IPv6, Git, SatCom, ESNI, Tails, Twitter, Email, Scaling

1. 90%+ LTE users in China are using IPv6 (@ APNIC Blog) I bet that even if this blog post is doing to be delayed for over 12 months, the situation Europe isn't going to be anything nearly this good.

2. It seems that many coders today aren't familiar with protocols like ESC/POS, even if there's nothing special there. Just read the docks and get it working. Therefore I implemented ESC/POS QR Code and PDF417 (@ Wikipedia) 2D barcode printing for one coupon / ticketing project. Fun and easy.

3. Git finally supports SHA-256 (@ Wikipedia), yet the time while projects are using SHA-1 and SHA-256 require bit of trickery which can be confusing. It's also possible to convert all objects to use SHA-256, but of course in that case all SHA-1 references get broken. Therefore it's unlikely to happen to older repositories.

4. I'm also very curious to see what kind of global effects the Starlink, OneWb and Kuiper systems will cause. What countries will banning services, what the final pricing and performance will be like. If it the systems will be used for HFT links and so on. Well this post (@ Some Blog) was good enough, yet lot of speculation, that I decided to read it in full. Here's another shorter post (@ Sneak Berlin) with less technical stuff.

5. It's so strange that Firefox ESNI (encrypted - server name identification @ Wikipedia) doesn't work unless DoH is enabled. Afaik that doesn't make any sense.

6. Lot's of tuning connecting private networks using sit and GRE tunnels (@ Wikipedia). Aww. now everything even works automatically with dynamic end points. Oh, no encryption? Yep, no encryption, everything being transferred is pre-encrypted, so adding extra layers on encryption isn't necessary and for low end devices only causes serious CPU overhead.

7. Tails (@ Wikipedia) documentation says that you can't upgrade the system in place without external device. But you actually can. You'll just download the image. And then simply copy the Tails partition from the image to the destination disk overwriting the existing file system. I did skip the partition table on purpose, so all the existing partitions do remain on the disk. Worked like a charm. Yet people claim this can't be done. When data is written to the disk just sync and hard boot or use oflag=direct in the very first place. Job done. Of course that corrupts the live file system, but so what? It's read only. It's enough that the write process completes. On next boot, everything is fine again. So, it's possible to update the boot media from root shell, which the live system is currently running from.

8. Bad password handling (@ Twitter). I'm clearly not only one encountering this junk code all the time. It's so frustrating and annoying.

9. Did I already complain about stupid validation rules and incompetent brain dead software developers? Again, Finnair doesn't accept email addresses there is a minus-sign aka dash or hyphen (in ASCII) is in the domain part of email address. Great work! Anyway, as I've mentioned earlier. Email address validation code is almost always broken, only some sites get things right. RTFM: Email Address (@ Wikipedia).

10. Nice post about scaling apps / web-sites for larger number (100k) of users (@ AlexPareto.com)-. I usually add CDN and Caching very early, because it's trivial when developing the system. Also data structures need to be designed in a way, to support caching. As example non-mutable object identifiers etc. So if object changes, it's a different object, make caching lot easier. Yet of course those aren't done for very low traffic sites.

11. Something different? Space fence a surveillance system, Seasteading floating cities or completely independent countries of the future?

2021-01-31