PGM, Bloom, RBtree, USB4, DNS4EU, GitHub, NISAR

1. Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM) (@ Wikipedia) - RFC 3208 (@ datatracker.ietf.org) - This is what I ended up with when I need to distribute a bunch of data to a large number of hosts on the same network with low latency yet reliably. The library I ended up with is OpenPGM (libpgm). Classic dilemma again, use a bloated and complex to use library, or rewrite an extremely minimal and simplified solution which does from your practical standpoint only what you need. These discussions always bring me back to Zmodem MobyTurbo and HS/Link implementations and shortcomings of both implementations. Yet Smodem was clearly superior.

2. Counting Bloom filter (@ Wikipedia) I've done lots of sync protocols, but haven't had to deal with IBLT because I've usually had some business logic which requires a guaranteed process, instead of probabilistic. But IBLT can be used as optimization, especially with initial sync and/or if there's too long a time after sync so no sane queue / pointer state has been kept. I've got at least one such case in mind, where people complain about two things. Duration of the initial sync, if a full sync is performed, and/or size of the queue in case incremental sync info is kept for too long. Sure, both are technically solvable problems. But so far the problem is annoying, but it's not a show stopper. Something like IBLT could radically improve the initial sync and allow much earlier discarding of the sync queue. Yet on the systems we're usually running, we don't have a lack of computing or storage capacity, it's just that the performance of the process isn't currently very good. I'm sure there are plenty of lower-hanging fruits to making it more acceptable than adding some quite complex tech.

3. RBtree-family-drama (@ syst3mfailure.io) Quite a nice trick chain to trigger an exploit, I like how it's executed. It's so common to miss what happens if things are chained. Each component and system is viewed independently and then claimed, but this component only received "trusted data". Uh yeah.

4. USB4 (@ Wikipedia) - up to 80 Gbps bidirectional link (v2), protocol tunneling (display port, PCIe), dynamic bandwidth alloation. TB3 interop. USB-C conectors.

5. DNS4EU (@ joindns4.eu)- I made similar observations immediately as many others. It's kind of a fishy project. There are many strange and red flags around it, TBH. I don't see any specific reason why anyone would use it with the current setup. Pros vs cons analysis doesn't look favorable. It's hard to come up with any pros and the cons list is quite long.

6. A GitHub binary download rate throttled? Has anyone noticed if GitHub implements some kind of download speed limit? And do downloads frequently seem to be restricted to around 100 KiB/s = ~1Mbit/s? The speed then constantly fluctuates around that level, sometimes a bit above, sometimes a bit below. This can't be anything other than an intentionally implemented limiter. Anyway, reading a few other reports online, it was totally wonderful to notice that almost all units in the posts were totally screwed up! kbps/s? Mb/s? Nice... Units is something that's really easy to mess up and can lead to radically incorrect values being passed on.

7. WhatsApp getting ads? I've been wondering what's the trigger for people to get rid of it. But we'll see, probably this won't be enough. But at least the community has been looking for a "good reason" to do it.

8. EU Cloud by US companies - it shouldn't be unclear that's not true, and it's only a marketing gimmick. True resilience and independence don't rely on made-up marketing stuff like that.

9. NASA-ISRO-SAR (NISAR) (@ Wikipedia) More SOTA level earth surveillance satellites, this is good. At least we can now track the changes. It would have been nice to have this operational before the Kamchatka earthquake.

10. One colleague was completely assured that the customer is still using NetBIOS. But based on a quick check, it's actually surprisingly hard to figure out with Windows what "name resolution protocol" was actually used for the lookup. Interestingly the AI said that the best way to figure it out is to use a network traffic packet capture and see what protocol delivers the response. That kind of sucks, why doesn't something like verbose lookup clearly tell what steps were taken, which failed, and what option ultimately did lead to the resolution if any. A good example where answering a simple question has been made way unnecessarily complex and hard, and basically "impossible" for normal users. Also, it seems that Windows 11 uses DNS, mDNS, LLMNR, and NetBIOS all by default.

11. Some Iran & Ukraine stuff has been quite interesting, but I guess there's nothing worth noting in long-term notes like my blog.

12. Something different? Orka class submarine (@ Wikipedia),  Laika class submarine (@ Wikipedia)

2026-08-02