Notices by Christian Huitema (huitema@social.secret-wg.org)

@lauerhahn @lauren @nikatjef Hey! I use checks regularly. Companies that don't want to pay wiring fees pay me by sending a check in the mail. This looks like another case of tech bros cozying up with the goverment and making sure that everybody pays *their* fees.

@whitequark The worst is always certain, isn't it? I would assume that some will, others wont, and code accordingly.

@whitequark @sabik @ignaloidas I had to use CBOR in a project that was parsing DNS traffic logs written per RFC 8618 (Compact DNS archives in CBOR). I ended up writing a parser in C++. Was not very hard: https://github.com/private-octopus/cdnsrdr

@whitequark @sabik @ignaloidas Have you tried CBOR? Essentially a binary version of JSON. Specified in RFC8949, used in several IETF specified protocols. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8949.html

Fascinating blog that reveals a worrying practice: https://jviide.iki.fi/http-redirects.
Many sites exposing a service with an HTTP API can be accessed on HTTP. Sure, the server will redirect to HTTPS, but the client has already sent credentials over the HTTP connection, basically sending password-equivalent data in clear text! Consequences are easy to guess. The blog lists dozens of servers doing that, some small, several quite big!

@xtaran @karotte @casandro @GossiTheDog

That's an old one! We came up with it for IPv6 when I was working at Microsoft. I think it was introduced in Windows XP SP1. We were worried that typing addresses like 2001:2:3::abcd was not going to work well in a variety of user interfaces, hence the "2001-2-3--abcd.ipv6-literal.net" hack. One of the team members (maybe me, not sure now) registered it on a personal account, and then transferred ownership to Microsoft before shipping.

@lauren @violetmadder @mekkaokereke @devlord @remi I don't know for LA and fires, but I did lose a lot of native plants and brushes to frost last year. Not supposed to happen because native plants are supposedly tune to the climate. Except they were tuned to the climate of years ago, and the climate has changed.

@bortzmeyer Poutine a un petit problème. L'armée Russe utilise beaucoup de groupes Telegram. Si les services Français ont accès aux serveurs, ils peuvent lire le contenu de ces groupes et passer les mouvements de troupes aux Ukrainiens...

The story of Kayla Nemour and her gold medal reminds me of so many things about France. The French federation would not send her to the Olympics, so she ended up competing for Algeria. The federation did not want her because they did not like the small town club in which she trained, which looks like a classic case of Parisian elites snubbing "the provinces". Probably mixed with the kind of racism that reserves the good jobs for "people like us". I am not surprised.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/08/04/world/olympics-gymnastics-bars

@malwaretech how can that be "every instance in the federation" fetches the link, by opposition to "every instance on which at least one of your followers received the post with the embedded link"? The scaling properties are rather different.
#MastodonScale

Dave Mills was a great contributor to the IETF and the Internet. Of course, he invented NTP. But he did not just do that. He also kept improving it, solving issues, passing his knowledge, and inspiring many to work in his field. So many reasons to miss him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_L._Mills

For a couple of years now, I have been working with Alain Durand at ICANN to collect statistics in DNS usage, patterns, etc. Data is updated monthly. Latest addition is a table of the concentration of DNS name servers, measured by looking at where the IP addresses of the servers are hosted. The big "winner" is of course Cloudflare, but there is also a significant correlation between being hosted by AWS or served by Akamai and have the DNS on the same network.
https://ithi.research.icann.org/graph-m9.html