Hobbies, Hetzner, MailGun, AirWheel, Security, RDP, FF

• It seems that it has had time to fold one of my hobby projects. First of all, I didn't have time and motivation for it. It would have consumed too much of my free time. And as bonus, it had become more or less obsolete due to other technological advancements. But I can't go into too much detail just yet. All the things got the beginning and the end.
• Attended Hetzner Data Center Park Helsinki Finland Grand Opening and data center tour event. It was a nice event. I'm also looking for Telia DC Pitäjänmäki data center tour, which I've already arranged in the future for the company staff.
• MailGun finally released their EU endpoints. Awesome, this was one of the reasons why I preferred SendGrid before, their API was a lot faster to use in EU than MailGun's from US. On quick view, it seems that it's basically a completely parallel installation of the environment, with only login being shared.
• For summer fun I've had joy to ride AirWheel X3S MarsRover . It took a while to learn how to ride it comfortably, but it's a nice ride when you're used to it.
• Tor's Open Research Topics 2018 - Excellent article about: Including networking performance, Congestion Control and Fairness, Load Balancing, Network Security, Guard Discovery, Traffic Analysis, Censorship Circumvention, Entrance Side, Exit Side, Application Research, Usability, Privacy. All absolutely excellent subjects and well written post with good links and references.
• Public Key Authentication and security - Long discussions about it. It was just curious to notice, that Chrome doesn't even show the public key fingerprint to the user, when user is prompted to confirm that the public key is correct one. I personally find that pretty annoying. How can the user confirm the keys correctness if any information about the key isn't being show. - Duh! - Sure it's possible to view the fingerprint via address bar and certificate info, but why not to show the "key information" directly? - I really don't get it, is checking public key fingerprint really so hard for people. In one project, it took again several hours, even if it should take a minute over phone or seconds on chat / email.
• Windows administrators, they've never used PowerShell nor cmd. If it's not point and shoot with mouse, they're absolutely clueless. - Unfortunate truth of today's Facebook tech gurus. - Lot's of discussion again about HTTPS and "security" and what the "valid certificate" actually means and guarantees. Which isn't too much actually. Valid domain validated certificate guarantees that they've seen the same certificate with that domain before signing it, nothing else. Green lock, doesn't mean "certified security" even if sounds awesome.
• RDP sessions disconnect and hang more or less randomly, but quite often. On networking level, everything seems to be fine. Sigh. Digging deeper. Let's see what's the trick this time which will solve the problem. These are situations where it's awesome to have monitoring tools deployed in multiple data centers. After lot of googling, it seems hopeless. RDP just won't work reliably. And I'm not the only one reporting the problem, and the networks seem to be fine. Maybe I'll need to change more or less random settings. Or maybe the UDP mode is for some strange reason just very prone to repeated disconnects? I've got monitoring systems at Hetzner, Google, UpCloud (multiple DCs), ScaleWay, Nebula, Telia DC, and so on.
• Transactions - More of endless discussion about transactions, reliability and correct design. So many implementations, protocols and systems are absolutely and totally broken by design. - Luckily in most of times, it's not my code / part which is broken. Because I know how to design and implement this stuff right , and so that it works reliably. I hate nothing more than pointless waste of time spent fixing manually something which got automatically totally messed up.
• Decided to try Mobile Firefox for Android, mostly working fine. Font sizes and scaling are bit strange at times. Classic issue with mobile browsers, as well as on desktop of course. But annoying thing is that you can't share web-images as images alone directly from browser. At times those are being shared as .bin files (probably some issue with MIME types or something?). Also another annoying thing is that if you share image from web, the original URL is also always included. Some of the apps allow you to remove the url later like WhatsApp as image description and some won't like Telegram.

2020-01-12