Sites, Firefox, Routing, Alt Search, Maximator, OVH, Matrix, WeeChat

1. It seems that Google Sites (@ Google) has slightly changed how new pages look, Title isn't coming to page automatically anymore as well as the newly created pages got slightly different stylesheet where the title is smaller than it used to be. Edit update while posting: For a while page header wasn't automatically added when creating page(s), now it is created automatically again.

2. Found out that Mozilla Firefox (@ Wikipedia) HTTP/3 (H3)(@ Wikipedia) support is incompatible with Facebook / WhatsApp implementation, which leads to connection failure. This is actually why I've had the H3 disabled, and I'll keep it disabled for a while. Yet faik, issues like this shouldn't happen, that's why there are several SPDY / H3 versions which have different feature support. Failure shouldn't be an option. Ahem, yet as we all know, it always is. Based on my experience Facebook says, their implementation is perfect as well as Firefox team. The result is that there's nothing wrong, it's just not working. - Been there, done that.

3. More crazy routing, traffic between Telia (Oracle Cloud) and Hurricane Electric seems to always loop via London. Traffic from Oracle to TunnelBroker (via London) adds extra 14 ms of round trip latency (RTT). Sigh!

4. Alternate Search Engines: Cliqz is shutting down (@ LinkedIn) linked via LinkedIn on purpose, because it's not clear how long the official site will be kept alive. Luckily some alternatives remain like Yippy, Private.sh. It's good to remember that DuckDuckGo (DDG) isn't independent search engine, same applies to Qwant, Oscobo and Private.sh which are just glorified Bing wrappers. But Yippy is truly interesting option, yet slow currently.

5. Maximator - Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and France SIGINT Alliance (@ schneier.com) - Totally expected, but it's nice that these things come to light.

6. OVH refuses to sell cheap VPS servers to Finland, this is interesting approach. Error: '[400 Bad Request]: "Plan vps-essential-2-4-80 is not sold in merchant FI'. - Also their contact customer support form is broken. Classic OVH quality service. Yet the rant about OVH tech and management issues could go on forever.

7. Riot 1.6 is out with E2EE enabled by default (no link, old domain) and another lighter post about E2EE being enabled by default (@ Matrix) . Nice, yet I assume this won't resolve the room issues I've reported earlier, but I'm eager to see if it does. They claim it would, but I guess it still wont, in case of multi user rooms with encryption. Also having some discussions with other users, I might have found new ways to deal around this limitation. I'll probably post a few weeks later if this new solution has resolved the issue. (leaving last client / device / session logged-in, even if inactive / off-line). At least the blog post mentions "Solving “Unable to decrypt” errors". QR code verification feature is also nice as well as emoji verification, which allows easy "out of band" channel verification. I did have a long discussion about this E2EE key management topic, and it seems that the room level encryption, without having persistent device / session, still won't work. There's no way to relay the required decryption keys in such situation. The root cause for this is that the encryption is tied to the session / device, which is inactive and won't return online anymore, instead of being tied to user. From the issue list, "you weren't in the room when the messages were sent". I were, but my session / device being active weren't. Gossip protocol is nice, yet won't solve the problem before. Yet it allows slightly better security than using server based encrypted, encryption key storage. Text color, themes, emoji picker, oh no now. Now we've got the "focus" again. kw: SSSS - Secure Secret Storage and Sharing, aka Quad-S (@ GitHub), E2E, Pantalaimon, Mjolnir, IAM SAML. Update while posting - Now Riot is called Matrix.

8. After going through WeeChat (@ Weechat.org) documentation. These are so different worlds. WeeChat (@ Wikipedia) is incredibly feature rich. When you compare that to most of apps being delivered nowadays for end users, which are totally retarded, it reminds that software can be a lot more than for dummies. There are developers and "developers". Scripting APIs, FIFO pipes access, Plugins, tons of keyboard commands and features, SASL & TOTP.

9. While debugging one project had a bunch of classic Microsoft error messages: "bad exception, broken promise, future already retrieved, unknown error, owner dead". Yet I would have preferred my personal favorite: "invalid user error", which explains most of failures very well.

2021-05-16