FemtoStar, GIMP, UTF-8, TLS, WG, JWST, Docs

1. FemstoStar notes: PocketQube Workshop (2021) contained a really good talk about FemtoStar satellite design, hardware selections and challenges. Very interesting project. Curious to see what will happen in future, and let's hope this project is successful.

2. Finally got GIMP 2.10.30 version, which fixed all the bleeping stuff which was totally broken with 2.10.28, as example saving images to PNG format just crashed the program.

3. Even more endless, pointless and waste of time discussion about character sets. The solution? Join meeting, just say hi everyone, "go UTF-8 yourself" and leave the meeting. Job done. Efficient.

4. Quality error messages Windows Update encountered problem. Schannel 10011. Absolutely awesome error messages. Thank you so much for this, Microsoft. Yes, highly sarcastic statement. Flooding all logs with kazillion totally useless messages.

5. So much wasted time with all the useless TLS version talk. Afaik, there's no easy way to exploit the theoretical vulnerabilities. Wasting weeks to solve non problems, is well, totally very bad approach.

6. Updated Filezilla, let's see if everything got broken or not. I'm curious. At least passive port ranges got lost during migration, so I know that the migration process is at least partially faulty. Well, as expected everything did get broken. TLS did break down and another nasty trick in their sleeve was that user login names which were earlier non-case sensitive suddenly did become case sensitive and around 30% clients with case inconsistency stopped from working. Yet that's not a biggie, because the TLS change broke around 80%. Good time to check all client versions and update all logins to consistent configuration. Ahh, so many things to do.

7. Weekend testing fun - There are so incredibly many misconceptions about Torrents (BitTorrent). First mistake is that everyone else would know what you're downloading, second is that something illegal would be linked to it. In our case we used Torrent just as content addressable network. Private tracker, all connections over WireGuard and using IPv6 ULA  addresses. This allows very efficient distribution of data between moderate number of peers, in totally secure fashion and utilizing mesh bandwidth. When systems are on multiple continents with limited data center source / seed capacity the performance gain was huge. Especially compared to the old model where these packages were delivered over rsyncing with the source server. This was a fun testing project to check how to effectively deliver content bundles to distributed locations, without using a CDN. - But it was just a nerd test. In many cases it doesn't make any sense with current CDN prices if the party receiving or delivering content is even moderately interested to pay for low delivery fees. - Of course this could be also turned into friend to friend (f2f) network by using Yggdrasil or similar overlay network model instead of WireGuard mesh. - Another well working option is just using DHT and BTIH to share encrypted content. Then peers and content hash & metadata are publicly available, but the content is useless without the encryption key.

8. Meta Anti-virus platforms. VirusTotal (@ Wikipedia) seems to be down, so I found out MetaDefender (@ metadefender.opswat.com) from the OPSWAT, looks good to me, a great alternative. They also allow nice API access with hash check. Quick way to find out if files are already known etc, and API to check results in automated fashion. Yet somehow it seems that VirusTotal is only ony which is well maintained. Jotti's malware scan (@ virusscan.jotti.org) has been very iffy lately.

9. Watched Out of Stock Supply Chain Crisis documentary series and the Titans The Rise of Wall Street documentary series. I've also been watching Engineering Catastrophes, what could go wrong? - I do still miss ICT system catastrophes or data center disasters or similar opsec / infosec / it engineering fails series.

10. Something different? - James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) - (@ Wikipedia) is almost at L2 halo oribt. Still 50k kilometers to go. But that's pretty close. It's great (and amazing?) that everything has worked so far. Let's hope that it goes all the way and serves humanity and science community for a decade (or more!). Fuel got saved, because Ariane 5 launch performance was so good.

2023-04-09