GS1 Digital Link, SMR drives, SimpleX

1. Toshiba Canvio SMR (@ Wikipedia) backup drive gave read errors. It's slow drive, even without any errors, now it's  insanely slow. Let's see if the problem is classic, some random read errors. Just like the cursed WD Blue drives often do. And some SSDs from Toshiba as well. I'll just completely overwrite the drive and rerun read test. Let's see what happens. Anyway, it's obvious that the drive isn't anymore production quality, so it'll be replaced, the rest of tests are automated to run, so I'll just leave those running over the weekend to see if there are any issues with the testing. Rewriting whole drive resulted it to be working ok again. 32 sectors relocated (remapped) and some data got corrupted. But now it's again "good as new", eh. Corrupted data got recovered from other sources.

2. Watched a few OPSEC conference videos. Good stuff. Remember, everything, absolutely everything leaks!

3. Reminded my self about some light investing and stock valuation related basic stuff: ROIC, WACC, RONIC, EPS, FV, FCFE, P/E, PEG, ESP

4. Helped a friend to setup a SimpleX Chat messaging server for their teams providing convenient secure group communications over Tor in very secure manner. Everything is used only in a small closed circle with dedicated burner devices and SIMs, just as it is supposed to be. No, I don't have any credentials to the server anymore, and the configuration job was done using Tails and temporary SSH keys, which I don't have anymore and I also removed the public key from the server before logging off. Anyway, having access to SMP aka simplexmq  (@ GitHub) server, only allows you to practically cause denial of service (DoS), by sabotaging it. All traffic is still end to end encrypted (e2ee) and IP addresses are protected by Tor. Only potential benefit would be traffic quantity and timing analysis. Yet all messages (aka packets) are also padded to 16 kB blocks. This means that all messages are just random blobs while passing through the server. The server process is also very well isolated with practically no access to the host resources. - The end devices only run GrapheneOS, F-Droid, Orbot and SimpleX. - From external perspective the devices only connect to internet and Tor and that's it. Nobody can tell which devices are communicating with each other and when, easily.

5. Differences with data hygiene SimpleX (XFTP) versus Matrix MXC are staggering. SimpleX XFTP keeps track of access tokens and / encryption keys, and chunks of the file are encrypted and distributed. Yet MXC:s are AES/CTR encrypted with unique key (if encrypted), but after that the media is just freely replicated, delivered, without authentication, and there's no clear expiration. As long as the key is kept secret of course the data should be useless. But just as generic design / approach is quite different between these solutions.

6. Studied "new" GS1 (@ Wikipedia) article code standards. One thing I thought afterwards was that in many daily grocery stores this coding scheme might almost nullify need for expensive inventory? Why? Products have limited shelf life. When products expire, system tells about it. And stock is automatically well maintained, eliminating need to execute separate inventory task. kw: GS1 Digital Link URI, GS1 DataMatrix, GS1 QR code, Application Identifier (AI)

7. Great reading, read it from cover to cover NATO (@ Wikipedia) - Science & Technology Trends 2023-2043 - report (yet, it's more like a book!), and even book series if you also note the external links in the document. Thousands of pages of awesome future predictions. kw: military, emerging and disruptive technologies - It was a lot to read and found several interesting aspects to deepen my knowledge about. 

8. SimpleX Chat v5 is out, they also released a nice blog post (@ simplex.chat) about the project backgrounds, motivations, vision, funding, etc. As well as now the mainstream version also includes XFTP protocol support. 

9. Finally got all backup systems configured and running again, after disk storage system failure. Phew!

10. Checked out Hedera Hashgraph (@ hedera.com). Yet I don't yet see any use for it, with my use cases.

11. Something different? Watched a three part documentary series about Nordic War and Russian espionage in Nordic areas.

2024-03-10