GoDaddy SMTP, EMV authentication, Google+ API, Tor blocking, Nginx, uWSGI, Git, ADrive, € in password

Post date: Sep 18, 2011 8:39:37 AM

This was fun weekend. I did plenty of things.

• Found out that GoDaddy's european STMP servers are randomly unreachable. I'm not yet exactly sure what's causing this. Emails between Yahoo and GoDaddy aren't getting delivered due timeout.
• Monoprix, France grocery store chains EMV-terminals do not do proper authorization cancellation if card is removed from terminal before transaction is completed. It should do. At least our POS/EMV systems do it. Without auth money on your account keeps to be reserved form them for several weeks.
• Set up latest stable Nginx for my test server. Installed Python 3 and PostgreSQL. These should provide better performance than Apache HTTPD / Python CGI / SQLite. Altought this far those have been enough for testing with just a few users.
• Played with my test server and Google+ API. Seems to be working well, although API is super limited compared to Facebook APIs. I'm sure new features will be out soon.
• Read thoroughly documents how Iran blocked Tor and how Tor project team circumvented the problem. It seems that Iran got pretty nice deep packet inspection systems installed. There is also longer term solution with would allow usage of alternate pluggable transport methods.
• Wondered why one credit card transaction handling company recommended their clients to disable SSL-certificate checks completely. It seems that they forgot to renew certificate in time. I'm pretty sure that most of clients wont turn the check back on after certificate is renewed. Therefore allowing easy hijacking of data if DNS information is manipulated / spoofed. In this kind of special situation it could be good to use self signed pre-installed certificate with long enough expire time.
• Tried Git a bit with ProjectLocker. Found out that it's bit more complex than I previously thought and I need to study it more.
• Wonder why people upload confidential documents to services like DropBox. I personally like ADrive. It's great service and they offer 50 gigabytes of storage for free! Service is just fine as long as all files sent there are strongly encrypted.
• Logging in to Vista using RDP doesn't work with rdesktop client from Linux, if password contains € character. I have found out earlier that logging in to XP workstation doesn't work even locally if password contains € character. I have installed only Skandinavian keyboard layout which contains the € charater. It is possible to circumvent this problem on console by using ALT+0128 combination.