CSCE, Staan, WebDev, CSRF, EPI, Marktext, Vagrant, ICEYE

1. Revisited Cyber Security Cyber Exercise material. Scenarios covered: Cyber Attacks: Data/password breaches, Denial-of-Service (DoS), Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), corporate/state espionage, malware (e.g., Emotet), fraud (CEO/invoice), cryptomining, and domain hijacking. Vulnerabilities: Weaknesses in firmware, network protocols, open-source components, and aging hardware. Includes risks from unknown network devices/traffic and data leaks via metadata. Operational & Physical Risks: Major network/power outages, hardware failure, misdirected data, and bypassing security policies. Business & Supply Chain: Risks from third parties (M&A, partner issues), sanctions, hacktivism, and reputational damage.

2. European Search Index - (@ staan.ai) - This is a very positive development. I think it's great that we decide to take control of key things. It's quite annoying that people have to select between Chinese and or American services... Yet less interestingly the web site looks like a typical EU project. Focus is on gathering funding, instead of offering services, sigh... Sorry for my skepticism, but I think this does look like a typical EU project. Lots of talk and propaganda and very little (if any) action at all. Lots of marketing material, but nothing concrete. Absolute and total opposite to how I like doing my projects.

3. Converted many of my older web apps to use Waitress + Flask instead of the older uWSGI + Bottle combination. uWSGI is total overkill for low-request services and Bottle is just outdated. So some modernization and rationalization. I'll also upgrade many extremely old projects which used CGI to use Waitress. With CGI (@ Wikipedia) it was trivial to provide an .exe, now I'll provide an .exe as well, but then there has to be a local IP and port defined where the service is offered for the front-end proxy. ref: WSGI (@ Wikipedia)

4. I haven't ever used proper CSRF (@ Wikipedia) protection, but now it's implemented following state-of-the-art concepts. Now the strong token is tied to the user-session, target record, and action, all three, cryptographically.

5. European Payments Initiative (EPI) (@ Wikipedia) - Studied it, it would be good to have sovereign European payment options. Currently almost all payments are made using American cards (Visa, MasterCard). Based on: SCT Inst.

6. Wero Payments (@ Wikipedia) - Interestingly this project is also already fragmented; some countries and banks operating those have opted out. So it won't be EU-wide at least for now. Based on: SCT Inst.

7. Marktext (@ GitHub) - Yet another markdown editor, I kind of like this. Mean and lean. If I would need a separate markdown editor, I would probably use this. Yes, it's multiplatform, Windows, Linux, Mac, etc...

8. Security & verification codes again. Sure, you CAN use those. But nobody practically ever wants to use those. Well, it is what it is. Nothing new under the sun. The same applies to any direct trust verification. And many think that using a 3rd party is the better way. Sigh.

9. Cognitive Load (@ GitHub) - I really don't have anything to add... I agree. I've been agreeing in my blog for decades. Boring, VERY BORING and MUNDANE code is good... Reliable, simple, boring. Perfect! It just works, and if it doesn't it's easy to figure out what's wrong and where. I've shot myself too many times with [ cool, new, complex, different, alternate ] parts in my projects. If it's for production, don't do any of that stuff. Sure, you can TRY it in your hobby project, to figure out good and bad parts. But taking some new concept and pushing it into a key production platform is a bad idea.

10. Vagrant (@ Wikipedia) - I helped a friend to setup Vagrant. I haven't ever used Vagrant, but most of the stuff related to it was quite familiar. Vagrant is to VirtualBox what Docker Compose is to Docker.

11. UTF-8 (@ Wikipedia) - I just can't really stop loving stupid daily character set and encoding issues. Even if we have UTF-8, someone is every freaking day doing something stupid and then complaining about the issues it causes. Beep! Again: "Go UTF-8 yourself!"

12. Finland is acquiring its own ICEYE (@ Wikipedia) - SAR (@ Wikipedia) (synthetic aperture radar, not search and rescue) monitoring / mapping satellites for military purposes. kw: radar, satellite, remote sensing, security, monitoring, global

13. Has anyone ever reported a Schwalbe Road Cruiser Tire "slipping off the rim" aka side blow-off. The tires were inflated to maximum 6 bar pressure and I'm not too light. But it's still very strange. It seems that the tire is probably not fundamentally broken. Its side gave up, very slightly (shedding a narrow 2 mm wide and quite soft and sticky "grip strip" off). Then the inner tube probably popped out between the rim and the tire. How's that even possible? Am I the first one to experience this failure? It seems like that the outer grip part of the tire bead got ripped off, revealing the internal metal structure. Thank god it happened on a good cycling road and uphill, so nothing bad happened. But it could have been much worse. 

14. Something slightly different? - Studied modern radars like: The Frequency Diverse Array (FDA) and Patria MUSCL multistatic passive covert radar technology.

2026-08-09