Matrix, DoT, Fusion, Pleroma, Firefox, SimpleX, VPN, DNS

1. I made some quick tests, it seems that even files shared in private encrypted non-federated room, are globally available via Matrix (@ Wikipedia) servers. It remains debatable how much that matters, but in some terms it's serious security fail. Only the chat itself is blocked by "do not federate" switch.

2. DNS over TLS (DoT) (@ Wikipedia) is also tricky to configure correctly, had to read many documents and ask a few friends to get it perfect. No wonder it's likely to be configured incorrectly, because it's tricky, and seems to be working even if not configured correctly.

3. Absolutely great YouTube video: Why Nuclear Fusion is Closer Than You Think (@ YouTube).

4. Lots of tuning with meta Open Graph (@ Wikipedia) og:title etc tags. Pretty broken system, also many of the online validators are also broken, which is kind of hilarious. When you combine bad with bad and multiply it with bad, what you would expect the result to be? Great? Hmm...

5. Pleroma (ActivityPub (@ Wikipedia)) home timeline has been really slow and giving timeouts. Wondering what's wrong with it. Who knows. Nobody has time to debug that kind of broken stuff, which is randomly broken and doesn't give any clear indication why. - So normal. - Now it's migrated to Akkoma, let's see if it's any better option. Looks pretty same.

6. Lot's of server utility, performance and cost optimization talks and acts lately as well as negotiating better pricing. Let's see how things work out. Lot of pressure to lower costs, if same results can be achieved cheaper. These kind of projects involve risks, but can also bring tremendous cost savings.

7. Mobile Firefox tabs are still broken. Page / tab content doesn't always match the title / URL shown. This is a serious problem that can cause security issues in some situations. Similarly Tor Browser got issues with new tabs, sometimes existing tabs aren't show when you're creating new tabs.

8. Listened Opt Out Podcast (@ Wikipedia) about Session (@ Wikipedia). I personally don't like the Session design concepts. I've said it earlier. Having one static encryption key and identity is really bad design afaik and that's it. There's no denying it. Also the reasoning why they did it wasn't solid. Of course using more advanced protocols are complex things to implement, but there's a reason why that is being done.

9. SimpleX.chat is planning to implement larger groups, MLS and potential automatic identity rotation which makes identifying and tracking users metadata harder. Yet MLS key agreement solution for rooms is completely different that SimpleX's current highly secure 1:1 with forward secrecy (@ Wikipedia) model.

10. About that VPN stuff making network slower. Well, it depends. A long time ago when I were in Uni. I there was a local ISP which provided 10 Mbit/s Internet access in very early 90s. It was true and it delivered. But because Internet transit was immensely expensive, the 10 Mbit/s speed was practically only available for national traffic. If you went beyond borders of the country, then the speed dropped to something like 100 - 50kbit/s level. Good thing about that was it did teach people to user local national mirrors. Why download X from faraway, when you can get it from your local mirror? Another funny thing was, that if you then used VPN to Uni network, which had seemingly unlimited networking resources globally, the international transfer speed was back up to 10 Mbit/s level. Because you didn't to through the ISPs very limited / crowded transit pipe.

11. Today when talking about DNS, I got a crazy idea. Where's the DNS TXT record format for Matrix contact information? After long discussion and going back and forth with different options I ended up adding this DNS TXT record: "matrix:u/sl:envs.net?action=chat" Yet I think, it's far from optimal. It does follow Matrix URI specification, but doesn't follow the TXT record attribute format (RFC 1464), "<attribute name>=<attribute value>". Yet of course TXT record can well contain any text and now it's just that.

12. It took some work, but managed to convince Mojeek (@ Wikipedia) and SipmleX.chat that discriminating people based on IP-version they're using isn't right! As example Starlink doesn't provide IPv4 addresses for users at all.

13. Something different? eVinci microreactor - Nice nice, 15 MW power 13 MW heating power and 5 MW electric power. That pretty much tells why heating is practically free, when you don't use electricity for it, because the thermal energy is all "free left over" from electricity production. Also studied Hermeus Chimera turbine-based combined cycle engine (TBCC), which allow hypersonic flight (@ Wikipedia) up to Mach 5. Ref: Air turborocket (@ Wikipedia) & Pratt & Whitney J58 (@ Wikipedia)

2023-12-24