Suomi.fi, Hetzner, exFAT, DRAP, CMAC, Cloud, COM, CX Freeze

• Finnish Suomi.fi portal - Is adding Strong authentication for EU citizens. This is awesome, because now you can use strong identity with services. It's still amazing how many services totally lack strong identity & authentication. ref: eIDAS @ Wikipedia. kw: EU, Authentication, Identification, Electronic, Strong.
• By accident I just noticed that Hetzner is expanding it's own network and availability in Europe. Now Hetzner peers ad multiple IXs around Europe. So it isn't anymore pure Data Center operator.
• Lots of discussion about cryptocurrency mining in the background using web-browsers and JavaScript. Not a new concept really, distributed computing. Nor abusive usage of system resources.
• exFAT filenames are fun, when I try to rename file FILENAME to filename, it says file name already exists. I need to rename it to FILENAME_ and then to filename and it works just well.
• Registration Data Access Protocol (DRAP) and DRAP @ Wikipedia. Sure, it's interesting to see the ICANN standards and WHOIS finally removed? Because the WHOIS is too widely open and doesn't provide adequate privacy to match with GDPR.
• One-Key MAC and CMAC and CBC-MAC. These are ways of using ciphers to generate MAC. But what about using HASH to generate pseudorandom stream for XOR cipher? That's the matter I've been thinking for a long time. At least on idea level it sounds good. But I'm pretty sure crypto experts don't like the idea. But if the HASH stream is pseudorandom enough, and can't be reversed or guessed. Why it wouldn't be as good as pseudorandom OTP key stream?
• Current cloud and data retention trends also lead to interesting questions from customer. They assume, that I'll save whatever information I've ever received forever. That's interesting trend. They're not worried, what I use the information for and if I get rid of it. They're worried that I might get rid of it at some point and I should retain it forever. And they might be even upset, if I don't have something still, I've received seven years ago or something. There are just so radical differences between organizations. Some say that you should not ever copy any information outside their system, and others assume that all their information is automatically copied and stored forever and even prefer that.
• Even more time wasted with archaic Common Object Model Interface (COM) integration. This is horrible waste of time, resources and mental energy. Well, someday it'll work. I've read I guess 300 pages of documentation, tried about 1000+ times with different configurations etc. win32com just unfortunately remains broken when it's being used with cx_freeze. I'll try tomorrow again. Extremely painful, infuriating, frustrating and pointless. I hate absolutely broken legacy technologies. I'm pretty close to the goal after all these attempts but things just aren't working out. It doesn't matter which method I call. All I get is call to __init__ modules run methods in my package. Parameters are /Automate -Embedding without any function parameters being passed forward.
• This is also great example why giving any time estimates totally suck. Because the implementation without cx_freeze took around 15 minutes, even if I did it first time ever. And the binary cx_freeze version of the same stuff, has now taken several days and there's no sign of it starting to work. It remains inherently broken, and might require modifying the existing libraries to fix the issues. Which is not new and I've done it before. Sometimes complex things are still extremely easy and quick to implement and sometimes extremely simple and easy things take ages to get working, if ever. This ia actually quote from some random Internet article, I feel like it right now. “Everything is sh*t. Embrace the anger and submit to suffering.”

2019-03-03