+ Dutch gov builds its own NixOS desktop
- Firebase SDK crashes iPhone apps
- London: 500k faces, 1 alert, wrongYou'd think the thing that can shut down a government's office is a hacker. The Dutch government decided it's a sanctions list in Washington, so it's building its own Linux desktop to get off Microsoft. And one more thing. Their own code has a comment in it that made me laugh out loud, and I'll get to it at the end. Three stories today, and the big one starts in The Hague. In February last year, the US sanctioned the International Criminal Court and its chief prosecutor, and the order threatens any company that gives him technological support.
In May, the Associated Press reported that Microsoft cancelled the prosecutor's email address, citing court staff, and that he moved to Proton Mail in Switzerland. Microsoft didn't answer AP's request for comment. Microsoft tells it differently. Its president, Brad Smith, told reporters that at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the court. So one side says the mailbox vanished. The other says the service never stopped. And the Dutch government, which hosts the court, drew its own conclusion. The off switch exists, and it sits in another country. The Dutch answer is called Dawo, short for a Dutch phrase meaning digitally autonomous workplace for government. It covers the operating system, the office apps and the cloud behind them. In July it became an official order, three big government IT shops are building it, and eight municipalities are testing it right now.
The pilots run on old laptops the government had already written off, the kind Windows 11 refuses to install on. One core developer built a point-and-click admin panel so Windows admins can come along, while admitting he's not a GUI guy. Another told Tweakers, we're not hardliners. So why NixOS? They tried open Suse first, then Fedora, and dropped both over who owns them. Suse has changed hands before and could be sold again, and Fedora belongs to Red Hat, which belongs to IBM. NixOS has no company behind it, and it started as a PhD project at Utrecht University, which is about as Dutch as software gets. Here's the trick, the way I'd explain it at a bar. On a normal system, installs write into shared folders, so two laptops that start identical drift apart by Friday. On NixOS every package gets its own folder, named after a hash of everything that built it, and nobody can edit it afterwards. The whole machine is a text file. Copy the file, and you've copied the laptop.
The developers say eighty to ninety percent of that code carries over from one deployment to the next, and for a government that's the whole business case. On Hacker News the first thread passed a thousand points, and the cynics showed up on time. One predicts that after the next election, Microsoft promises a local headquarters. Then, he says, the Dutch roll back to Windows at twice the price, which is exactly what happened in Munich. Munich did go back, in twenty twenty, after years on Linux. This time the Dutch have company. Germany's Schleswig-Holstein moved forty thousand accounts off Microsoft last year, and the court at the center of all this is moving to openDesk, a German open-source office suite. The developers hope for version one next year, and Victor Gevers told Tweakers that twenty twenty-seven will be the year of Linux on the desktop, a prophecy that has come true every single year, next year. Speaking of switches someone else controls. On Monday evening, California time, Google's Firebase served a bad config from its own servers. iPhone apps using its analytics started crashing within a second of launch, including builds nobody had touched. Gergely Orosz called it amateur. Google had a rollback going within two hours and apologized. And as one Hacker News commenter put it, pinning versions doesn't save you when the config comes from their server.
And in London, a six-month trial of live facial recognition at railway stations scanned more than half a million faces. It cost over three hundred twenty thousand pounds and produced one alert, which was the wrong person, and no arrests, according to documents shared with the Guardian. Police have already extended it to the Underground. Half a million faces, zero for one. Now, that comment I promised. The Dutch escape from Microsoft is a public repo, and the top of its main build file says every input is currently fetched from github dot com. GitHub belongs to Microsoft. To be fair, the same comment sets a goal of zero foreign-hosted dependencies, mirrored onto the government's own code server. So the plan to leave Microsoft still downloads itself from Microsoft, and they wrote that down in public, which is more honesty than most roadmaps.
Verdict: SHIP IT — one public file per laptop; now mirror off GitHub
Sources
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/the-netherlands-is-rolling-alternative-nixos-based-software-ecosystem-after-u-s-sanctions-on-icc-took-microsoft-off-the-table-trial-programs-running-now-first-release-expected-at-end-of-2027
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49891550
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49841563
https://www.dawo.community/en/
https://tweakers.net/reviews/15334/nederland-maakt-soeverein-alternatief-voor-windows-en-office-op-basis-van-linux.html
https://itsfoss.com/news/netherlands-dawo-initiative/
https://codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Core
https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS
https://github.com/DAWO-community/DAWO-Core
https://codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Core/src/branch/main/flake.nix
https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/
https://codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Core/src/branch/main/modules/programs/chromium.nix
https://codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Core/src/branch/main/modules/apps/sets.nix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_(package_manager)
https://nixos.org/~eelco/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NixOS
https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/imposing-sanctions-on-the-international-criminal-court/
https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/10/31/international-criminal-court-dumps-microsoft-office/680564
https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/
https://github.com/firebase/firebase-ios-sdk/issues/16728
https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/2104825886922911981
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49889934
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/29/trial-live-facial-recognition-cameras-london-stations-false-positive
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49891480
And that's the diff for today. I'm Niko from Axrisi. Merge responsibly.
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