Cloudflare, Deepfake, OVH, BGP, Roughtime, DB

• Something really interesting Cloudflare supports IPFS. 1) End-to-End Integirty with IPFS and 2) Cloudflare goes InterPlanetary - Introducing Cloudflare’s IPFS Gateway. Very interesting development. Of course there are interesting abuse cases coming up for sure. But that's one approach which could interest different underground web content publishers. Could this IPFS bridge be used to serve BB images directly from IPFS network? That's interesting question, think about it for a while. Investigate how that actually works out. Integrity & Caching, that's nice. There are similar proxy services for so many other networks. Technically there's nothing new there.
• Deepfake - AI based technology for creating fake images and videos, probably fake 3D stuff in future too.
• OVH hell desk aka Support - Now they confirmed that oops, their DHCP server was broken and service is finally working again. That's around 9 days later. Ha ha, good work guys. Well, later is better than never.
• BGP & RPKI @ Cloudflare - Pretty basic stuff, nothing new here. See: RPKI @ Wikipedia.
• Cloudflare Onion Service. Sounds interesting, I were suspecting something like this, immediately after the IPFS announcement. But is this exactly what I'm expecting to see? Let's find out. Well, it wasn't exactly what I were expecting. It's Cloudflare providing alternate gateway for Tor users. I were kind of hoping that they would take similar approach to IPFS, where the approach is reversed. They'll bring access to IPFS on the Web. But in case of Tor, they'll just slightly improve routing for Tor users accessing public web. But they do not bring the dark web (tor world) to the public web by providing simple gateway. Which they of course trivially could do, if they just would want to do that. And as bonus, they could provide efficient caching, making Tor network really fast at least for cacheable resources.
• Google's Roughtime - Hmm, yet another time synchronization protocol, which isn't even accurate. The accuracy goal is so rough that getting time over https as usual works just as well. Getting head from cloudflare.com over https give you timestamp which is very accurate, and the lookup seems to take around 30 milliseconds. Sure the time stamp is only accurate to one second, but that's more than enough for most of the issues addressed by the Roughtime. Of course you can use any other reliable major site instead of Cloudflare. Google.com works just as well, or whatever service you'll prefer. Depending on service just remember to add cache-control: nocache to your request. No need to re-invent the wheel? If you're paranoid, you can check 3 services and limit clock skew by comparing the values provided by the services, and then setting the time depending on your own preferences. - I still do prefer NTP because it's much more advanced protocol than this.
• When I were posting about the AI article, I thought that I'll need to put more examples of engineering logic in the blog. Here's one. The other party announced that it's impossible to update data on the database and that's the reason they'll end up with invalid values. I checked everything that's being sent to them, and didn't find any issues. Very classic problem, they don't know what a composite key is. They claimed it's required to have UUID on every record that can be updated. Why? When the UUID could be trivially formed from A+B+C composite key or by using original record ID if required. Yet that wasn't being transmitted, but as far as I see, it's not even necessary. Their solution is that if there's update, we'll need to send delete command to delete whole block of data, and then resend everything. - Sigh. Sure you can have all kind of engineering done to solve this, and build real-time integrations which transfer every transaction separately with UUID. But to solve this problem, it's all totally pointless and basically really bad approach. Sure, I'll do it, no problem, but it's just wasting customers money, over engineering and creating so called BS software. All they needed to add to their software was the composite key, and I really don't know why they completely missed that while creating the code in the very first place. - Solving the real problem smartly, is the key, anyone can create whatever, cool, expensive and absolutely over engineered stuff, which will deliver hopefully exactly the same result, while causing huge overhead and wasting system resources.

2020-02-02