CBDC, RF, Refactoring, CF Workers, Briar

1. Central Bank Digital Currencies (@ edwardsnowden.subtrack.com). Very good article about Central Bank issued Digital Currencies and how those are different from Crypto Currencies. Article also had nice reference to eNaira (@ enaira.com).

2. Big boys probably have had tech like this for ages, but still very interesting to see it at this scale and availability: HawkEye 360 Orbital global RF analysis. And quoting it from their page with probably better words: "HawkEye 360 | The Leader of Spectrum-Based RF Geoanalytics". Classic saying is that even directional microwave links leak signal to air and space behind the receiving antenna. Where it can be picked up.

3. Lot's of code refactoring, in various projects. It's just as tricky as always. Either you'll change something, and boom. Or you'll have to do extremely tedious work to figure out things. Especially shared databases which are modified by multiple sources are nice. If something is changed, who knows what will follow? Everything which is only used / modified by single code base are extra trivial to deal with, because you can check all the references and add as much debug code and tests as it is necessary to make things work right, if even checking the references isn't enough.

4. Too much discussion about performance, design aspects, desired operation mode. Optimizations, how everything should operate, reliability, logging, privacy, GDPR and all the stuff, related to software development which handles highly sensitive personal data. Phew. Endless and never ending discussion.

5. OVH outage on 2021-10-13 (YYYY-MM-DD, ISO 8601) was kind of funny. Because it only affected IPv4. Many people missed that systems were up'n'running and fully accessible over IPv6. Also that they said no impact expected before they started maintenance was also really hilarious.

6. Lot's of discussion about making requests, then properly validating requests, before those are executed by authorized and privileged process. Basic process isolation and privilege separation.

7. Tested just for fun Cloudflare Workers (@ workers.cloudflare.com) - with Python, using transcrypt to compile Python code to JavaScript. Worked like expected, yet I'm sure there are many kind of limitations and traps, just like whenever such translations are being done, because it's not Python anymore. Python allows incredible versatility of doing different tricks because everything is an object. So you'll know what things to avoid with this kind of things. But most importantly, I did it and it works, and I can use it in future, if I need to. It's just being prepared with different kind of solutions and alternatives. Yet this kind of solutions usually make debugging extremely hard, if something goes wrong. That's the reason why I really don't like transcoding. Yet in this case there are source maps, which try to remedy this major problem. For most of cases I would use Google Cloud Functions (Python), because I'm very familiar with Google Cloud services. kw: Transcrypt, Wrangler, Python, Cloudflare, Workers, FaaS

8. Nice article about Cloudflare Workers KV (@ cloudflare.com) - (Key Value storage).

9. A very nice talk about Briar (@ nico.dorfbrunnen.eu) strangely labeled 'diving at xmpp'. Going through system design, architecture and future roadmap. Inspired by UUCP, Usenet and Fidonet. I'm so familiar with that legacy stuff. kw:Briar, BriarApp, Bramble Transport Protocol (BTP), Bramble Rendezvous Protocol (BRP), briar:// links, Bramble Handshake Protocol (BHP), Cryptography (Crypto), confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, forward secrecy, traffic analysis prevention techniques, Briar Synchronization Protocol (BSP). Anonymity, unlinkability, unobservability (via Tor).

10. Something different? Listened and catch up many Darknet Diaries and Malicious Life episodes. Lot's of good stuff.

2022-12-25