OPs, PXE, Museums, PII, eTurbo, SNN, OB, Email Filtration, Outlook

• So much appreciate operations team. Disabling firewalls on servers, etc. Aaargh. So much joy. No wonder everything is insecure, when people are doing their best making systems insecure.
• Updated some systems to PXE boot over HTTP instead of TFTP, nice good improvement and switched from pxelinux.0 to lpxelinux.0.
• Visited a Spy Museum at Tampere, Finland. They covered all the classical options, telecommunications, eavesdropping, stenography, hidden messages, lie detectors, encryption, cracking ciphers, code books, OTP, social networks, dead drops, short wave radios, optical communication, hidden devices, coins, rocks, walking sticks, secret assassin weapons and so on.. Good timing, because in Finland there's that new Internet & Military surveillance law being crafted right now. Anyway, as we know, spying is nothing new, it's as old as human kind. And everyone spies as much as they can. That's nothing new either.
• I finally received statement from national data security department. It took them one year to handle minor leak of (lost) document(s) containing personally identifying information (PII) register. Ok, I guess this was very low priority for them. But it's still funny that it takes one year to close that kind of stuff, which could have been handled in a day or two. - But hey, at least they gave final and official statement. Possibly after my blog post. I'm not sure about that. I didn't ever refer to the details of the case. Just generally complained, that the processing was slow and it seemed that nobody cares about PII leaks after all. Who knows if the Equifax discussion woke them up or maybe not.
• People are talking that electric vehicles could have electric turbo which would eliminate turbo lag. But what's the point of doing that at all? Because ... On electric vehicle you can have on-board charger. There's no need to connect the gasoline (or other fuel) unit to the traditional power train (if it exists at all). The charger can run on only one optimal power setting and that's it. Therefore there's no need or reason to run the engine on wide range of engine speed at all. Either the charger is on, or off. That's it. It's only used if the battery is low and extra power is required. And of course it's possible heat emissions can be used for extra heating power.
• Social Security Number broken system - As tech guy. I don't see any problem there. In Finland HETU / National Identification Number is used to identify people, and that's not a problem either. What does it matter if the ID is social security number, just an integer or UUID. Doesn't make any kind of difference. Afaik, it's pretty handy for many purposes to have unique identifying ID for people. Why it would be a problem? Unless you of course want to hide your identity and make gathering data pieces together harder. In those cases it's better to avoid giving that information in the very first place. - Laughed at the endless discussions about this matter. Somethings are just so simple, that there's not much to talk about. Just like the passwords. This one seems to belong to the same category.
• Finally updated one project to work with both, OpenBazaar cookie authentication using "OpenBazaar_Auth_Cookie" cookie. As well as alternate approach where HTTP Basic Authorization is being used with Basic Base64 stuff. Now both options work perfectly with latest OpenBazaar 2.0 Beta (v0.9.1-beta).
• I don't know if I should laugh of cry. First people want their email filtered by 3rd party and then they complain about not receiving some emails. Well, it's your own choice. Don't complain to me, I'll just laugh you out.
• I just thought for a while that Outlook has been working quite nicely lately. But after running a few traceroutes, I found out why. It seems that they're finally handling IMAP and SMTP traffic in Europe, instead of always routing it to single location in US as it used to be. Even if Finland is in "edge zone" of Europe. This has still cut the round trip latencies by over 60%. - Thanks. Finally something positive about Outlook. Another interesting remark is that the new beta Outlook doesn't support Skype anymore. Afaik, that's only positive. It was just more bloat to the site.

2019-01-06