Ciphers, Git, Search, Usability, HMP, Outlook, Win10, Docs, Teams

• Disabled old AES-128 and AES-256 ciphers without PFS / FS / Ephemeral Keys support. On web-servers and in Firefox. Security.SSL3.RSA_AES_256_SHA;false SECURITY.SSL3.RSA_AES_128_SHA;false
• Git protocol version 2 - Did someone say hackish kludge solutions? What about that double null separator for version indication. It's almost ridiculous, but works. So it's a true hacker thingie.
• People said there are new search engines, after checking those out. Nope, those weren't new. Those were just new front ends for old search engines, aka metasearch engines. True search engines also do the indexing part. As example DuckDuckGo is only a metasearch engine, and mostly returns same results as Bing. Yet they might use data from Yandex at times (for Russian users?). Many search engines try to hide or mislead users, where the data is coming from. But there are sites which return headers of the requester and when that data gets indexed, it's pretty hard to say that they're not using source X. At least Mojeek - is very welcomed option and true web crawler based solution with it's own index. WhaleSlide is just another cover for Bing again.
• Usability, Usability! Why you can't join Telegram channels without using link? Usability is totally broken with this model. You'll have to write a horrible link, and after writing it, you can't even fix typos. It also hangs the browser, because every time browser is started, it starts loading the link, which open Telegram which says the channel doesn't exist. Great combination, excellent engineering. Yet another thing, which feels more like trolling that being just designed so extremely badly. Killing the process, and then clicking stop immediately when starts, works. But it could be worse. One way would be destroying the stored application state. But whoa, bad engineering, leading to a need to use silly workarounds and hacks. Ouch!
• Heterogeneous Multi-Processing (HMP) - Allows different processor and core types to be mixed. Often managed with dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) code.
• Outlook spam controls are totally inadequate. Message rules would be nice, but those aren't probably applied, if message is marked as spam. And therefore you can't set a rule which would mark the messages as not being spam. Sigh. Excellent engineering, once again.
• Windows 10 update v1803 triggered nice host name resolution errors. Lots of fun digging through LLMNR , mDNS - and NBNS documentation. Yup, those do not have anything to do with DNS / WINS, which are completely separate mechanisms.
• Watched great documentary about law enforcement and bit data analytics. How we've got the minority reports pre-crime finally coming true (?). How we can predict victims and criminals, what algorithms should be used, which data sources and so on. Unsurprisingly all available data is being used for analysis. You know what it means.
• Decided to test Microsoft Teams. It's quality, as expected. First of all, 100 megabytes download, and immediately after start using 420 megabytes of RAM. Great start. Also it seems that the inter-op with Skype and Skype for Business (SfB) isn't great. Which isn't surprising. Just like the Skype for Business and Skype bridge sucked totally, was unreliable, mangled messages (like URLs) and so on. - Why doesn't teams work with Skype? You can't add skypeids contacts. - Anyway, basic chat & status gateway shouldn't be rocket science. But maybe it's still something which is way too challenging for company like MS. Total mess, when some users are using Teams, SfB, Skype... And because those suck, of course there's Slack and Discord. WhatsApp, Telegram, Riot, XMPP and IRC.
• Something different? Telescoped Ammunition, Caseless Ammunition, V-280 Valor and Friction Stir Welding (FSW) with Dovetailing.

2019-10-27