Innernet, TV, Matrix, Hydrogen, Python, IPv6, Scams

1. Introducing 'innernet' (@ blog.tonari.no) - This project is something I like. It's just on the level of software I generally do like. Why? It does what I need, yet it's not utterly and extremely bloated to deal with every enterprise requirement making it really hard to understand and generally very complex and often expensive to run and configure. All the examples use IPv4 but why bother, it's better to go with IPv6 and sure, they do support it as well. And they managed to avoid the registration to some mandatory site, and all of that stuff which I generally strongly dislike. As example one other VPN provider requires login using Google or Microsoft account, ahem.

2. @Mikko (@ Twitter) tried to buy a television. Conlusion: "Nope, televisions aren't being sold anymore. Only s**ty computers with big screen. - So, this means that officially the time of television is over."

3. Tried: Hydrogen Matrix client (@ hydrogen.element.io), but fail. The hydrogen web app login fails, giving error: "Something went wrong: The operation is insecure.." - Yet the dev team was totally awesome, the issue got confirmed very quickly and fixed in hours. - This is what I mean by agile development. Some just don't get it. First problem? Then oh s**t we got a problem... Fixing ... Ok, can you verify that the issue is now resolved. - Check - Done. No BS. Perfection! - The web app push notifications work well with Chrome, which means that now I can commend Hydrogen to people whom complain that they don't want or cant use Matrix because they don't want to install yet another app. All you need to do is setup Matrix account, join the rooms / chats in the web app (element). Then login with mobile browser to Matrix using Hydrogen and enable notifications. Now you'll have end to end encryption (e2ee) and a very lightweight and nice Matrix client in browser with push notifications. No need to install any apps, and it's really light and sleek even in browser. - Boom! Solution to naysayers. I'm now using it for low end devices for cross device communication. Because it's light weight, encrypted and doesn't require "yet another app".

4. A very nice Python switch case tutorial (@ pakstech.com) (even if it's called a match) - Thank you, awesome examples. So many sites try to push model where you'll first create dictionary and then get value from it. Which is kind of silly. Or just use the good old never ending flood of elif statements. This was the feature I actually really missed from Turbo Pascal with Python.

5. I can quote myself, this is fun. "IPv6 is like 64 bit software. Nobody needs, wants or uses such a problematic technology which wastes memory and makes everything slow." / - @Sami_Lehtinen (@ Twitter).

6. Matrix (@ Wikipedia) / Element / Synapse - Basically all of the Matrix privacy and security improvement thoughts I've had, are already mentioned in the GitHub issues. It was nice to see that I'm not alone. - Team is doing awesome job, even if it's taking a while to implement all of the features. Just configured the m.room.retention for all of my rooms.

7. Got a scam mail telling about new Microsoft ToS. It's pretty good one. Finnish in the email isn't obviously bad, probably copied from legitimate Microsoft ToS update with just dates changed. But what rats it out, is the links, all of the links link to mmed.micorosft.com which is Azure Function App. Ie. custom client code running on Microsoft Azure. Most confusing part when you check the email is that all of the links are leading to the same address with long hex query string. Yet many things are developed like that for tracking purposes, it's obviously questionable. Another thing which was much more obvious, was the fact that I'm using always a separate email address per contact. So, if the message is out of context, it's immediately obvious it's not right and that's what told me right away that there's something really fishy with this email. Ref Subject: "Päivityksiä käyttöehtoihin", Ref heading: "Palvelusopimus on entistäkin selkeämpi ". Just as my personal opinion, Microsoft's domain mess is just one big h*ll... I personally like solutions where some trusted service is delivered usually from just one or maximum of two different domains. One service, and just what's required, nothing extra. All external dependencies easily invalidate security of the service by loading non-trusted junk. Sure, you CAN use integrity tags, but in 99% of cases those dummies loading junk from other domains don't understand that much.

2022-07-03