Paths, Duplicati 2, Summer, EmailRelay, Keybase, Masking, Alien Wave

• Daily Windows fun. How to remove directory which name ends with a dot. Everything fails when you try to remove or rename that directory. As example "directory." but if you refer it to like "\\?\c:\direcotry." then it works. But that's just yet another thing you'll need to know. Same thing can be applied to directory names with trailing space.
• Latest version of Duplicati 2 suppresses itself when started and doesn't give you any sane indication. - Fail. User can't really tell what's happening if anything at all.
• Summer time is wonderful, when people are on vacations. Anyone can become an expert! Are you expert in this field? Hmm, well is your documentation good? Yes? Ok, then I'm expert. Ha. Finally proven, than people and be expert in anything. It just takes a while to get started.
• Studied EmailRelay-2.0 documentation and features. Even if I don't currently need it. We've chosen to run own fully featured general MTA for SMTP delivery. It's great great solution, if you don't need full MTA. Simple configuration, yet fully featured program. At some point I might use it with the fully featured MTA, managing inbound mail with it and forwarding email to the local MTA for further processing.
• Keybase exploding messages. Perfect example of today's engineering skills. Visual timers, destruction animations, etc. But no technical guarantee that the message was destroyed. This is exactly what I've hated so much about engineers and developers lately. They focus on useless junk and the hype about it. Instead of making something simple and verifiable without pure BS. Keybase just reminded me about this, but his is a trend that has been going for a long long time. Worse, and worse and more bloated and less usable software. Yet in general, setting expiration / retention time for any data is what should be always done. Unless it's something which is actually intended to be archived forever. That part of concept I agree. But using self destroying messages or exploding messages does not unfortunately guarantee anything, and marketing things as such, is pure disinformation and bogus BS marketing. Which of course Internet is just so full of. Like the IPFS "Permanent Storage", hue hue, lies, lies lies. If you want secure communication, you can't trust random parties, not for providing software, services or hardware nor sending encrypted private messages to them with sensitive data. Also this is good fit with the discussions about "deleting something from the cloud". Which of course can't be done. So that you would be sure that it's actually deleted. Best way to avoid that issue, is never putting anything such stuff on cloud. - Yet in some technically oriented user groups, they very strongly share the same opinions I have about this stuff.
• Lots of discussion on group, about banning of veils and covering face. Combined with latest facial recognition technology. This seems to be the direction the society is going. No more sci-fi. Lots of discussion also about the "Closing the gates" report which details the "Implications of Iran's Ban on the Telegram Messaging App". The Chilling Effect is here again. But on the other hand the banning of Telegram hindering government communications was kind of hilarious. Am I the only one thinking, that Government should have it's own secure tools, run on it's own secure platform? Another benefit from all this, that users have to get very familiar with all kind of circumvention tools which can be used also for other purposes than Telegram alone.
• Wondered for a while what is Alien Wave / Alien Wavelength technology. Haven't heard about it. But finally I found good documentation and read it. Technology allows injecting optical traffic from 3rd party equipment into optical fiber using software controlled ROADM filters. Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) signals on fiber optic link. Reconfigurable Add Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs) network management tool. Issues Attenuation and Dispersion (several types of it). SD-FEC, Super-channels, QAM, QPSK, Polarization PM-QPSK, PM-16QAM, AMZ, SMZ. Related, BER, OSNR, NCG, SD-FEC, fidelity, Q-factor. Technically similar concepts which is used on copper stuff. Coherent super-channels. Integrating side lobes into main pulse, eliminating Inter Carrier Interference (ICI), removal of guard bands, even denser wavelength packing, Pre-dispersion (pre-emphasis, pre-compensation), NPCC, AFCPR, DBP, Tx Pulse Shaping- This is nice, because it allows even more capacity and users to be using existing fiber networks.

2019-12-01