Firejail, Downfall, Ext4, TLS, WiFi7, IPv6, Veilid

1. Firejail (@ firejail.wordpress.com) for Linux - Started playing and testing, it works fine too. Among the other options I've tried like podman and bwrap. Of course being slightly different.

2. Downfall (@ downfall.page), yet another CPU security breach. As they predicted earlier, these attacks go and go on, because some CPU design traits.

3. A friend complained how slow SQLite3 (@ Wikipedia) is, well, it's quite much about settings. 100 inserts into new database & table timed with different settings: "Commit 100 inserts: Journal on 5.26 seconds, Journal off 1.29 seconds, Synchronous mode off 0.0026 seconds, Synchronous mode off + WAL journal 0.0020" -> 2630x speedup just by changing few settings. Sure that has trade-offs, but often the comparisons are totally unfair, when you compare two databases you'll need to also make sure that you'll compare with similar settings and guarantees. SQLite3's default mode is very slow, if you make lot of independent inserts without wrapping those into a single (or a few) transaction(s).

4. About SimpleX chat and "lag" - If someone is annoyed by the group posting lag, and can't swap much faster SSD in place. You can always change two database settings, and then posting will be about 1000x faster, yes. 1000x, ie it'll take 99,9% less time to post or receive a messages. What it takes? Just set journal off and sync off. Drawbacks? If you post to a group and hard shutdown the machine, then the client isn't sure which messages were sent to whom and which weren't. - When people say it lags, it's not about servers, those are super fast and server from RAM. But it's your local storage which is slow on your system.

5. Played with Bing AI Chat, funny thing is that in Private Browsing mode it completely refuses to work. Luckily it also says: "Your personal and company data are protected in this chat", so no worries, all your secrets are safe with us.

6. Fast commits for ext4 (@ lwn.net) - Nice, things that improve storage performance are always welcome. I've noticed that especially programs which work lot with file system metadata are extra slow with BtrFS because metadata is duplicated by default. Yet I haven't ever seen this file on any system yet: '/proc/fs/ext4/dev/fc_info' file.

7. TLS: Microsoft is finally going to disable TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1. I'll be waiting what kind of mess follows from this happening as "a complete surprise" that nobody told anyone about earlier. - Time will show. Personally, I would prefer using only TLS 1.3, but it seems that many search engines and web indexers do not yet properly support it. So I have to keep TLS 1.2 support on.

8. WiFi 7: IEEE_802.11be (@ Wikipedia) - is coming out earlier than IEEE_802.11ya (@ Wikipedia), interesting. Yet they didn't include the high frequency channels in this version.

9. Nice 2D barcodes (@ Wikipedia) from GS1 made it to national news. Those are going to replace EAN-13 / EAN-128 and UPC codes at some point in future. Yet as usual, this process has been going on for ages, nothing new here. It's just like IPv6 comes as complete surprise to some people. 

10. IPv6 (@ Wikipedia)- Today I had a discussion with a colleague. He was really glad how much better internet has came when he has enabled the IPv6. Yep, there are reasons why it's good time to give IPv6 a go. Reduced latency, services reachable global on the local network etc.

11. Veilid (@ Wikipedia) - Quite an interesting project. There has been so many attempts for privacy networks to replace Tor, but almost all of those have been more or less failures in terms of adopting any usage. At least the core tech sounds very good and interesting (as in a good way). Could be a great platform for other simple privacy apps, because the complex stuff is handled by the Veilid layer. The ideas like content address able data blocks, and popular data becomes more available automatically, were all supported already by Freenet and GNUnet. So far I haven't seen anything that I wouldn't like with this network. Gotta dig the website bit deeper to find something negative. Watched a DEF CON 31 presentation, it was good, except some thing were presented in a really bad way. The guy talking was great. NYM is also one to check out.

12. Something different? Yet another very long grange (3000 km) radar system: Container radar (@ Wikipedia).

2024-07-21