Bubblewrap, Snowflake, FICIX, Vacuum/Compact,  UTF-8, Quantum ECC

1. Bubblewrapped (@ GitHub) all of my Python services for security reasons on my servers, on top of earlier security measures.

2. Over 50% of Tor bridge (snowflake) traffic is now from Russia. That's really high number compared to from traffic from other countries relative to their population and network user adoption.

3. Watched four hours long lesson about Ukraine situation, Russian tactics and how it's changed cyber security aspects and landscape globally. Sabotaging satcom firmware and so on. Sure it changes things, if basically everyone can expect their systems to be attacked by nation state actor level stuff compared to random script kiddies or crypto miner malware bots. Also fog of war and APTs were important topic. Some key organizations and systems can be sabotaged by insiders and so on.

4. In one cryptography, steganograpy, anonymity, security tinfoil group someone said that NFT captures a painting. I said it doesn't. Then they referenced "Robert Ryman (b. 1930), Bridge". I sadi that that's a perfect example. First of all that can contain steganographic message. Then they were confused, then I said it might contain steganographic message which isn't even recoverable from the photograph. It seems that many people don't fully realize how extremely complex things paintings, especially oil and acryllic are. Photograph of the painting does NOT compare to the original work, which could have almost unlimited number of steganographic factors embedded in it. And I'm now talking only about paintings, when we go to physical objects, the way of embedding information is nearly unlimited. Computers make these things just faster, but in case where it's required, doing these things manually is also totally possible. Especially in situations where comms are strictly monitored, and you've got very limited bandwidth, but might have lots of time on your hands to deal with the situation. Next the question turned to classic questions like how to use steganography, encoding and ciphers, which probably will escape the check by captors, but still be decipherable by the recipient without knowing anything about encoding. Yet there's the benefit that the recipient might be looking fo cipher text and steganography which the captors possibly didn't properly bother to do.

5. FICIX 1 IX is now multi location, available in Espoo & Helsinki. I've seen many larger IXs providing multiple POPs, but now it's available to see that also happening in Helsinki. And in future the might add even more locations. It was clear that FICIX 1 was being "overrun" but the FICIX 2 location, and not all members wanted to connect to FICIX 1 because having connection to FICIX 2 alone was more than good enough.

6. This one goes into the category of urban legends (?). Just got ahem, someone very worried contacting me and complaining about serious data loss when running compact, vacuum, shrink on database. They told they lost N gigabytes of data. I asked any errors during the process? What's lost? N gigabytes !!!! Sigh, really? I thought whole point of that operation is to get rid of partially allocated and or moving empty pages to the end and truncating the db files, defragmenting and or completely restructuring the database. Why would anyone expect that it wouldn't affect the external size of the database file(s). Does that mean you've lost data, even if you can't say what the data loss is? - Phew!

7. How UTF-8 works (@ sethmlarson.dev) - A very nice and quite short post indeed. And of course nothing new. But it's good to know. Hopefully this will end the character set and encoding discussion which is such a huge waste of time, every time. UTF-8 (@ Wikipedia).

8. Breaking 256-bit Elliptic Curve Encryption with a Quantum Computer (@ schneier.com) - This post got a very interesting headline, yet when you read it, tl;dl; is nope, not going to happen at least anytime soon.

9. Something not so different? Reminded myself about PAM Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels ie M+L/2 Ethernet signaling. It's awesome that James Webb Space Telescope now reached mirror alignment milestone and optics is working flawlessly (!) Yay.

2023-06-04