Outlook, SCT Inst, CF, VPN, Kernighan's Law, C14, IPv6, Brunsli, NoReply

1. Microsoft Outlook bounces are broken when using custom addresses. Most interestingly, if I use Outlook mobile app, bounces do work. But if I use Outlook web mail or Thunderbird mail client, then the email bounces are broken. I think this is engineering logic. I can claim that my email service got 100% deliverability, because I don't track non delivered or bounced messages. - Neat! - Invalid return-path in headers, btw. Sure I've had chat with support, but they can't do anything about technically complex issues like this is. How about just fixing the return-path: outlook_JUSTFEAKINGFIXME_IN_HEX@outlook.com

2. Had long discussion with friends in payment business. SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) aka SEPA Instant Payments / pan-European euro instant payment scheme. It sets interesting requirements for fraud prevention and creates technical challengs. Maximum payment delay allowed is 10 seconds.

3. Ah, so nice. Microsoft Outlook email app got a new update. After the update, if I try to open ANY message, the application crashes immediately. Truly amazing work. I guess that's all I can say if I try to be polite. They got it fixed in couple of days. kw: elite coders, top quality, hyper teams, UX, quality, software, valuing customers

4. Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records (@ txti.es) - This story made me kind of smile. It's exactly what I've posted about Cloudflare providing exceptional customer experience. Yet they could have done better. The customer service should have simply answered, your account has been deleted, decision is final, now get lost.

5. Lot's of discussion about VPN (@ Wikipedia) solutions (network to network / enterprise) with a few colleagues from different companies. It's normal, that totally outdated VPN technologies are used in production environments. IKEv1, DH5, MD5, 3DES? - It's time to let those go. Those were the gold standard just long time ago.

6. EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app (@ Politico.eu) - Interesting choice? Why they recommend US privacy app, which still get's all meta and contact information? There are many opinions what kind of privacy US companies provide and if it basically equals to none. Reminds so much about the Crypto Ag stuff.

7. Kernighan's Law - Yes, this is something I agree about. It's kind of fun to sometimes trying to make really clever elite code, which minimizes amount of code or does some crazy optimizations, at the same time making the logic really strange and code totally unreadable. But that's not something I'm preferring with production code. Writing 2000 characters long one-liner is also sometimes just fun. But just as a clever trick, not for production.

8. C14 Cold Storage @ Scaleway - Checked it out. Works well and provides nice amount of free space to start with. Also see the behind the scenes blog post (@ Scaleway Blog). Opened short discussion if cold storage could be utilized for backups like Duplicati in a dynamic way, where old static content would get cooled down to save costs. Anyway, if they write to SMR (@ Wikipedia) drive and then quickly power it off. The SMR drive can't empty it's "write buffer". So I personally would keep the drive powered on longer, than the data channel is connected. It would allow the write buffer to be emptied and the drive would accept writes faster when it's next time powered on again. I don't know what time time to empty the write buffer actually is, but I'm sure it can be reasonably simply estimated based on the writes to the disk.

9. After watching IPv6 / ICMPv6 type 135 Neighbor Solicitation (Neighbor Discovery Protocol, ND, NDP) messages for a while on my LAN, it's very clear, that someone is scanning the whole IPv6 address space. Because I'm receiving lot of requests for unicast addresses that I'm 100% sure I haven't ever used in my personal address ranges. This address space hasn't been pre-allocated for anyone earlier, so it should be clear.

10. Brunsli (@ GitHub) - lossless and practical JPEG repacker. Nice. Yet it remains to be seen if AVIF (@ Wikipedia) or JPEG XL (@ Wikipedia) will be the main stream future. Even WebP (@ Wikipedia) isn't widely used.

11. How much confidential business information is bouncing back to or sent directly to noreply email address? - A lot. Sometimes it's so annoying that it would feel like an funny idea to just publish all that. Well, you didn't clearly care where you send the information, so why would it matter if it's made public? - Just kidding, but honestly. Nobody clearly gives a bleep, even if they should?

2021-03-14