G Sites, Mobile Apps, Scaleway, 2FA

• "Quality", Google Sites Classic link is broken from sites.google.com, if you click for classic sites, you'll still end up with the new sites, and can't manage classic sites. - So classic? Trolling users. Thank you for that. Luckily the actual classic sites management page still exists, if you just know the correct URL. Maybe it's time to migrate my site to modern sites. Let's see when I've got the right mood for that. I'm already prepared that it's going to be painful. But let's just see how painful. - Sometimes it's those small fails, which are after all very annoying. It seems that they've updated the sites login, so that it redirects from old sites to new sites. But at the same time they forgot that now clicking the link classic sites, will get again redirected to new / modern sites. Sigh. - I'm IT guy, and I've gotta workaround this stuff. But what about normal people, whom might not have the skills to look for different workarounds?
• HSL (Helsinki Area Public Transport) launched new mobile app to buy tickets. It's a real troll all. First of all, it's extremely bloated, next it doesn't support anything else than latest iOS and Android versions, it's requires really fast mobile data to be usable and with many phones where it works, it's still really laggy. - This is exactly what I've been saying about elite developers. They make junk, which is practically unusable, and they don't have any clue about so called "real world". - It's just funny to see this same concept to repeat over and over again in different cases and situations. - That's an app which should work with any smart phone, with minimal resources and should take a few megabytes and even that's ridiculously much. - But this seems to be the norm. Extremely simple applications, sized at 150 - 200 megabytes, which would consume mere kilobytes with same functionality in "good old times". Ok, maybe the small versions would lack some ultra HD video animations and other crap, which is absolutely useless for the function of the program. But it sill would get the job done. - At one point I loved to check how the IMAP / POP3 email notification apps grew. From tens of kilobytes to tens of megabytes, even if there was absolutely no extra value to the user. The user got simply notified if there's new mail or not in the mailbox. - Duh!
• Scaleway, IPv6 networking once again... At times traffic hits hop limit, there are "routing loops" as well as the connectivity is unreliable and often extremely slow with ridiculous latency. Not really working. This is once again one of the situations, it's painfully clear that IPv6 is second or even third class citizen in their network management and monitoring. It just doesn't matter if it works or not. Anyway, the funny part is, that it can work just well for a month or a few weeks, and then it's again totally broken. So the "failure isn't consistent" either. It seems to be routing related issue, as expected, because the connectivity is working to some locations and failing to other locations. This is something I've been observing with Scaleway for a long time with IPv6. Also connectivity from the server itself to some other networks fail every now and then. Also for some reason connectivity to Amazon S3 storage over IPv4 is extremely slow, around 1 Mbit/s or ~120kKbytes/s.
• 2FA - Really nice post about Two-Factor Authentication. What it's about and what are related risks and benefits. Nothing new, but if you're not familiar with all that stuff, it's still worth of reading. In one forum we had really long discussion if it's ok to backup / store the 2FA secrets, or if those should be protected so that those can't be transported / exported / copied / imported. But at least application / QR based applications do not guarantee that there wouldn't be multiple authentication devices with the same secret. Therefore, protecting the secrets from authorized export / backup doesn't make much sense.
• Darknet Diaries - Excellent podcast about dark stuff on the Internet, hacking, cracking and other scary & interesting activities. I've naturally listened every episode. This is true modern day warfare. - Kind of bad show, makes you really paranoid.

2019-01-19