Passkeys, OpenSSH, Teams, NVMe, Post Quantum

1. Most interesting, now Google says that I can't create Passkeys / WebAuthn (@ Wikipedia) with Linux Firefox desktop. Earlier it allowed creating Passkeys with this exactly same combination. Way interesting, so many random changes all the time. Also Cloudflare WebAuthn 2FA login with Firefox and Linux is now broken, even if it was earlier working. This is kind of frustrating.

2. OpenSSH (@ Wikipedia) 9.5 has a new feature - keystroke timing obfuscation. - Very nice indeed!

3. Microsoft Teams messages are buggy! Now I've got multiple scheduled messages hanging in the app. It allows scheduling messages within a weeks time frame. But for some funny reason now I have chats, which have been showing having scheduled messages for months. Something isn't clearly working with this bleeping program again. - Good job!

4. Studied and wondered difference of the symbolic links and .lnk files. It's very clear that .lnk files aren't symbolic or hard links, those are files, not links. And how to explain this to average user? - Uh, I give up.

5. Lot's of tinkering with SQL Server's table indexes and performance optimizations, table partitioning and stuff. Got it done and it was worth of the effort, allowing historic partitioning and page compression.

6. NVMe secure data erasure. It's not as trivial as it should be. Spent a few hours testing and implementing the methods with several different new drives. Now we're using four different overlapping erasure methods. And depending on supported drives, those are more or less successful. Well, usually at least method is working to generally acceptable level. as well as reading research paper: "Reliably Erasing Data From Flash-Based Solid State Drives".

7. We have used too many levels of abstractions and now the future looks bleak (@ unixsheikh.com) - Well said. I've been writing about the same problem several times. People are clueless what they're actually doing.

8. UK Online Safety Bill approved, EU Chat Control, still delayed. Interesting times. - Update, latest news claim that the Chat Control is again on the EU agenda.

9. I think I had missed MTA-STS discussion somehow completely. I think there was some discussion about some email STS option using HTTPS, and I would have preferred solution using DNS. But there is one, how could I have missed it? SMTP MTA Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS) (@ datatracker.ietf.org). Well, now it's configured for my domains as well. - Oh, the HTTPS/file based domain policy is actually in this RFC. Maybe I didn't completely miss it, just ignored it, because I didn't like what I were seeing. Why email should need web server? kw: smtp, tls, email, security, encryption. - Well, about Cloudflare email forwarding, I was immediately annoyed by the fact, it didn't support subdomains. But now that's fixed.

10. Cloudflare email forwarding, with subdomains.  Let's try it out. Email Routing subdomain support, new APIs and security protocols (@ blog.cloudflare.com). Oh wow! That's was easy and quick, probably took about 2 minutes to get it fully configured. That's great!

11. Proton Mail pushing forward quantum safe PGP encryption cipher suites (@ proton.me). "For digital signatures, we have selected CRYSTALS-Dilithium (@ Wikipedia) in combination with Ed25519. For encryption, we chose CRYSTALS-Kyber (@ Wikipedia) in combination with X25519 (@ Wikipedia)." - Very similar to the Signal's similar announcement earlier. See: PQXDH (@ Wikipedia)

12. It makes me cry and laugh, when I think how tightly people are stuck with stuff like email addresses and phone numbers. Even most modern cryptographic protocols rely on accounts linked and verified using email or phone number (SMS). That's just ridiculous, tbh.

13. Something different? AGM-88E Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile (AARGM) (@ Wikipedia)

14. Unscheduled update: It seems that Google Sites have finally fixed most of my long enduring complains. Bad performance, insane lag when editing content, random race conditions and operation, constant errors when trying to save changes. - Maybe they found someone who wasn't creating their first program / website / database ever?

2024-09-01