SRE and Justice

;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution

For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.

Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.

As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.

Not yet at its midpoint, 2020 is already an unforgettable year. This article will appear in the fall edition of ;login: but was drafted in June, three weeks after the tragic death of George Floyd. The Black Lives Matter movement is at the forefront of current events, eclipsing even the ongoing pandemic. By the time you read this, the news cycle may have changed again (to what is anyone’s guess), but right now, Black Lives Matter is at the top of everyone’s mind, including mine. I sat down to write this column with the intention of drawing out often overlooked nuances of health-checking in distributed systems, but that will have to wait until a later column. There are more pressing matters at hand.

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