Data, Tor, Matrix, Project Management, Alpha, eIDAS, Firefox

1. Just saying this: I don't have any secrets or really valuable data, which someone would actually really want. If you for some strange reason seem think so, you've been misdirected and your intelligence is bad. My version of the the classic saying is: "The best way to protect big secrets is not to have any". And the original classic version is: "If You Have Something You Don't Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Doing It". - Well, I don't. So that's it.

2. Tor Congestion Control (@ forum.torproject.net) - Most interesting: Tor proposal 324 (@ gitlab.torporject.org) describing the congestion control algorithm options. That's pretty familiar stuff for me. Personally I found out the graphs more interesting where it was made clear that the network utilization for the Tor project relays is around 50% now. So there's lots of unused capacity on the network already. 600 Gbit/s capacity, but only around around 300 Gbit/s is being used. #tor-relay operators channel.

3. Uh, withdraw my support for a few open source projects for undisclosed reasons. Let's say that the risk / benefit ratio was extremely poor which just means that it was wiser to drop it. Nothing to gain, lot to lose. No thanks.

4. Updated my true random shared secret generator sheet layout to provide better readability printouts. The earlier version was purely for copy paste use. But some people prefer to keep keys on paper only. Now it produces one page with 6 columns of 10 case sensitive alpha-numeric TRNG strings on 50 rows. Perfect layout for printing on one page. Meant for long term symmetric backup keys for identification or what so ever where having shared key material in advance is important, or something like that.

5. Matrix / Element (@ Wikipedia) once again, daily software quality. One message is being sent forever. It's not in error state, and it's not going anywhere. And there's no resend button, because it's persistently stuck without error. So classic. Also the program comes increasingly slow, unless the caches are cleared all the time. Also often if there would be resend button, it usually doesn't work out. Nor you can recover the message at that point anymore. Only option is to delete the message(s) which are stuck.

6. Classic project management, I really don't know if I should laugh or cry. When resources are desperately needed on key tasks, customers project management wants to divert the resources to non-essential blah blah meetings, which do not actually help at all progressing the things. I haven't ever understood why people want to do that. I guess it's text book example of perfect management failure. Usually this happens when situation is already very bad due to management failure, and just gets worse due this silly approach. It's bit like adding lots of random resources to a very complex project. Wishfully thinking that it would quickly help. No, it actually makes things much worse for quite a while.

7. Haha, found some photos and documents on the internet, where the images had been redacted using alpha channel. Classic failure, just like drawing a box over text document in office or PDF file. So much fun!

8. Recommended reading: Passkeys part 1 (@ hanko.io) and part 2 (@ hanko.io). Passkeys are the future of secure authentication. I'm really hoping for as wide adoption as possible.

9. Curious to see, when someone starts to offer WebAuthn (@ Wikipedia), OAuth (@ Wikipedia), eIDAS (@ Wikipedia) verified logins for external sites. I know it splits opinions very strongly. But for NORMAL users, it would be great. Of course high security nerds would tear their pants for loss of pseudonymity and need to trust the government official identity system. But for everyone else, it would be great.

10. Finally WebAuthn is working with Firefox on Android. I've been waiting this for quite a while. But it's finally reality. Awesome! But it seems to be still broken on Linux Desktop Firefox.

11. Firefox on Android still messes up tab content and URL content. In some cases that could have serious security implications, even if it usually is immediately obvious. So much fail.

12. As totally separate side remark added today. I do approve the latest Google Sites changes. Insane lag is gone, and constant failures saving changes are also gone. Generally the editor seems to be working a lot faster. Maybe they found someone else, than an intern whom said that they know how to create the intterwebs.  - Yet the real irony is that while writing exactly this paragraph, the saving feature failed again, starting to show Reconnecting... - At least this time it didn't show the final error and lose changes. But save started to work after a long wait automatically. That's better than before.

2023-07-09