SSH, PowerShell, Ereceipt, SMB, IoT, Networking, Choice

1. I had some ideas about SSH-key based authentication. I mean it would be used to logging into services. Yet it means that the process should know what the public key provided was and the SSH server should accept any public key. Just wondering if that's possible. Quick search didn't provide any hits for such a strange configuration.

2. Finland announced that all official authorities start using The Galileo Public Regulated Service (PRS) (@ gsa.europe.eu) instead of GPS in the future.

3. Tons of PowerShell scripting and dealing with TLS (SSL) certificate update automation and distribution. My mind got seriously blown how complex they want to do very very simple things. Copy-Item ... to ... won't work. Instead you'll need 636 bytes of scripting and figuring out how to do it, and more copy paste code and code to delete expired certs and ... Phew... In total 1471 bytes and a few hours wasted. Now I just hope it works in future when the certificate renewal time comes again.

4. Eurocard is pushing electronic receipts hard. That's wonderful. Allowing automated and fully electronic expense management. No more paper receipt. kw: ereceipt, e-receipt, smart receipts concept, business automation

5. Automated dropping unnecessary SMB connections daily. It seems that some systems just open more and more SMB sessions and connections (client & server side). Now both are dropped automatically.

6. Classic tech forum stuff, one user asked how you can use touch filename in Windows. Discussion were several hundreds of comments long and many many of those answers were actually incorrect. Legendary. - Yet it's just so common that things are done incorrectly.

7. IoT home automation post by Troy Hunt (@ troyhunt.com) , awesome stuff. I know the feeling, I've been walking the very same path and wondering if it's really worth of it. So far I've decided it's not worth of it. But of course it's something you've could spent a few weeks toying with and then keep debugging annoying problems when those arise later over and over again in different forms. Sounds joyful! I've learned to appreciate simplicity and minimalism. Setting up things takes N units, but then there's constant maintenance and trouble shooting when something changes later. - Reading some discussions with long time users, just confirmed the constant breaking down, debugging, fixing and trying again steps. Well, that's exactly what I expected. - Someone said that smart home is time consuming and expensive hobby. Yep.

8. Nice story, undelete flv file (@ behind.pretix.eu). My first thoughts were fragmentation and data integrity. One step he missed, would have been trying to fill the corrupted data with some checksum from the disk. Yet this would probably take excessive resources. Luckily ext4 extents make data recovery somewhat more feasible (unless disk is quite full) than NTFS with very high small fragment counts.

9. Optimized network address coalescing in one project. Now routing and firewall rules are automatically merged into mininum number of rules, using variable network masks. Python's ipaddress library makes this pretty much a joy. New code was easy, merging it with old code, well that was painful. But nothing new. Of course the new code was bolted onto the old code using minimum amount of work and effort, leading into interesting kind of chimera. Business as usual.

10. Absolutely great talk about the Paradox of choice (@ ted.com). Been there done that. Analysis paralysis, there are so many options to choose from, that you don't do the selection at all. Painfully truthful talk, investing, decision making, life. Also the fact that you're seldomly responsible for the consequences of choices is also deliberating. Great talk!

11. Another extremely interesting talk Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story (@ YouTube). Actually very nice one. Trust no one, encrypt everything, taken to next level, can't even trust the system hardware. Everything must be executed inside secure enclave. Even TPM can't be trusted, because it's usually communicated with over insecure channel. kw: Microsoft Pluton security processor.

2202-13