Weapons, MFS, Clever, Hetzner, DDG, SW, GCM, UI, SSHD, Sim, DSA

• Read a few long good articles about autonomous weapon systems. Nothing changed after reading those. No, there's nothing that could stop the future. First it will be man in the loop, but soon enough, it will be man out of the loop. Fully autonomous killer bots, where stopping is optional, those won't require authorization to engage after initial authorization. Which technically speaking doesn't make those any different from land mines. This is the sentry area, if something which is not supposed to be here, is spotted, seek and destroy. If you see killer bots warning sign, how eager you're going to be entering that area? I guess just as eager as mine field. It was clearly announced, and you went and took your changes. Too bad if something bad happens.
• Had to upgrade MergerFS to latest version, because older version which came with the Linux distribution being used, didn't support threads option. But now it's working perfectly in environment where four disks are merged together to providing network file server functions (without redundancy). If any of the disks fail, epmfs leads to situation where just some directories will disappear when disk is replace, and content can be then re-uploaded from source(s).
• Clever drone surveillance detection method? I would say hardly. If this hardly is news to SIGINT / COMINT people. Or even if you're downloading large files over Tor network. What's more obvious that the sender varying transmission rate on purpose, nicely revealing where that flow is going. It's just like the water "balls" going in pipe on cartoon movies. Bit statistical filtering and boom, that's it. It's very easy to tell even on encrypted traffic over multiple hops that data from A is flowing to B. Btw. Tor documentation especially mentions, they're not protecting against this attack. Because protecting against it on low latency network, without using constant bitrate is, well at least hard. Sorry Clever guys, I'm not impressed. Just so often, everything new is something really old.
• Hetzner Cloud - This is something I can say I've been honestly waiting for. Of course with Finland data center.
• DuckDuckGo Privacy Simplified. It wasn't as interesting as I hoped for. But giving sites privacy rating is a good thing. Unfortunately usually it's based on impression or some light automatic analysis. Instead of truly knowing how the site works and how well its technically managed.
• Tried to launch more servers on Scaleway. But the only answer they gave me was: "The cloud is full, go away".
• I were wondering when GCMP / GCM will be available - for WiFi, but it seems that I wasn't wrong about it and it has been rolled out already ...
• We'be talking a lot about Amazon Go and other future Amazon Go and other future shop concepts with colleagues. But unfortunately that's something I can't cover in detail.
• Created basic UI for one project using Tkinter sigh. Win32gui and Tkinter are aah, legacy stuff. But works, when minimal and simple UI is required. So it's done.
• Had some fun with sshd, mergerfs, mount --bind and chroot jails. Took me quite a while to realize what's wrong. But now it's all working well. It also seems that with SFTP and gigabit network Atom CPU can be bottleneck for encryption, compression was already disabled.
• Enjoyed some basic flight training with trainer at one simulator sites around Helsinki. First attempts not prefect, but no crashes yet. So that's pretty good. Of course I've flown with X-Plane, FlightSim X and FlightGear and original Micrsoft Flight Simulator, for a long time. So I knew the most important basics. Mut proper simulator with real cockpit is naturally much better.
• Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) - Studied more some 5G networking related facts, and spectrum allocation for it around the world. It seems that at least Finland and Sweden would love to have spectrum under 4 GHz, because millimeter waves like the 26-28 GHz spectrum is very seriously range limited due to athmosperic absorbtion. So don't wonder if the cell network radio signal is gone when it's raining heavily. Just like satellite signal might disappear.

2019-05-19