Arcade, CF DNS, PUF, brscan4, Security, H2, ESNI

  • Went with a friend to arcade for old times sake. It was fun. Problem was that the air hockey (over engineered arcade version of it) game we were playing crashed. After wondering for a while, we didn't find anything wrong with the game, except the error message 133. It took just a short while that we decided to hard boot the game, have you tried turning it off and on again? After the reboot, the game was left in pretty strange state. Well, we looked at each other and weren't sure if the game is ok. We just stepped away from it, leaving it for "end user testing". Let's see if it works out now, and if it works, then we can continue playing. Hah, it worked, yet the first game round wasn't perfect because the hardware state of the game didn't match clearly the software state. We laughed so much! Made some hap hazard changes and put it to end user testing. Perfect! After they had finished their game, we took it over again and it worked beautifully.
  • Cloudflare fast 1.1.1.1 DNS? No, I think it's really slow. Especially reverse DNS lookups (rDNS) are agonizingly slow when using Cloudflare's DNS. Similar experiences, anyone? - But maybe there's some other reason for that, which I'm just not aware about. Because with plain dig -x everything seems to be ok.
  • Physically Unclonable Function (PUF). - Ok nothing new here, decades old stuff. But I reminded myself about this stuff, after reading funny article about SHA3-256 encryption. Yep, that's funny. Yes, for sure they're seriously talking about SHA3 encryption. Of course that BS didn't stand any closer inspection. But I don't know what that is, hopefully someone could enlighten me? But in the same article they wrote really unclearly about PUF and I had to confirm that.
  • Had to purge and re-install everything xsane, sane, brscan4 and so on, before Brother Scanner worked with Ubuntu 18.04 after distribution upgrade. I'm not exactly sure what was a miss, it wasn't probably Brother related, but the issue was on the xsane side or related libraries. Because skanlite worked, but xsane didn't. Which started this whole setup process. Xsane after purging xsane and reinstalling it brscan4 was broken somehow, yet I don't know who, because all configuration and settings seemed to be ok, but xsane sill didn't find the scanner. Also the configuration file in systemd configuration was incorrect. StandardInput=null needs to be StandardInput=socket before stuff starts working in path /lib/systemd/system. So much fun. But hey, I got it fixed. Even if it took a while to figure it all out.
  • Security in a World of Physically Capable Computers - Great blog post, and good questions, we all know how bad it's probably going to be.
  • Optimizing HTTP/2 - As stated, this is going to be a very deep trip. There's just so much that can be optimized. Nothing new except obvious things in this post though.
  • Encrypted SNI (ESNI, Server Name Identification) - ESNI test, everyone should be already familiar with all the technologies on the page. Including DNSSEC, DANE, TLS 1.3 and Secure DNS. If you don't know what SNI @ Wikipedia stands for ...
  • Python 3.7.1 didn't install because there were issue with older 3.7.0 library, but the following row fixed the issue. sudo dpkg --install --force all and /var/cache/apt/archives/libpython3.7-stdlib_3.7.1-1+bionic1_amd64.deb but this only after purge python3.7 and running autoremove to also remove old dependencies.
  • Something different? Studied: High-altitude Pseudo Satellite technologies (HAPS) , Geostationary Balloon Satellite (GBS) or Atmospheric Satellite (atmosat) and read several issues of The Economist, I think it's one of the best magazines ever.

2020-02-23