Python, Docker, OIDC, ELSA, cURL

1. Python 3.14 (@ docs.python.org) - I just managed to upgrade older projects to 3.13 and 3.14 is coming soon. Ah, many things on the release are something I think I've covered or at least read and thought about: PEP 750 template strings, PEP 758 except without parentheses, PEP 784 Zstandard (zstd). I've used zstd lib from pip for now, but it's better to have it in std lib, PEP 734 interpreters (@ peps.python.org). - I think I haven't personally ever used / tried / suffered about 765 Disallow return, break continue in finally block. Free-threaded is nice, yet for most of my programs it doesn't matter so much, just provides sight resources savings (which those do not matter as well so much) and requires lot of tinkering at this stage, so no thank you. Yet the changes with multiprocessing could cause some issues. I'm big fan of ProcessPoolExecutor. The error message improvements are very important and nice. Nothing is more frustrating than getting the error at "random location" and not being able to decipher wtf is triggering it and what it practically means and why. Other smaller nice things, HTTPS server oneliner, JSON (optional) detailed errors, MIME JPEG 2000. Pathlib additions copy and move for trees is very nice. Pickle default version updated, great. Optimizations to many std libs, which is great.

2. It seems that the Qwen3 /no_think parameter isn't really a parameter saved in different storage as a flag. It's just part of the context, and when it goes out of the context Window, it's forgotten.

3. Finally Python 3.13 works on Windows with cx_Freeze and the lib lief is updated so it won't prevent using cx_Freeze on the platform. - I updated to cx_Freeze 8.3.0 and thought that it would work out of the box... Nope... The Windows Service Flow with Win32Service base is strangely broken. Now I'm reading the project source code to figure out how it actually and exactly works. Extra agonizing fact was that it enragingly referred to Run and run in the service / servicehandler class... If I used run it said Run is missing and if I used Run it said run is missing. Of course I could have Run that calls run... But I want to understand in detail what's causing the issue.

4. A few days working hard with docker, OIDC (@ Wikipedia) and federated Microsoft login stuff...

5. News covering that Outlook starts to relay IMAP connections and stores all email in cloud, even from non-Microsoft accounts. Yeah, something new? Didn't Nokia already do that back in the day.

6. Something different: European Long-range Strike Approach (ELSA) - Missile system(s), I guess details are going to be provided later. Projects like this usually are quite complicated and change several times due to different reasons.

7. cURL refuses to resolve .onion domains, and users are wondering it. - My reasoning back then was exactly the same. If domain names cause 'side effects' (i.e., different domains work differently), then that might be a surprise to someone. It's nice that programs make assumptions, but sometimes those assumptions come back to bite you when the behavior is suddenly changed by something you weren't aware of. If you use SOCKS correctly, the .onion names don't leak --socks5-hostname.

8. TLS/CA - I find these certificate restrictions very positive. It's so annoying that you'll get random prompt, that you'll need to install this CA on your system. I'm extremely hesitant and practically always reject it, unless there's very based reasoning behind. Therefore I find it great that these restrictions are being applied, to limit abuse of CA certs, at least in most of cases. The case which I complained that there were TLS problems for six weeks which were hard to resolve, were also related to situation exactly like this. They wanted me to install some random CA and I just won't do it. - Ref: "Browser vendors are drawing a clear line in the sand: As of June 15, 2026, public TLS server certificates must no longer include the Client Authentication EKU. While the change might seem technical, it will carry significant consequences - especially for sectors like financial services that rely heavily on certificate-based authentication". - Yeah, got burned by it.

2026-02-08