The IT Blog

Firefox vs Vivaldi – A Matter of Engines, Not Just Geography

The world is complicated. I like the #DID campaign – regaining your digital independence step by step. Like changing from X to Mastodon or from Chrome to another browser. For me, the next logical step was reconsidering my browser choice.

Firefox was the first choice, but then I wondered: why not Vivaldi? A Norwegian developed browser – supporting a european company. A post on Mastodon quickly shifted to a more fundamental aspect:

Vivaldi is built on Chromium, which is dominated by Google.
Firefox, while developed by the U.S.-based Mozilla Foundation, maintains its own browser engine – one of the last alternatives to Chromium’s dominance.

So, what matters more? Supporting a European company or preserving engine diversity? It’s not just about where the browser is developed, but also how diverse the browser landscape can remain …

(Maybe, if I find a way to sync the bookmarks, I could just use both?)

21. January 2026

How to migrate Gmail to another Provider without Breaking the Mail History

This is a practical how-to on moving email from Gmail to another provider.

The main challenge is Gmail’s label system: one email can have multiple labels and all mails also appear in “All Mail”. Most other providers use folders instead, where an email can only exist in one place. If you migrate without taking this into account, you will most likely end up with duplicated mails or a messy folder structure.

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Fediverse reactions

15. January 2026

How a User Helped Fixing 4 Bugs with AI (and No Expertise)

I see a lot of AI skepticism in the dev community — and some of it is fair (okay, maybe “a lot”). Vague bug reports, monster commits, untested code … We’ve proably read it all, and maybe even seen it all.

Even Mitchell Hashimoto whose post appeared yesterday in my timeline writes “Slop drives me crazy and it feels like 95+% of bug reports”. But … he continues with an impressive story: A Ghostty user with no Zig or macOS experience took crash logs, fed them through AI, reached out on Discord, explained what was done. And the result:

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Fediverse reactions

13. January 2026

Skipping AI is not going to help you or your career

I just saw a post on Simon Willison’s blog where he linked to “Don’t fall into the anti-AI hype”. And I pretty much agree on what antirez writes there:

Whatever you believe about what the Right Thing should be, you can't control it by refusing what is happening right now. Skipping AI is not going to help you or your career.

Don’t fall into the anti-AI hype – <antirez>

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12. January 2026

AI Won’t Fix Bad Software Teams

What do you do an Saturday when you don’t feel well to go out for some activities? Right! Let’s read about Software Engineering and AI!

Yesterday I read the complete series of the 22 blog posts listet on The AI-Ready Software Developer – Index – Codemanship’s Blog.

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Fediverse reactions

11. January 2026

The Fear of DevOPs

I just read Walking Skeletons, Delivery Pipelines & DevOps Drills and came to the paragraph about “throwing s.th over the wall:

DevOps – the marriage of software development and operations – means that the team writing the solution code also handles these matters. We don’t throw it over the wall to a separate “DevOps” team.

In the past years I’ve been driving the DevOPS culture and work style. And I just had to smile when I read the article because I can so feel it!

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Fediverse reactions

10. January 2026

Spec-first Agentic Development is not Vibe Coding

Not even two weeks ago I wrote about “Reproducable Vibecoding” and that the specification as a permanent context to document all decisions is important.

I just stumbled across the article “Notes on Six Months of AI-Enabled Building” by Isaac Flath. There are a couple of good quotes in there, especially in the chapters “Your Thinking Style Determines Your Success“

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Fediverse reactions

9. January 2026

How Deepfakes and AI-Slop Undermine Democracy

I am still watching the recordings of talks given on the #39C3 Chaos Communications Congress (see the talks here). Katharina Nocun gave a talk titled Doomsday-Porn, Schäferhunde und die „niedliche Abschiebung“ von nebenan where she shows a really disturbing trend: AI-generated content is becoming a cornerstone of authoritarian and far-right communication strategies.

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Fediverse reactions

2. January 2026

Happy New Year!

I want to wish all of you a Happy 2026! I thought about writing a recap of 2025 but … naah :-D There are so many ideas waiting.

I wish you all the best.

1. January 2026

The Malicious (Coding) Agent …

I just watched Agentic ProbLLMs: Exploiting AI Computer-Use and Coding Agents from Johann Rehberger on the #39c3. He shows quite impressive how the future threat model looks like, the more AI Agents are deployed.

In his talk he demoes a couple of attacks that were applied by using agents. I don’t want to summarize the talk here (you might want to read the heise online article instead), but it is ways beyond “simple prompt injection”!

But my most “aha”-moment was the statement to treat an Agent as a Malicous Internal. Which is probably the worst scenario you want to deal with. Usually you would like to trust your co-workers and not treat them as if they could stab you in the back while smilig at you.

Anyways, I’m pretty sure the technology will evolve into more secure ways. But it will also stay as a new way of attack in the future. I’d recommend checking it out!

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-agentic-probllms-exploiting-ai-computer-use-and-coding-agents

PS: I’d embed it here, but this obviously requires some CSS / WordPressTheme-magic …