3D printing, CORS, CSP, XHR, I Spy, Aurora, Net Neutrality, HSTS, Bits vs Bytes

Post date: Apr 8, 2018 7:11:58 AM

• FreeCAD, Repetier, Slicer and Cura. I've been working with those during last few months and phew... So many bugs I can't even believe it. Almost everything can bug extemely annoyingly. When you change something, something disappears. Programs crash. Even basic boolean operations fail. Objects which are ok in editor, aren't ok anymore when exported for 3D printing etc. So it's software as usual, it's not working well. Well working code is actually quite rare occurrence. Bad code and bad software is the norm.
• Latest version of duplicati isn't called experimental anymore. That's awesome news. It's becoming stable and production ready? That's great. I've got just tons of servers and other systems waiting for it. Maybe I'll setup it next time on my home systems too, when I would need to run full backup next time. So that will happen in a month or so.
• Outlook.com is losing even more email. Duh, this happens all the time. Funniest thing is that I can see the mails in sent folder but the mails never arrive at the destination. When I got the right mood, I'll migrate to some other service provider. Outlook sucks way too much. Outlook SMTP confirms that email has been received, but it never appears in inbox. They have some kind of hidden censorship engine installed. Who would trust that kind of messaging service?
• Reminded my self about Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) and Content_Security_Policy (CSP) for one project where I needed those. CSP is a whitelist which lists allowed data sources for the site to be loaded. This can be very easy or hard, depending what kind of mess you're running. In best case the source is the server itself. And if required CORS can be used to allow sending cookies to other domains to request authenticated resources from cross-domain (XHR) resources using Ajax etc. Most of projects I do, only use the site itself as source, and only potentially load a few libraries from some CDN. Which is easy to specify with CSP and doesn't require CORS. Because I prefer making sites secure and private.
• I Spy - Funny story about how paranoid security agencies were and probably are. Well, good luck wasting resources.
• Deleted my experimental Brand Account @ Google+
• Studied products from Retail Next and their Aurora product. Very interesting stuff. But as we know this of surveillance and tracking technology has been creeping in for a long time. Actually it's quite easy to spot the tech being used in local malls, if you just look carefully.
• Watched Digits Series Season 1. A very nice set of documentaries about information technology's past and future. Where we are heading? Only the future will tell.
• News about: Network attacks utilizing subcontractors as ingress route. Yep, we're all very aware about that risk, nothing new.
• War on Open Internet - Absolutely awesome and thought waking post about Internet business. Yet it's not actually anything new at all. We've been heading to this direction for a long time? How someone can send me a message over the Internet that Internet isn't working. Well, they weren't talking about Internet, they were talking about Facebook or Google, because some people seem to think that those are the Internet. Are we losing Net Neutrality?
• Watched a documentary of 2016 year in science. As well as nice documentary about all the problems related to Brexit from this point on.
• Telcos and chronic lying and spreading customer disinformation. One operator now advertises that they provide 1 GB speeds. When they should say they provide 1 Gbit/s speeds. Once again the question is, do the telcos just got totally incompetent staff Do they think their customers are braindead or are they just being whatever and bleeping their customers on purpose. They can choose any of these three options. Right attitude, right? Positive customer service experience. Sometimes trolling is irresistible fun, but trolling paying customers might not be a good idea.
• Nice HSTS post by Julia Evans - Nothing new on it of course. But if you're not familiar with HSTS it's a good read.