Hotels, SimpleX, OCSP, Contabo, UpCloud, Matrix, Btrfs, FTPS, v2ray, AitM

1. I had interesting security incident in nice hotel. Someone entered the room between 3 and 4 am. As soon as they noticed I wasn't sleeping they immediately left. I didn't properly see them. But this is quite interesting observation. I reported it to the hotel chain management security department. Let's see if I'll ever get any kind of reply. If this is happening, it might not be isolated incident, that's why even if there wasn't any harm to me, I really wanted to report it. Maybe they already have some on going investigation, or maybe they've missed something essential. - They never bothered even to answer to that.

2. SimpleX Chat now finally got Finnish servers from their Flux server provider. Servers smp#.simplexonflux.com [4-6] are located near Helsinki. - When SimpleX Chat queue rotation and messaging redundancy are implemente,d then I'll probably consider SimpleX to be ready to be actually usable for communication. Before those tasks are completed, it's still too immature and unreliable, because message delivery relies on RAM of single server instance. If server is down, messages can't be delivered and or if it goes down unexpectedly, also queued messages are lost. But the feature is probably coming in 2025.

3. OCSP - Let's Encrypt is ending OCSP support (@ letsencrypt.org) - Uh oh. I've configured all of my servers to provide OCSP stapling and clients to use OCSP and require stapling. I hope the CRLite is will be widely enough supported. - Which it's not yet! And hopefully main clients like Chrome, Edge, Firefox, etc will support it and have it's required backend support, with compact incremental updates and bloom filters. - And the OCSP stapling is out (update)

4. Contabo - Great going, when customer service and support got these people. Windows Server 2025 doesn't work, then they say that you should reinstall the server. Yeah, but their platform doesn't offer reinstall option for Windows Server 2025. - I love it when customer service give answers that they know do not have any value to the user. - Yes, more than a full week later (7+ days), the server setup is still pending. - Even option to reinstall the server didn't seem to work from control panel, because the rescue mode boot fails and I assume that affects the image deployment process and it fails. I honestly asked who's behind their product deployment, quality assurance and site reliability engineering team is doing. It's obvious that the solution and organization is seriously broken on multiple levels. They're using Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE or PVE) (@ Wikipedia). - That's not all, even better, their server "Rescue Mode" is broken too. Yet, it seems to require additional console access and selecting alternate boot source with QEMU. Uh.

5. UpCloud - Started to run out of time with Contabo, so I decided to launch the service using UpCloud and it was all up'n'running in 35 minutes after the decision that it's necessary.

6. Element X and Matrix reliability. UtD etc. - broken. Yawn. Unreliable. Sigh. Similar problems than email.

7. Tor Webtunnel (@ blog.torproject.org) - Nice alternative to Snowflake, yet that's not as easy to run. Which means that number of sites and addresses providing access will be quite limited.

8. Btrfs - CRC32C (@ Wikipedia) hardware acceleration is utilized in several important file systems like Btrfs. - Nice, I didn't know.

9. Ah, pain TLS/FTPS always broken in more than one way. Sigh, maybe I'll finally give up and replace it with HTTPS and or SFTP...

10. v2ray (@ GitHub) is interesting proxy by pass and network restriction circumvention tool.

11. Surveilled (2024) (@ Wikipedia) Watched documentary about global digital surveillance. Nothing new or surprising in that documentary, obviously.

12. AitM (Adversary-in-the-Middle) (@ techcommunity.microsoft.com) aka MitM (@ Wikipedia) - Funny, sounds exactly like the attack scenario that TLS is designed to prevent.

13. Something different? Estonian Frankenburg Technologies Mark 1 anti air missile is way interesting. If it works, it should cut cost of anti drone defense by orders of magnitude.

2025-06-29