OpenNIC, Mayday, Spring cleanup, 2FA / Cloud Services, Windows 8 CP, Distributed file/storage systems

Post date: Mar 4, 2012 10:14:55 AM

• samilehtinen.geek is now registered for 10 years. I just wanted to try OpenNIC project. Drawback with OpenNIC domains is that those do not work without using alternate DNS servers.
• Made complete spring cleanup for my computers. Many were completely full of house dust. No wonder that CPU coolers scream to get more air and temps rise.
• Watched a few episodes of Mayday Air Crash Investigation. It very clearly show how many ways there are to fail catastrophically and how many problems are caused by bad communication and human error! I would prefer fully automated air planes, because it's quite common that people in cockpit are reason for accidents and destruction. I also recommended this series for my co-workers. How important team work and proper communication is. Disregarding safety guidelines also can lead to major mishaps. Even if this series is about air traffic, exactly same reasons for problems are found for sure in every profession where teamwork and technical skills are required.
• Talked with people about importance of proper authentication. This Linode compromise clearly shows how important it is. Cloud services are cool, but if all it takes to destroy everything is one static login / pass combination. I think, it isn't safe enough! At least some kind of two factor authentication should be used, with changing access codes.
• Windows 8 consumer preview came out. I had to test it. I personally didn't like Metro user interface too much. But maybe for small tablets it is nice and better to use than traditional desktop where objects often are too small to be easily accessed using touch screen.
• Read white papers of Tahoe-LAFS. Many people say that it's great. But personally I don't think it's so great at all. Only storage layer is fully distributed. In many cases it would be ideal to distribute higher management layers too. Like Freenet and GNUnet does. Yes, I have read also lots of documentation related to these solutions. I was also the person who suggested that GNUnet should expire entries from cache. Before that GNUnet nodes only collected data to cache until it was full and there wasn't any kind of expiry process. I always want solutions to be complete in long run. If something works for a while, it's not complete solution. It should work also in long run without problems.