Firefox, Duplicati, cURL, RCS, WASS, Outlook, 8chan

• Firefox bad UX - I open URL, FF then says restart required due to update. The URL I opened is shown in the address bar. But if I bookmark this tab, the created bookmark says about:blank - Thank you for providing bad user experience. It's highly confusing that the tab shows the right content, and the url shows the right url, but when you bookmark it, you'll get different bookmark than the one you expected to get. This happens when FF is requesting for restart.
• Duplicati 2, even latest versions are extremely dangerously broken. Everything seems to be working perfectly, until you'll try to restore the backup and then it fails. This is devastating flaw for any software. But especially bad for a backup software. It's like having insurance from a company that never covers anything for you. Just wasted time and effort. Ok, not all backup sets are always broken, but too many, way too often. Some discussion about this topic here in Duplicati forum when restore tests are completed ... Because all other tests, verify and repair features tell that everything is good. Only when you'll start restore, it fails. - Addition, even if Duplicati got it's flaws. It just today saved a few of my blog posts, which had gotten corrupted (thank exFAT!) several months ago. Because of Duplicati backup version history, I were able to restore the lost posts.
• Daily oh joy. Now I've seen documentation which recommends doing JSON integration using cURL. Awesome. - Well, not really unexpected. But usually It's just as example. This time it's official recommendation. Yet there are some actualy benefits from this approach, do you know what those are?
• Google Rich Communication Services (RCS) which is designed to replace SMS based texting. It's designed to circumvent carrier messaging systems, of course by replacing those with Google's own services. kw: RCS chat, Android, text messaging, text message, short message service (SMS), Android Messages
• I've got this external SATA3 USB3 adapter. It's curious case, it supports USB2 fallback mode. So it works on USB2, but at least when using it with Linux default drivers, it totally hangs CPU. But only when being used with USB2 bus, if it's connected to USB3 bus, then the CPU load is minimal. Strange. I guess they've just got this USB2 backward legacy compatibility mode, so they can say it works with USB2. But it's much slower than what USB2 would allow, and also wastes CPU cycles, so the communication protocol clearly isn't optimal.
• Outlook.com and deliverability issues. Just found out that Outlook often blackholes mails with slight errors. Like in one mail there was problem with mime type. Somehow Outlook blackholed that message completely. If there was encoding problem with body, message should have been shown in inbox and then you can view message source to figure out what's wrong. But nope, that didn't happen.
• All this 8chan stuff is really fascinating from political and technical perspectives. Cloudflare dropping support, BitMitigate going completely down due to Voxility and so on. How deplatforming and dropping network routing is working and so on. As well as thinking that the platform where something is posted is to blame. Not thinking about root causes, and so on. But these are really complex topics and I just want to view and discuss this from the network engineering, networking politics and hosting perspective without taking any sides. - All this reminds me about Orville and Dark Mirror episodes, where social media is used for court, prosecution, law and final judge. It shouldn't be that way, should it? - Unfortunately this seems to be the trend where world is going?
• Checked out a new fiber connection being installed between Finland and Sweden by Easter Light. Looks good. It's been a good while since previous cables have been laid between these countries. C-Lion by Cinia probably freed plenty of existing capacity between Finland and Sweden. Actually now they have plans for much larger Nordic / Baltic network.
• Something not so different? Gorgon Stare Wide-Area Surveillance sensor System (WASS) and Wide-Area Motion Imagery (WAMI). It's totally expected that these systems will be flown on different platforms. Now they're testing high altitude controllable balloons like the Loon.

2020-08-23