Logger, Secrets, Block Mapper, Units, Tor, Windows

1. It seems that Python 3.10 logging is still broken with Windows. TimedRotatingFileHandler (@ docs.python.org) logger handler is broken and doesn't handle files with dot in the filename correctly. So annoying, I'm ending up with terabytes of logs. I'll retry with 3.10.7 and let's see if it's still broken. - Yes, it is.

2. Now the case which I mentioned years ago, is in court. They're wondering the case where press tried to leak military secrets and to protect the sources the reporter ended up trying to destroy laptop with secrets with hammer in the basement, causing fire and being charged with arson in residential building (on top of everything else). This is why press should be aware about privacy and security stuff to avoid this kind of blunders. Also if you happen to have military secrets, I would take extreme security measures anyway to protect the data. Never storing it on "normal laptop" without top tier security as it was clearly the case this time. Even in the case I for some strange reason would have to hold such secrets. Those would be hidden somewhere, so it's always plausible to deny the things and there's no clear-text evidence whatsoever. Everything is done using RAM only system and strongly encrypted storage. 

3. Using my custom block device mapper would be also possible, if feeling extremely paranoid, where the actual encrypted data is sparsely stored between true random data using some pseudo random pattern. Now you don't even know which bits or bytes are the encrypted data and which bits / bytes are just decoy data. Good luck decrypting. Assuming that you don't have good alternate references. Using different keys for the pseudorandomization and actual encryption. You can use first LUKS and then map it via my mapper to expand the data. My mapper also supports up to 64 Kibibyte input blocks with additional random expansion, XORing and reordering of input inside the block. If someone asks about it, I just like to wipe my empty partitions / media with data from /dev/urandom I've got nothing to hide. Yet if the attacker has prolonged access to the media and they can monitor changes over time and access data from FTL or something like that, then it obvious renders the wiped from /dev/urandom claim useless. Also you don't really want to do anything I/O expensive with the device, because the read, decrypt, modify, encrypt, write patterns are insanely slow and expensive (because of total overkill) to run with larger blocks. But works great with exFAT and small ASCII files. That's why it's better to actually to decrypt the whole volume to RAM disk, use it, and then encrypt the volume back to media at once, so it matches the cover story and with whole volume being rewritten also the nonces are regenerated and advantage of prolonged observation is lost. Now it's just a new blob of random / pseudorandom data at pseudorandom locations.

4. Kibibytes and stuff, I have to pay attention with the units. It's so easy to make remarks how others are sloppy with units, but uh oh. I've done that too. Modern units: Bits (@ Wikipedia) and Bytes (@ Wikipedia) and all on one page orders of magnitude (data) (@ Wikipedia). Not forgetting Octets (@ Wikipedia).

5. Helped a friend to configure Tor hidden (.onion) services (@ Wikipedia) and securing and hardening the server platform + adding extra isolation and containerization for the services and preventing all outbound network traffic from the containers even if breached, which hopefully won't happen, but you'll never know.

6. Updated to Windows 11. I don't know if I should laugh or cry. There are just so insane usability problems with Teams that I don't know why they would release such a bad software. The audio test blim blim blomb sound was left in non stop loop and there were no way to stop it. After a while I got confirmation that it was actually Teams, quitting teams using UI didn't make it stop, but killing all teams processes did. Also the new settings are bad, especially if it's not in full screen mode. You can't close or move the Window etc. - I also liked having my task bar on secondary screen(s) (which is on right side) left edge, so it's easily accessible and won't use any space from primary display. But that won't work with Win 11. Instead the task bar is at the bottom of screen, where it extremely annoyingly covers many times things like input prompts, status bars, when using powershell, ssh, etc. - Update while posting, the New Teams is much better, but there's still a long list of very annoying things, like why I can't forward messages on desktop just on mobile, etc.