AI, Rail, FIDO2, CF, CC, Security, ALSA, Cables, Mobile

1. The New Business of AI (and How It’s Different From Traditional Software) - Pros: Really nice long article. Cons: Absolutely nothing new at all. - After reading so many books and being in software / services business for decades...

2. The limits of high speed rail - High speed trains are nice, yet it's clear there are speed limits and those are quite complex to solve. Really enjoyed this article. Yet hardly anything new, I've done dozens of SAP integrations.

3. Google Titan Security Keys are now available in 10 countries. This is kind of strange why they limit availability by the country? Security keys are perfect example of small item which can be very easily sent to anywhere on world cheaply. So what's the reason for the geo-blocking?

4. Letsencrypt Multi perspective validation- Nice, yet as mentioned, it just makes the attack(s) slightly harder.

5. Credit card / payment card tokenizaton, what happened to it? It was all the hype few years ago, and nobody's talking about it or using it? Or maybe it's just the one of the dark secrets of the market. Everyone's using it, but nobody's talking about it, because it can provide illegal tracking breaking privacy laws without user consent? There are so many practices which are technically possible, but illegal. But if it can be done, it can be done. Just don't get caught. Before the EMV it was really trivial to track people using their full credit card numbers. Sure it was illegal back then, but anyone with access to the data could do it trivially.

6. Daily coding dilemma, if the specification contains funny typos in error messages or any other strings. Should I fix those? Then my code doens't anymore work as specified. After thinking it for a while, I did include the original typos in honest copy paste style. - I especially like cases where xml tags are mismatched by typo. But I guess it's then just accordin the requirements? <date> </datw>

7. Spent few hours reading "secure communication" thread. End result? No perfect solution, lots of discussion about different current solutions, pros, cons and which products and solutions are easy to users and when users don't understand concepts of secure communication what kind of drawbacks that creates and so on. Some people didn't understand benefits of unlimited "free" disposable identities, etc. Strange. Afaik, if there's no reason to use a strong identity, it's always better to use temporary independent identity, which can be discarded as soon as the transaction is over. Another concept that many people don't understand at all is deniability. Sigh.

8. Confirmed Ubuntu + VLC + Firefox (reader mode) messes up ALSA. Quite annoying audio fail. Why? That's a very good question. Restarting ALSA and VLC fixes the issue. 20.04.2 update probably fixed that annoyance.

9. How many hackers do you need to hack a smart light bulb?

10. At the bottom of the sea: a short history of submarine cables | APNIC Blog - Totally excellent article about submarine cable history. And how easily people forget how hard and expensive global communication is. Ref: Erbium Doped Fibre Amplifier (EDFA), on/off keying (OOK), QPSK, QAM, FEC, Polar code, Fibre Raman Amplifier (FRA), Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS), Optical Kerr effect, Probabilistic Constellation Shaping (PCS).

11. Twitter and other mobile platforms. If my language in this blog is bad at times, I really laugh and mobile platforms. Usually there are very strict message length limits. As well as the text entry totally sucks. Which often leads to posts, where you say something, leave every detail, background and fact out, and just drop badly written one liner. I wonder if that makes the platfrom more valuable? Maybe some users love it, but for others, it's just engraving*. Haha, typo totally indented* just to stipulate* mobile platform suckyness. Yet it makes making comments and claims much more fun, when you don't even feel a need to get it correct nor have any reasoning, background or facts. All of those are annoyingly tedious tasks when trying to say something. So it's just kind of perfect! Maybe in future we have emoji doctors? PhD using only emojis? Sounds cool.
    * AutoCorrect fixed my statement for me.

2021-02-28