Unikernel, ThumbHash, Tunnelbroker, Hosting, SimpleX

1. A ThumbHash (@ GitHub) a better minimal image presentation option than BlurHash? For image previews.

2. A nice simple post about Web fingerprinting (@ bitestring.com). And as expected, it's nothing new.

3. Migrated a bunch of 6in4 IPv6 over IPv4 tunnels back to tunnelbroker.net, because Route48 terminated services. Duh! Sad to see Route48 go, but that's life at times.

4. It seems that many friends are again interested setting up home servers. I've helped several. First hardware, and then with networking. Using multiple different configurations depending on the need of the solution, using dynamic IPv4 + DDNS, IPv6 tunneling, SSH tunnels, WireGuard, Nginx with reverse caching proxy, VPS with static IP / IPv6 for entry / exit point with VPN etc. This is a lot cheaper solution to run than having dedicated server or high performance VPS. Especially if you need lots of RAM or storage and not so much bandwidth after all. Yet, it's worth of noting that residential 1/1 Gigabit connection is still relatively cheap and provides just as good latency than local data center would.

5. Unikernels as Processes (PDF, @ people.cs.vt.edu) - Quite an interesting paper. kw: unikernels, cloud computing, security, virtualization, privacy, performance and hardware and system requirements

6. Some people want badly written monitoring program on top of badly working software. I don't know what to think about it. I only agree that the monitoring idea is good, if it's ultimate goal is to catch and fix the issues. But if the monitoring is just used to tell when things go wrong and then manually trying to clean up the mess, then the efforts are misplaced. Also of course it would be positive if the design would be sound, and implementation and tests as well. But if not, well monitoring is one way to use production for testing to figure out when things go wrong. But at least I'm 100% sure, this isn't overall the best approach. Yet I'm worried, that it might also mean that the true root cause isn't even planned to be fixed. - But these are questions which arise with every project. Resic, Duplicati, Element, SimpleX, etc. Even if there are things which are obviously very bad, and happen repeatedly, things are still well, as they've been for years now. Very much broken.

7. Messaging Layer Security: Secure and Usable End-to-End Encryption (@ ietf.org) - Awesome. Just hoping that the implementation will be done correctly. Because I'm complaining about Matrix MegOLM being broken about monthly. MLS is very complex protocol with it's epochs and might get practically broken in the similar ways than MegOLM does. Afaik, MegOLM got it's own drawbacks, I personally kind of like it, it's quite well balanced between security and key management requirements.

8. Whoa, used WireGuard on Windows. That's like w00-h00, extreme user hostile application. Great work. Well sure, it does work. But if someone says that OpenPGP is bad, because it's so user hostile. WireGuard seems to be even much worse. Well, didn't surprise. I've found so many VPN products to be extremely bad from user experience point of view, except very few. At least someone has created the great website WireGuard Config Generator which makes the process at least barely bearable by providing sane sample configs.

9. SimpleX Chat seems better and better. They're constantly adding great features. I've been wondering for ages why many developers claim such features are impossible to implement. Yet SimpleX is doing it. Great work!

10. SimpleX Chat bug fix speed is also amazing. I reported an issue, and version with the fix to that issue got delivered online in under two hours from the bug report being made! That's just like I prefer to work with my projects. Ah, known issue, let's get it fixed, so it's done and everyone is happy.

11. Why every app should be perfect for everything? SimpleX users complain about lack of huge public groups, and Matrix users complain about lack of ultra privacy features. How about choosing the right tool for the task at hand? - Shouldn't that be quite obvious? - Also lot of other discussions about SimpleX. Maybe bit too much. I have to have a break from this repeated annoying topic.

12. SimpleX is also still missing Wikipedia article or even stub, but maybe that time comes at some point.

13. Something different? Pauli effect (@ Wikipedia). I'm sure everyone knows this effect from experience, but I didn't know it had Wikipedia article.

2024-03-03