Our great sponsors
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govuk-puppet
Discontinued Decommissioned: Puppet manifests that used to provision the legacy GOV.UK stack.
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libcurl
A command line tool and library for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTMPS, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET, TFTP, WS and WSS. libcurl offers a myriad of powerful features
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WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
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The Internet's phone book is called the Domain Name System, or "DNS". When you visit "www.reddit.com", when your email program fetches email from "mail.hotmail.com" or your phone connects to "play.google.com" to install an app, these names are translated into their numerical addresses ("IP address") using DNS. Between your device, your service provider, and the rest of the Internet, the route from you to this IP address is figured out and then you can access the service. We can't be expected to remember 2a04:4e42:600::144, but www.gov.uk, sure thing.
Another example is curl. curl fetches or sends information from or to another computer. Seems like a small deal. Until you browse this tiny sample of who uses it. Everything from TVs, cars, nuclear fusion experiments, Playstations, mobile phone infrastructure, Microsoft Windows, printers, Spotify, Siemens telecommunications, digital photo frames and...NASA. curl is free software.
It's a fascinating example how a large, decentralised, federated network that isn't owned or overseen by any central authority can work, can work really well, without something like a government being in charge of it. It's why services like facebook, Google and reddit are fragile, why we can be victims of their whims and controversies. They're centralised and run to make money, and once you've locked yourself into their garden they can mistreat with you with impunity. But say, email? You can use any email provider to email any other person, because it's federated. I'm way off piste now but if you're interested in such a service for social media, Mastodon is a great example of a microblogging service (a bit like twitter) that is federated, it's part of the wider Fediverse.