Microsoft, Matrix, A-PNT, NI2CS, CAA, Computer

1. Almost nothing is as enraging and agonizing as PowerShell and it's totally misleading and bad error messages. Well, what a great way to waste lots of time. - Yet that applies to all systems with similarly confusing or lacking messaging.

2. Microsoft Teams Webhooks: So broken we've resorted to good old email for all notifications. Not sure whether to laugh or cry at this point. + Matrix because it just works.

3. I've noticed something concerning about the new Microsoft Copilot for Bing. It frequently interrupts its own responses mid-stream, which is problematic enough. But what's more worrying is that when asked to continue, it often veers off into completely unrelated topics. This behavior raises some red flags - it bears a resemblance to classic security vulnerabilities where conversation sessions get mixed up. We might be looking at a potential data leak scenario here.

4. The official Microsoft instructions for setting up Thunderbird with Outlook are really inaccurate. For the correct setup process, follow the guide provided in this Mozilla support thread (@ support.mozilla.org). Please note that Thunderbird may not display the OAuth2 option by default. This feature only becomes visible when certain conditions are met (specific SMTP domains?), which can be frustrating for users trying to configure their accounts. As an additional requirement, the system now mandates the use of my personal email address with its associated domain, rather than the standard outlook.com address I've consistently utilized in the conventional configuration prior to the implementation of OAuth2.

5. Element X (for Matrix) - doesn't seem to support encryption / session verification at all. Duh. It's nice that key security features have been disabled on new great client. Excellent.

6. Had long discussions with EP about SimpleX Chat ... And everything I've wanted is coming to it. Absolutely fantastic. It's going to be my top app after a couple more fixes. The most important updates are redundancy and disk-based message queues, plus SQLite's WAL mode for performance.

7. Apple iPhone brings satellite based text messaging. Nice! It uses Globalstar satellite network in 2,4 GHz band.

8. OneWeb brings GPS alternative A-PNT (@ Wikipedia) solution. There's been so much talk about GPS failing constantly in many regions. It's in news every week.

9. You.com Pro AI image generation features have been now broken for more than a week. No feedback or any response. Gives quite bad impression about company, they're still advertising the features which are currently broken and won't give any comment about that. - Yet now they do have a ongoing ticket about it.

10. Got a totally enraged by SATA connector connectivity problems. My motherboard and cables are more than 12 years old, so I had to disconnect properly clean and reconnect everything to get system running again. It's kind of a bad feeling when the system drive drops connection while doing something.

11. NATO starts to use Matrix for it's communications. System is called NI2CS, yet it's only for unclassified information Source (@ element.io)

12. Finnish Cryptography Approval Authority (CAA) just approved ML-KEM and ML-DSA & SLH-DSA post quantum algorithms for national security stuff. After going through the full documentation, the recommended algorithms are: Official recommendations include algorithms like: AES, Serpent, ChaCha20, RSA, ECDSA, EdDSA, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA-SHA2, SLH-DSA-SHAKE, SHA2, SHA3, SHAKE, KMAC, DH/MQV, ECDH/ECMQV, X25519, X448, ML-KEM - Of course requirements vary based on information classification, etc. I have to confess that MQV and KMAC where new terms for me. The official documentation in Finnish [PDF] (@ kyberturvallisuuskeskus.fi).

13. My battle station (computer workstation) is getting quite old, random failures, memory (RAM), drives (SATA), maybe power source (Earthwatts) , maybe issues with motherboard (ASUS)? Well, good time to start looking for a new proper and upgraded battle station.

14. Something different: Special Patrol Insertion/Extraction and Fast Rope Insertion/Extraction System (FRIES / SPIE) and Fulton surface-to-air recovery system (STARS) - Probably the drones / UAVs will be used in future, allowing quick insertion and extraction.

2025-04-13