SMTP, WinBtrfs, Matrix, Simplex

1. I started to receive =mails which contained seemingly =andom = character. But after analysing =everal mails. It was obvious =hat it wasn't random at =ll. - First I suspected that it could have been caused by Outlook changing SMTP protocol and mangling messages to remedy the SMTP Smugging (@ sec-consult.com) vulnerability. But after contacting the source and going through dozens of messages and running new tests, it turned out that reason was Mailbutler + Apple Mail + macOS combination. Yet because the problem started just when the SMTP smuggling news were out, it's still possible that it's related and some changes were made which weren't properly tested. Uninstalling Mailbutler fixed the issue. At least recipients using Microsoft Outlook saw the messages like the start of this message. It also caused additional havoc, because in HTML emails the HTML tags were similarly mangled.

2. About that SMTP Smugging, I'm not surprised at all. I've posted so many times about the issues related to email handling. And one of the funniest quotes from my earlier posts: "I don't even know what's right, but it seems everyone got different implementation of the same standard." - So what would you expect that leads to? - Nothing new I would say. If you develop something that works in some more or less random careless way, it's kind of silly to be surprised when the end result is also something silly.

3. About creeping AI revolution. To be honest. Isn't a pet dog's life after all quite excellent. Everything it would actually need to worry about has been usually taken care of. Including excellent health care and so on. I really loved the advanced heart flow analytics system they used to debug heart problems. You can really clearly see how heart works and if there are any valve leaks or electricity conductivity problems and do on. Whole body CT scans and stuff. I personally hope that stuff like conductivity tomography would become popular. That with AI would allow very quick and cheap full body scans. Like every 3 months during whole life. Just electrodes on body. Few minutes and done. Just like heart film with modern tech. Best option would be bath where electrodes are already in pool. It would be even faster.

4. Watched many 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37c3 unlocked) (@ events.ccc.de) videos, maybe bit more about those later. Some of those videos are highly anticipated, like hacking Polish trains, Matrix and SimpleX talks etc. And of course other electronics and security stuff coming up as well as military and cyber espionage stories and electronic hacking.

5. WinBtrfs (@ GitHUb) - I don't know how I've missed this project so long. Seems awesome. Just nice project, if you're bored and want something light code (kidding!). It's btrfs (@ Wikipedia) for Windows.

6. Matrix - Some friends complain that they got banned due to deleting own messages when using MatrixTTL script I've created. - Well, that's not my fault. You should check what's wrong with the system banning you. - Of course ultimately, don't post / join rooms, which you don't like. That's very simple. As we all know, there's no safe way to delete anything once shared anyway, so it's kind of moot.

7. SimpleX - Someone asked why I'm not running a public SimpleX / Matrix relay. Well, because of disk I/O costs it involves. Sending just one reaction like (thumbs up) to existing post required 29 566 write operations, 1 225 232 bytes were written to disk and 10 154 of those write operations were blocking operations. Depending on disk type and it's I/O latency with blocking operations that can take quite a while, and it's just handing a single reaction to message. Which means that bridging any active rooms would probably start to cause problems. As well as it makes the system very vulnerable to different kind of flooding attacks.

8. Something different? Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) (@ Wikipedia) and Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) (@ Wikipedia) and Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB) (@ Wikipedia) and Finnish Pohjanmaa-class corvette (@ Wikipedia).

2024-10-20