Integration, MS, Arattai, Digital Euro, Matrix, Zstd, ECN

1. Lot's of system integration work, but unfortunately I can't go into details. But basically quite standard stuff... SQL + HTTPS + XML in this specific case, with full multi-tenant support, single gateway for everyone and multiple different communication sources / destinations utilizing client / server pattern.

2. Cursed devices with smart power switches - Oral-B electric toothbrush - This is very confusing. The toothbrush turns on for 300 ms every 5 or 10 minutes or so. I really don't know what triggers it, but it has happened several times, and it's quite rare but still repeated. Turning it on and off again, stops it.

3. Microsoft Teams - Now they've announced that they're going to improve the web-hook, and it's most likely that the working web-hook interface will be broken again when year changes. I love this. Constant battle and maintenance work required for even simplest things to work (unreliably) and mostly being completely broken. - Thank you for that, honestly. - I think that their crappiness is highly connected to some new pile of poop they're creating. Copilot Agents, Power Automate and Teams Workflows are all absolutely broken and unusable.

4. Microsoft Copilot - As much as it sucks, I'm still disappointed that it doesn't have AI Clippy agent - Why, oh why? Some employee could make it as weekend joke when in adequately deranged state.

5. BBC started to use PQC with their CDN. But that doesn't mean that the CDN itself couldn't do MITM when requested. Who would be surprised? I wouldn't. 

6. Arattai (@ Wikipedia) - Nice to see that India is getting it's own (popular?) messaging platform. Having more options reduces dependency on the few huge platforms. I didn't honestly know that Zoho (behind Arattai) is Indian company. But it's long history makes me believe this is technically sound solution. - E2EE isn't yet good. But I guess they're working on that are as well.

7. Digital Euro (@ Wikipedia) is moving forward, at least on paper. All facts and details are still missing. I don't know what kind of kick backs the credit card companies pay. But it seems that banks have decided to prefer credit cards over other payment methods...

8. Matrix metadata encryption (@ element.io ) - If this plan is moving forward, it's going to take years and it's still kind of bit too little. Rooms and memberships and all the metadata, except those few fields getting encrypted is all still there.

9. Finalized server maintenance and automation scripts. Converted all old .cmd / .bat files to PowerShell 7.5+ and verified that everything including yearly maintenance tasks are fully automated. - Phew, it took some effort but now it's done.

10. Some people complained about ZIP files containing Zstandard (zstd) compressed data. Well, They obvious forgot that ZIP file supports other methods as well. Notably Shrinking, Reducing and Imploding. I remember when using DEFLATE caused problems, when people tried to extract the ZIPs with (de)compression tools that didn't support deflate. Yeah, nothing new.

11. Element X got finally thread support. Yet immediately after the update, the application showed some error, it still allowed to post messages. Then basically all information except login information disappeared from the application. Few hours later the application recovered and all the messages posted after the update disappeared. - Oh well. Maybe we'll get devices with semi reliable storage and databases with transactions someday.

12. Microsoft so full of it. Now they're pushing Skype for Business... Duh! Strange fluke? Maybe they'll get their bleep straight some day. I guess this is some kind of prioritization failure on their app, the chat search now shows Skype for Business contacts first and as primary contacts. Which is highly confusing and annoying. And very lame fail.

13. SimpleX Chat (@ Wikipedia) - Wondering if the minimal backup option been implemented? i.e., backup only SimpleX Chat contact information (excluding messages/media) to enable contact recovery while minimizing backup size and enhancing privacy through frequent lightweight backups.

14. Uh, when I installed new system, I didn't configure ECN (@ Wikipedia) properly, now it's fixed. ISP rate-limiting works nicely and uses ECN, enabling ECN practically eliminates in and outbound packet loss. During this investigation again checked all the details that ss provides and related socket timers, ecn, ecn seen and so on. Deep dive into the topic. Enjoyable.

2026-04-05