Refactoring, Silly requests, Suite B Crypto, C-Lion1, Privacy, Opinions, Cloudflare

Post date: Feb 28, 2016 9:57:39 AM

• Re-factored one project. It had horrible copy pasta code, and same bug could be in tens of different places. Modified code to do it right, and deduplicated stuff as well as wrote reusable functions and libraries for the project. Before the refactoring it was a real nightmare to maintain.
• I so much enjoy smart people. Like in this case there's horrible mile long complaint from 'a party' that system isn't working and data isn't getting delivered etc. They make all kind of threats and requested a through investigation to be made. What has happened and why and doing the root cause analysis and all the traditional excess stuff. Ok. I'll do all that. I did it because they asked for it. I also invoiced for all the documentation and reports they requested as well as explained as detailed as possible what was the root cause as far as I can report it outside their organization. What was the root cause? The system that was supposed to generate the data source, wasn't turned on. Why? Because they weren't using the system at the time. And it wasn't being used, because it was being relocated to another physical location. So... They got bunch of documentation, and a long invoice. All because they accused that my system isn't working and they didn't realize that there's nothing for it to work on. Yes, it's clearly visible that no data is available from source X.
  • I wonder what my bank would say if I would demand that they'll make a detailed technical report and check their back end systems, because I don't have a billion Euro on my account. Do I have any claim that I should have? No? But I just think that it might be a system error that my account balance isn't showing such numbers.. - Or should I claim billion dollars from Gmail, because the love letter from billionaire to me was lost due to Gmail errors and I lost the extremely profitable marriage. - Just trolling because some things inherently annoy me.
  • I wonder if they were smart enough to continue the investigation in their own organization and figure out why they make silly requests like this. If they didn't, the invoice they received clearly wasn't big enough. Maybe exponential growth would make them think next time before asking for the same thing.
  • Actually if they pay enough, I could write a program that uses ML to generate them believable looking fake data when no real data exists. I wonder if the management in their organization would be happy about that. Even better question is, how long it would take before they figure out it's not real. It's kind of funny to think about that. Because the initial problem was them not knowing their data. So it could pass for quite a long time.
• Even more Mobile Payments, Mobile Loyalty Systems and Mobile Receipts. How do you know you master something? When it feels like every presentation is similar to others and does not raise any questions or arouse interest how they're really doing it. It's just business as usual and trivial stuff. Than you for giving the presentation but I could have guessed 95% of it's content anyway in general terms. I'm just wondering if any service provider is going to get enough market share to become de facto standard. Market is currently extremely fragmented in Finland.There are solutions and more solutions, some provide all of mentioned services, some provide even more, and some just one service, and so on. Gaining the market traction would be the killer here. Now it's just frustrating for everyone. Do I want to install yet another App that I can't use anywhere? No. Do retailers want to use integration / service that's not being used for anyone yet costs them money? No. Ok, let's not the use all of those so cool Apps.
• Read: NSA: Suite B by Cryptography Today
• Checked out SPHINCS (SPHINCS-256) - SPHINCS: practical stateless hash-based signatures
• Cinia C-Lion1: Submarine Digital Highway video @ YouTube - Yet, even this is official video from Cinia. It seems that they don't know the difference between bits and bytes. So much lulz. Epic fail, gives great confidence to your guys. Cinia's article about the cable getting completed.
• Had extremely long discussion with friends about privacy, censorship, self-censorship, chilling effect, social pressure and other means used to control people. Especially loss of privacy in communications causes everything to be self-censored. Can I really say this? This could be used against me later and so on. Maybe it's better just not to have any opinions, because some opinions might be 'wrong opinions' later, which could lead to almost anything... You can't even imagine.
• I've been following B2 Cloud-Storage Beta announcements from BackBlaze. I'm unfortunately fully booked, so I haven't had time to play with it. But it seems that if I need 'extra blob storage' for any systems. I'm most probably using B2 with encrypted blobs.
• Cloudflare is now connected directly to 100 Internet Exchange Points. - Very nice post. Nothing new there I didn't know yet. I would be more interested to know how Cloudflare takes care of their connectivity from their PoPs to the original content providers. As far as I can remember, I haven't seen any posts about that. Maybe I'll just post a question on Twitter and ask for it. Let's see if there will be any answers. Kw: Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), network Access Points (NAPs), peering, transit, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), Internet Service Providers (ISPs), LINX, LONAP, AMS-IX, NL-IX, DE-CIX, ECIX, Autonomous Networks (ASNs), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR), Networks, Routing, Distrubted Denial of Service (DDoS), Point of Presence (PoPs).