Windows, Sandboxing, Skype, exFAT, ATCI, #19009, BlueKeep

• Once again, processes hanging, operating system is totally jammed. Nothing works, can’t save open documents, store state. Probably leads to forced reboot and data loss. Can’t stop loving this. For some less interesting reason Firefox also lost most of it’s configuration data. Phew. - It's good to remember when writing really bad and buggy code, that nobody else does better. Software and systems are inherently broken, and there's nothing new about.
• Had a long discussion about system security and sandboxing etc. Sure, it's hard and expensive to make systems actually secure. That's also the reason why basically no-one bothers, unless it's something that has to be kept actually tightly under wraps. It's just very important to separate and properly secure systems which contain classified data. Easiest thing is of course totally take everything off the net as it should be (!).
• Microsoft annoys me daily. Skype for Business doesn't work, if IPv6 is enabled. I have to disable IPv6 routing, and only then Skype for Business starts. My recommendation would be that junk like Skype shouldn't be used at all.
• exFAT corruption, now it happened, I've been waiting it to happen. A few large files got cross linked and corrupted. Well, what I did I expect? Exactly that, so I'm, not surprised at all. It's something which will happen sooner or later without journal.
• Grinning at agile "process" stuff what many people are talking about. Real agility means that when you ,mail about something during Saturday night, you'll get the new version on Sunday before 8 am. Similarly calling 6 pm, on Friday. Stuff is done before midnight. That's what I call agile. So, is your software company agile or not?
• Arctic Telecom Cable Initiative - Awesome, finally the plans that have been around for almost a decade and is possibility moving forward and there would be a arctic fibre connection from Europe to Asia via Arctic Ocean. Cinia Group has been doing good work about this. Earlier this route was known as Russian Optical Trans-Arctic Cable System (ROTACS), bit later as Polarnet project, also China, Japan, Norway, Finland are interested in the project. The new route map is different again. It's nice to see how many different routes there can be. But of course final route is clear only when all agreements have been finalized. Current plan shows two routes, on Europe's side, one via Norway and via Finland to Frankfurt and branch from Kola Peninsula via Saint Petersburg. Some earlier maps showed straight submarine cable to UK / Scotland. kw: 'Ice Silk Road', Internet optical submarine fiber projects, MegaFon, China Telecom, Optic, Barents Sea, Bering Strait.
• Great post-mortem from Google: Google Cloud Networking Incident #19009. Segregated clusters, obvious. Misconfiguration and bugs, nice combination, and multiple rare things overlapping. Not unusual that this kind of situation causes problems, especially when combined with such wonderful cascading events. I liked how the network configuration data were lost due to all instances getting shut down. Why there wasn't a copy of this date? Even if system is designed to be clustered, it's still a good idea to save a snapshot at times, so recovery times can be shortened, in case of "cold start" happens for some unknown reason. Ah, okey, just that measure was listed in prevention and follow-up. It was so obvious. The fact that the issue spread between multiple availability zones (AZ) was quite a fail. - Someone could create a "Data Center Crash" TV-show, like Air Crash Investigation aka Mayday, or stories of other industrial accident events like Chernobyl. - Why and how did it exactly happen?
• Awesome analysis about BlueKeep exploit. There were some funny parts, you'll find it out if you read it. Nice description how the issue was caused and how it allows system to be taken over. Perfect example why protocols and especially authentication should be kept as simple as possible, so issues like this wouldn't exist.
• Hetzner Finland Data Center Park Helsinki (Finland) is expanding, with now three data centers being active.

2020-07-26