Outlook, Psiphon, IPv6, Ethernet, USB2, Bluetooth, Random

1. Microsoft - Outlook (@ Wikipedia) problems, now even emails from Fastmail (@ Wikipedia) are being rate limited. It seems that Outlook is doing everything to prevent users from getting their email.

2. Checked out: Lantern (@ Wikipedia) and Psiphon (@ Wikipedia). Nice additions to Tor with bridges for censorship circumvention (@ Wikipedia).

3. Catched up on malicious.life (@ malicious.life) audiocast, started following Nullsec and SmashingSecurity.

4. Had to deal with tools like: ndisc6, ndpmon, ndptool to resolve the problems with IPv6 I lately encountered.

5. Had long talks with a friend about alternate communication channels, when internet and phones, including satellite phones are blocked by own or foreign governments. Some claim that it prevents communication, which of course isn't true. kw: Amateur radio (@ Wikipedia).

6. Listened one security audiocast, got confused when they said RDP tunneling over SSH, it's wasteful because it's bad to tunnel TCP inside TCP. Well, in this case, SSH tunneling doesn't tunnel TCP inside TCP, because SSH forwards / relays data as a data stream, it doesn't tunnel it as original IP packets, as some other network tunneling protocols do. SSH tunneling doesn't tunnel like many network level tunnels do. Sigh. More waste comes from double encryption, because now SSH is encrypted and authenticated as well as the RDP traffic inside SSH traffic. How about RDP over SSH over OpenVPN over WireGuard over IPsec? Sounds secure and cool?

7. Networking discussion, had to study four-dimensional five-level pulse amplitude modulation (4D-PAM5) aka gigabit Ethernet signaling. Next question, is Ethernet port a modem or not? If 100 Mbit/s Ethernet is not a modem, at least Gigabit Ethernet (GbE / GigE) port and it's hardware counts as a modem. AFAIK. It's totally comparable to 1200 bit/s modems (600 baud), just with higher symbol rate and multiple wires. What's the baud rate of gigabit Ethernet? It's 125 Mbaud. Yet Ethernet doesn't use any carrier, so there's no need to modulate / demodulate = MOdulator-DEModulator, so not a modem? ... That's a good question. Answers please?

8. Even more fixes of USB2 devices, which are so badly designed, that all movement of the cables is passed to the circuit board and soldering inside. When I replaced damaged units with new one, I did the good old trick, filled key areas with glue, and this pretty much guarantees that this particular problem won't happen again. That design was so bad that even any absolutely minimal movement lead to breaking of cable / circuit board soldering in a few years.

9. So classic, I found USB Bluetooth V5.0 adapter which naturally isn't compatible with Linux. "ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)". Luckily I've got plenty of adapters, so I swapped it with adapter which is. But again, yawn, why this always happens.

10. Added one more entropy source to the PRNG number generator seeding pool. Now it's using hardware TRNG, several other local and remote sources as well as a good old very noisy webcam. All of these are mixed into constantly refreshed 8192 bit pool. There's no way to get past of future pool values, not stored. As mentioned, even that is mixed with keyed blake2b + urandom when actual output is requested. If any of the sources is good, then it's good. Just to slightly validate the webcam as random source, I did capture 5184000 frames, and hashed those, no collisions were found and dieharder (@ Wikipedia) passed. Yes, one full raw frame is hashed down with blake2b to 512 bits.

11. Just to keep up the good mood and tradition at this point. As usual, this Sunday started again by trouble shooting annoying Ubuntu problems. Haha. But now things seem to be bit better, let's hope those stay this way. After a few reboots I didn't anymore need to fix anything manually. And everything essential seemed to be working after the reboot. But I'm still slightly confused why some binds fail at boot.

12. Something not so different? - BlackSky satellite constellation (@ Wikipedia) used for space imaging and Aquajet, water powered space propulsion.

2021-11-07