Thought Bricks

Firefox is the last browser to remove FTP support pretty much killing widespread use of this rather insecure protocol. This is bittersweet as I got my start on the Internet using FTP and Gopher to download data for economic analysis in the early 1990s. But the Internet was much different then and I applaud the push for encryption everywhere. With tools like Let’s Encrypt there is really no reason to have any uncrypted traffic on the Internet.

I just love this quote from a Bloomburg article: Just imagine traveling 10 years back in time and trying to explain this to someone; just imagine what an idiot you’d feel like. “There’s going to be this online currency that people think is a form of digital gold, and then there’s going to be a different online currency that is a parody of the first one based on a meme about a talking Shiba Inu, and that one will have a market capitalization bigger than 80% of the companies in the S&P 500, and its value will fluctuate based on things like who is hosting ‘Saturday Night Live’ and whether people tweet a hashtag about it on the pot-joke holiday, and Bloomberg will write articles and banks will write research notes about those sorts of catalysts, and it will remain a perfectly ridiculous content-free parody even as people properly take it completely seriously because there are billions of dollars at stake.

As I was reading through some random stuff on Linux, I came across an interesting project called Lightstream. As the description says, this is a project that continuously replicates Sqlite databases to S3 compatible buckets. That seemed pretty interesting. Sqlite is more performant that most people think and really reduces the complexity of an application. If you don’t have to manage a database server and all of the networking configuration that goes with a database cluster, you can focus on building the app and not yak shaving to get a database set up.

There is some current buzz about Apple copying Tile and various and sundry other predations that have been perpetrated against smaller rivals through the platform power they wield in the App Store. This power is an inevitable byproduct of having a successful platform. Important digital platforms tend to capture much of the value in a market. In some cases, they capture almost all the value. This naturally leads to claims of monopoly by rivals who are subjected to what they consider to be unfair play by the platform owner and calls for legal sanction.

This article on The Register about NFT was great in their usual cheeky way. NFT is extremely interesting from a number of perspectives. Like currency (and Bitcoin), NFTs are worth something because a large enough group of people think they are worth something. At present, they are valuable only because they make the owner feel good and might have some sort of financial return. Think of a painting. We have some nice art in our house which might be worth something (I honestly don’t know), but I would never sell it because I’d rather look at it on the wall.

Bitcoin is on quite a tear. Although it’s interesting, I don’t own any directly but have a little exposure through other holdings. I’m not completely sold on Bitcoin as a store of value. The ownership is very concentrated and murky which means it might be subject to manipulation. The positive corrleation between Google searches and value which indicates how influenced it is by, well, influencers. Lastly, there are the technical risks.

FOSDEM has many interesting presentations. I watched this interesting and informative session by Sanja Bonic and Janos Pasztor that discussed using ContainerSSH to create a honeypot to observe system attackers. I’d not heard of ContainerSSH before and it’s a really interesting tool that creates a container and connects an SSH user to it. The honeypot example was a nice illustration of what you can do with it but there are some other interesting use cases as well for eduction and ephemeral system provisioning.

Although I’m in the minority, my go-to browser is Firefox. One of the chief reasons is privacy. Firefox is usually the leader in introducing privacy features into their browser. The recent introduction of SmartBlock is an example of that. Basically, it short-circuits third-party tracking scripts. This allows pages to use those scripts to work properly without actually passing information. One of the arguments against Firefox is that it is slow (which isn’t really true).