Email, WiFi 7, SimpleX, Ubuntu Upgrade w Python

1. Is email dying and getting centralized? - After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.  (@ cfenollosa.com) - I fully agree with the article. I had to repeat that unblocking task around dozens of times with Barracuda and Microsoft. Also it was obvious that Outlook and Office 365 used separate SPAM management channels making it more annoying. It was necessary to do the whitelisting requests several times to both channels. It's also obvious that the blocking on their side is fully automated, and probably nobody actually took any action or gave ever any human responses to the complains. It's just that someone starts sending email, let's block them and wait them to ask for the blocking to be removed. Ahem, bit like Admin CAPTCHA? If nobody complains, let's keep it blocked then. But for quite a while I haven't had issues. But when I launched the outbound SMTP server it was weekly annoyance of getting blocked. I also full agree about that statement about black holing messages. It's really enraging. Thank you for that Microsoft.

2. Studied: WiFi 7 / IEEE 802.11be (@ Wikipedia) - Nothing new, just more of the same? Wider channels, more spatial streams, 4096-QAM. Ok, Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) (@ Wikipedia) is interesting. Yet, it's mostly just a modern twist on age old ACK / NACK (@ Wikipedia) scheme. For some use cases TNS / IEEE 802.1Q (Dot1q) (@ Wikipedia) could be really important (industry, robotics, etc). 

3. SimpleX.chat (@ simplex.chat) - At the time of writing this, it seems that the new features of version 3.2 haven't been fully migrated to the main site. For finding out the latest features, you'll need to check out the SimpleX chat v3.2 is released (@ simplex.chat). Incognito mode and Tor support are the most necessary updates. I've criticized so many applications about not providing ephemeral "identities". If I want to have different identity with every contact, most of apps won't allow me to do that. But it's only way to keep communications private. The examples of this problem are endless. SimpleX setup script is clearly for clueless users, it just downloads correct binary and adds it to PATH. Yet I personally dislike all programs that add stuff to path for "no reason". If I want something to be in the path, I'll add it. It seems that the user queue rotation isn't implemented yet, but it's planned. Ok, good. Because my first idea was that ahh, it's missing, but it can of course be done manually. Just use previous chat, to create a new parallel chat and then terminate the old one. But it's better if it's fully automated, of course. Just like with PGP keys, can be done manually, but most won't do it. Yet messages are stored locally in plaintext database (on client) (later versions have fixed this), depending on the situation that might not be preferred option. Message retention and database encryption are still missing, but it's a very promising start so far. If they keep developing it with a good pace, it'll be a great, even if not the best option soo for privacy enthusiasts. I also love the contact invite links, that's one feature I've been asking Briar to implement for a long time.

4. Doing Ubuntu (@ Wikipedia) release upgrades, every %$! time things get so %$! up! Now system is broken, because Python is broken. Actually Python has been long term problem when doing upgrades. It almost always messes up system, so that things get seriously badly broken. Also all the fix commands are useless, and none of those work. There's nothing wrong, but it's still extremely %$! up. Let's see, if I have to reinstall whole system due to Python upgrade problems. It turned out that it's very bad idea to have Python 3.10.7 installed before upgrade for 20.04 LTS. For rest of systems I removed the Python before upgrade and avoided serious problems. If Python is installed, there will be numerous dependency issues and things will get pretty much totally broken, especially after removing Python 3.10.7 with Ubuntu LTS 22.04. Also wrote Python script to fix the issues with the dependencies. But I'm sure most of users will fail with these challenges as well. 

5. Something different? Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP), General Electric XA100 and Pratt & Whitney XA101. (@ All of the links to Wikipedia, as usual).

2023-10-29