Email, PyInstaller, IM, RD Web, Fosdem, RISC-V, Repudiation, DBA

1. About not recommending email (@ Wikipedia). Someone then asked if: "Will Slack, MS Teams etc. become alternatives to emails?" - My comments:  Those are currently better on deliverability terms. But also these implementations have serious security and identity leak drawbacks and properties. As well as being closed source and managed by a single company. Depending on use case, I wouldn't recommend these either. Also Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal and Discord belongs strongly into the same category.

2. Carefully studied PyInstaller documentation (@ pyinstaller.org). There's now one project which uses it instead of the cx_Freeze (@ pypi.org) which I've blogged so much about. It still seems that the cx_Freeze is broken for Python 3.12 version. Reason? Library mismatches, clearly unfinished work so far.

3. Just confirmed that encryption parameters with Matrix Forward Secrecy (FS) work correctly. You can define how often or after how many messages you want to rekey the chat. - As example, using relaxed settings for rooms, which do not contain critical information. Event type: "m.room.encryption" Content: {"algorithm": "m.megolm.v1.aes-sha2", "rotation_period_ms": 2419200000, "rotation_period_msgs": 1000 }

4. Finished configuration for a friends Remote Desktop (@ Wikipedia) test environment. RD Web + Web Client, allowing using remote desktop with web browser. As alternative to that setup, I also installed Apache Guacamole (@ Wikipedia). Now it's trivial to test both and make selection based on the UX of the projects. Both take some expertise to setup and provide individual set of pros and cons. End result is still the same, users can use any Windows application with a web browser transparently.

5. Watched several FOSDEM'24 videos: Silly Linux Metrics, Passkeys Secure Authentication, Synthetic Aperture RADAR using WiFi, Web Performance at Mozilla and Wikimedia, Confidential Linux VM on Cloud, Thunderbird & Rust, OpenStreetMap, Performance Testing, containerd, embedded security, iputils, soft reboot host keeping containers running, Linux kernel Keystore, Platform Engineering, Performance and Data modeling in PostgreSQL, Regulators are coming, Using ECC for Identity.

6. It seems that RISC-V (@ Wikipedia) development has really picked up. I'm curious to see when real desktops for daily use and other embedded devices start popping up with RISC-V CPUs.

7. Read The Economist year 2024 predictions what we're heading into. Interesting stuff, risky (as always). Who knows what's gonna happen, I don't. Nor does anyone else, just average it out.

8. Watched the BlackBerry (@ Wikipedia) movie, one of the icons of it's time. Good stuff. Loved it. Things come and things go, times change. Nothing new about that.

9. Helped a fried to update their self-hosted server with latest SimpleX chat SMP & XFTP server programs. Luckily the update went smoothly.

10. Long discussion with contacts, about message repudiation (@ Wikipedia) and signatures. In many cases the train won't matter, because it's only small part of overall evidence. Also if something is signed by expert which shouldn't, does it make it look more likely that someone got hold of the private key and is just trying to frame / create evidence against you? Who knows. Then it's the overall case consideration which comes into play. If message X is signed or not, is that all that matters? Or if the message is signed with ephemeral key, which the recipient also has a copy of?

11. Some of shady privacy rooms seem to clearly  have intelligence agency employees as key members. They seem to have very good tradecraft (@ Wikipedia) and technical knowledge. As well as exceptional skill to avoid any personal topics. Obviously that really shouldn't surprise anyone.

12. Microsoft n00bs, why the scheduled restart windows uses 12h AM/PM selection, even if everything else is localized to 24h format? - Amateurs.

13. Classic trap. SQL server disk almost full. Delete unnecessary junk from database? Well, the journal fills up the disk and delete (obviously) fails. Legendary and very classic situation. - Yeah yeah, got workaround sorted out, by segmenting the deletes into (much) smaller chunks and shrinking journal / database in between deletion rounds, but whoa. I kind of hate this stuff. Especially when it hits you in the early hours and in production. kw: DBA, Database Administrator, SQL traps

14. Something different? Eitan, W87, LGM-35, AASM / HAMMER (@ all Wikipedia).

2024-11-17