Volution Notes

For some time I wanted to design a CDB (Constant DataBase) alternative that fits better my use-case for Kawipiko (high performance read-only static HTTP server).

I've made some experiments with compressing individual URLs, and I describe my initial observations (while comparing to standard compression algorithms).

My personal experience in finding affordable EU-based cloud providers for a small personal project.

About how another instance of "the scientific progress justifies the means", or perhaps "how a corporation milks profits from other people's work", triggers an arms race that piece by piece dismantles the open web, and turns it into walled gardens.

Experimenting with Linux policy based routing, i.e.

Demystifying the UEFI boot process with a focus on Linux, simplicity, reliability, and security.

Updating the Infineon TPM firmware on an HP t620 thin client, which is vulnerable to the ROCA attack (that allows an attacker to recover the RSA private key).

How about splitting the usage and storage of sensitive documents and data?

Experimenting with password-based authentication implemented directly in Postgres, all sprinkled with a few twists.

A subtle, but surprising, realization about password-based key-derivation functions when using long byte sequences as passwords.

Documenting various open-source tools and projects that I've found while experimenting with the Linux container technology.

Immutable OSs are just a minor step towards reliable OS installations.

`sh` is not a programming language!

A rant about the complexity of modern Linux distributions, which places them on par with the opaqueness of Windows and OSX.

A live document providing learning resources and pointers for those that want to experiment with applied cryptography.

Experimenting with various real-world instantiations of cryptographic random oracles, with applicability from multi-factor encryption, to database record encryption.

Prototyping an encryption tool that allows combining multiple encryption factors, from PIN's, passwords, to X25519 pairs, and beyond.

I reflect on my preferences when it comes to choosing open-source tools I need to rely upon.

Experimenting with OpenSSH authorization keys resolution; from skeleton-key providing emergency access, to simple centralized key management.

Trying to make the case for permanent irrevocable digital identities, which unfortunately today, by de-facto, are email addresses.

A few words about one of my latest open-source projects, `z-tokens`, that among other thinks, also tries to tackle this problem but providing more added value compared to existing solutions.

Although many software engineers know about the topic, especially through their exposure to Base64, there are however many issues and missed opportunities not tackled by the broad community.

A few words of caution about storage-free deterministic password managers.

An interesting take on containerized deployments, contrasted with other similar trajectories in the software engineering history.

Questions (without definitive answers) about how to securely manage secrets in scripts and development environments?

Questions (without definitive answers) about memorable password schemes and patterns.

Questions (without definitive answers) about password strength (i.e. entropy bits) for offline storage.

Given a simple enough HTTP server, and by employing seccomp, one could easily achieve a quite secure(er) server, with a small enough attack surface that the potential attacker might want to look elsewhere in the stack for vulnerabilities.

When it comes to static sites, there are a myriad of solutions for authoring and compiling, but talk about hosting these static sites, and we are still in the early 2000s.

A few Firefox addons I use on a daily basis.

About the many types of hash functions, their use-cases, dos and don'ts, with suggestions for currently accepted algorithms.

In support of software packages that come in the form of a single binary executable (statically linked or portable), that one can just copy anywhere in `${PATH}` and execute, without needing `sudo`, or downloading half the distribution's packages as depen…

Articles and tools I've found interesting in the last few days.

About how the largest romanian bank tries to give its clients a "warm-fuzzy-feeling" of security, that is actually zero in real security terms.

Articles and tools I've found interesting in the last few days.

About the hidden costs of forced automatic initialization of dependencies.

About the fatal perils and traps of many modern tools that handle "shell commands" as passed through `system(3)` or `sh -c`.

Trying to identify which compression tool and level yields the "best" outcome for "textual" archival purposes.

How to properly sort a list of FQDNs in Bash, first by TLD, then by domain, then by sub-domain and so on.

How to compact and clean Git repositories of "dangling" commits and objects.

A visual history of `microsoft.com` (thanks to the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine).

A visual history of `google.com` (thanks to the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine).

Articles and tools I've found interesting in the last few days.

A visual comparison between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 in the context of many small resources and with real-world latency.

About obtaining Go current goroutine ID, and why sometimes we should trust the developer to do the right thing...

Articles and tools I've found interesting in the last few days; and about the start of a new "column".

About the "DevOps culture" plus related technologies, less about containers, but all about our professional careers as software developers or operators.

About choosing the "right" RAID5 chunk size on Linux systems, and related benchmarks.