• 37 Posts
  • 206 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • You’re describing what agile should be, but Agile™ is the variant you get in toxic companies where they say they are agile, but it’s just a mechanism to micromanage developers with bad managers asking why you’re not burning down enough points or why you haven’t met the estimated date you thought before you realized there was more technical debt than a bankrupt business.

    Maybe you’ve avoided it but I’ve seen it first hand.




  • I developed my own scraping system using browser automation frameworks. I also developed a secure storage mechanism to keep my data protected.

    Yeah there is some security, but ultimately if they expose it to me via a username and password, I can use that same information to scrape it. Its helpful that I know my own credentials and have access to all 2FA mechanisms and am not brute forcing lots of logins so it looks normal.

    Some providers protect it their websites with bot detection systems which are hard to bypass, but I’ve closed accounts with places that made it too difficult to do the analysis I need to do.







  • Every WiFi router and network has something called an SSID and a BSSID. The SSID is the friendly name that you use to show off your puns to your neighbors. The BSSID is a 6 byte MAC address. All devices use the BSSID when connecting and communicating.

    With a non hidden SSID, your router broadcasts the SSID and BSSID.

    The BSSID doesn’t change even if you change your SSID (Though APs with support for multiple SSID create a different BSSID per network) and it’s what is actually used for geo location.

    When it’s hidden, it doesn’t send the SSID out, but sends out packets with the BSSID. Clients then scream out to the void “anybody know the SSID ‘My Secret SSID??’” Then it’ll respond.

    So basically hidden networks still send out the unique identifying address and then when you take your phone with you, you’re just telling everybody what your home WiFi is called.

    Hidden SSIDs are not that useful.




  • I tried that with my KeePass database and then I ended up with different conflict versions if a device didn’t sync to my server before I updated on another device. Then I ended up with the conflict versions and old versions I had manually resolve. The Android Syncthing app could get auto killed by the Android OS for memory/battery saving, so I had to go back to OneDrive style syncing where the KeePass Android app would internally merge and resolve conflicts. It couldn’t do that using the Syncthing style syncing.





  • Some people are asking why other regions seem to be affected when us-east-1 goes down. Why aren’t they separated out? I used to work in AWS, but will speak generally.

    First, it’s important to understand the concept of a control plane vs a data plane. Amazon and other big scale companies often talk in terms of control plane/data plane separation because those two concepts have wildly different scale and requirements.

    A control plane is the side of your service that handles the administrative functions of a service. For example, AWS S3 service would separate out bucket creation and deletion work from the file create/edit. In Route 53, this would be creating and editing zones. In IAM, it’s the creation of AWS access keys for IAM users. IAM Roles, IIRC, work differently and can function more in the data plane.

    A data plane is the side of the service that handles the main meat and potatoes of a service. For example, AWS S3 any object key creates, edits, deletes would all be part of the data plane. In Route 53, these would be any DNS record query. I don’t know if updating a record was considered a data plane call or not.

    These are separated out because data plane generally massively dwarf the number of calls for administrative APIs. It’s also done because control plane calls often times have some extra complexities. Like in Route 53, to create a zone means you need to go find n different name servers that can handle a given domain name without overlapping with another customer, you need to tell them that they should now handle calls, you need to get the records to those servers running all over the world.

    The fact is Route 53 is globally replicated and they need to have a source of truth and engineering culture pushes Amazon towards a pull based approach. If a user creates a zone in eu-west-1, they still expect it to be on servers all over the world, so how do you get it there? Well, AWS takes the approach that certain services can have a single region dependency for their control plane in the case that it’s infeasible technically or to the business to avoid one, however the data plane of the service can’t have that dependency.