely isolated alternate world, it's own reality. This tension, whether we need a baseline which is 100% new & novel & redefines the entire problem space on it's own terms, completely from scratch, or whether we can hack & improve & enhance what we have: I dont feel like there's any camp at all left to defend improvememt.

Tear it all down, start over... it's the mode. I agree, this debate needs more than HM comments. But this tension & conflict, this view of the world & how it evolves or revolts: it's been trying to make revutions & insist no bounds, nothing today can possibly be good enough for tomorrow. And two plus decades latter, it's made such tiny impact, is so niche.

I accept your snub, getting told im exasperated, but it's for a real reason, it's because these decades have failed to deliver & so few have willingly tried improving what is (Safari & Mozia being a quite vocal modern anchor keeling things in place, a modern astrpturfing shouting class against trying anything, especially). This effort does have the social capital to perhaps emerge & birth something new, but we could also just improve & greatly fix everything that ready is. With minor, layered, small, principled enhancements.

[1] https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/issues/597

signed web bundles [1] let you package up a page as a fixed resource, distributed with a signature to verify that the content of that page is what the author intended it to be, so a site like twitter that is embedding it can be sure that what they're embedding is always the original resource.

however, this is AMP, and so everybody hates it.

[1] https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/blob/main/explainers/sign...

A phyrric victory for a Web that is basically ChromeOS.

Ever heard of Web Bundles?

https://web.dev/web-bundles/

https://github.com/WICG/webpackage

I think advertising is positive [1] and the role of ads in funding freely-available sites is very important. My current work is primarily on how browsers can allow more private and secure advertising [2][3][4] which I think most people will agree is valuable even if they are less in favor of advertising in general.

At a lower level, I do this job because I'm paid, which allows me to donate. [5] But I wouldn't do this work if I thought it was harmful; there are lots of different kinds of jobs I could take.

[1] https://www.jefftk.com/p/effect-of-advertising

[2] https://github.com/google/fledge-shim

[3] https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/issues/161

[4] https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/issues/624

[5] https://www.jefftk.com/donations

data urls encode things in base64 format so bloat up the file. Also the user agent can't just seek over them, requiring it to parse the entire included base64 content. There are better ways, but sadly nothing cross platform:

* https://github.com/WICG/webpackage

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webarchive

Install Multipass from https://multipass.run

Multipass orchestrates virtual Ubuntu instances

Multipass I love Multipass for quick Ubuntu instances spun up for testing or as a playground. Wish I would have known and used of it sooner.

If you just need Ubuntu then you can try "Multipass" from Canonical (https://multipass.run/). Works quite well on my M2 Air. I haven't tried using Linux GUI with it though as I need only terminal based VMs.

Multipass is pretty clutch for trivial VMs on MacOs for sure. I use it for a bunch of ssh jump boxes running vpns to different sites. The macOS build does not support custom images (lest not without [some truly insane hacks](https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1260#issuecomm...) , which doesn’t really matter for what I use it for but it is kind of a bummer. If you need something with a little more grunt but don’t want to go full blown with writing your own QEMU tooling or fussing with something like UTM or Parallels, [quickemu](https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu) is a really nice qemu wrapper with sane defaults that can expose a whole lot of power if you need it.

I would be cautious or even distrustful of using anything from Oracle. VirtualBox components come under three different licenses - GPLv2, personal use & evaluation license, and an enterprise license. Their VirtualBox license FAQ [1] gives them enough leeway to change future licenses at will. If an exploit is discovered in your old VirtualBox and they've changed the license, you're out of luck.

We've moved our development to KVM and Virtual Machine Manager on Linux [3] and UTM on Mac [4]. There are other options to run your VM, such as Multipass [5] or VirtualBuddy [6].

On a digressive topic - it was fun migrating our legacy application server stack from Oracle Java (old & poorly considered decision) to OpenJDK, thanks to their license [2].

[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ

[2] https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/jdk-faqs.htm...

[3] https://ubuntu.com/blog/kvm-hyphervisor

[4] https://mac.getutm.app/

[5] https://multipass.run/

[6] https://github.com/insidegui/VirtualBuddy

How does it compare to https://multipass.run/?

If you have a reasonably beefy computer, you can always try setting up Multipass and set up 2-3 nodes for a k8s cluster, it's how I'm doing my own certification training. I do have a k3s Raspberry Pi cluster, but with Pi prices being what they are still it'd almost be cheaper to do a cloud setup. ☹️