IPv6, WG, Python, Tor, Anonymous, GPS

1. Things must not be too easy. Had incredible networking battle. IPv6 upload was something like ~20 KB/s, with incredible packet loss. So enraging, finally got it fixed. But that took something like 4 hours. Some of the IPv6 gateways are unfortunately very seriously overloaded. Also the application transferring data over network doesn't show any kind of progress / sane error messages or whatever. It's total backbox debug. First I though it wouldn't work at all. But it did, it was just incredibly slow. Things which should have taken less than a second, ended up taking 12 minutes. But tcpdump saved the day. I don't know if I should be happy or sad about this. What a waste of time. And of course the lag is only uni-directional.

2. Long discussion if "WireGuard leaks". Well. Well, it doesn't leak, but it all depends on your software and system and network configuration. Often leaks are desirable, like communicating to LAN directly without looping all traffic via the remote VPN termination. Yet WireGuard (@ Wikipedia) directly supports scripts on events like: PreUp, PostUp, PreDown, PostDown. You can put the scripts to do necessary actions, like block all non VPN traffic, if that's what you want.

3. Daily programming fun, I started to wonder why log-rotate doesn't work and delete old files. Yes, I'm talking about Python's log-rotate aka TimedRotatingFileHandler (@ python.org). After testing, looking into source and reading several posts about on the network. There's a silly and simple reason why it breaks down. Well, it breaks down if file name contains . (dot) or basically got any filename extension. So 'stuff' works, but 'stuff.log' or 'stuff.txt' doesn't. It doesn't say anything, it still rotates logs, but the delete function of removing old files gets broken and stops working silently. - So nice to find stuff like this. - After some additional testing, the issue seems to only affect Windows platform. - I just can't stop loving these things.

4. Silly discussion about Tor (@ Wikipedia) and VPN. No, those won't help. Because afaik, real privacy services, protocols and messaging formats can't be based on other non-privacy protocols, which are inherently non-privacy designed and seriously flawed. This is a bit hard to grasp for many people, also applies very much to Tor. Piping data via a few hops, doesn't hide all the stuff in the data. Correctly designed privacy data formats, messages and protocols, do not carry any extra junk which will reveal lots of information. If you send an anonymous letter in anonymous envelope without signature, and then the letter itself is full of your spit, hair and fingerprints, is it then actually anonymous letter? Ref: DFIR / Digital forencis (@ Wikipedia)

5. Endless discussion about data integrity Duplicati backup and how it continuously manages to mangle and corrupt data. Phew. New version released, same data corruption issue still persists.

6. Editor lost changes I made. It's a long time since this has happened to me last time. Around one hour of work lost, 100% ready to be committed. Funnies and or saddest part is that the comments what hasn't been done yet and is on to-do list, got committed but the actual meaningful logic changes did not. Oh well, it should be always remembered that changes you never do to program are the most important performance optimization for yourself. So what if it's super bad, impractical and bit unreliable. If it can be manually fixed when it fails, there's no need to fix / refactor the code. It mostly works. I guess this is also the Duplicati teams approach.

7. Teams introduces a direct chat between users not belonging to the same organization. Teams any chat (@ techcommunity.microsoft.com). And then a nice post related to that Business Chat Compromise (BCC) (@ netdoggy.wordpress.com). I'm sure many organizations will disable that. When their key personnel starts to get all kind of junk and spam via Teams. Similar stuff, which you already get in email and other platforms, just so lovely.

8. Totally awesome web-site about GPS and how it works (@ chiechanow.ski) - 6/5 rated - Pretty much a perfect presentation. I wish there were more ultimate sites like this one.

2023-04-16