paulgorman.org

< ^ txt

Tue Aug 25 06:00:01 EDT 2020 ======================================== Slept from ten-fifteen to six-thirty. Woke briefly around two-thirty. Partly cloudy with a 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms until late afternoon, then mostly sunny late in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 80s. North winds 5 to 10 mph. Fifteen-minute walk in the morning. Overcast and humid. Saw several mourning doves. Work ---------------------------------------- - Download and review Bullseye invoice Done. - Follow up on OpenVPN stability Done. - Work on some of the outstanding Entrata permission issues Done. Home ---------------------------------------- - Laundry? Done. - Geimini capsule on tilde.team Done. Changed sheets and towels. Some guy saw my VLAN tutorial, and emailed me a few questions. I helped him. Oh, man — one more reason to hate the unified search/URL box. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/08/a-chrome-feature-is-creating-enormous-load-on-global-root-dns-servers/ > The Chromium browser—parent project to Google Chrome, the new Microsoft Edge, and countless other lesser-known browsers—wants to offer users the simplicity of a single-box search, sometimes known as an "Omnibox." In other words, you type both real URLs and search engine queries into the same text box in the top of your browser. Taking ease-of-use one step further, it doesn't force you to actually type the http:// or https:// part of the URL, either. > > As convenient as it might be, this approach requires the browser to understand what should be treated as a URL and what should be treated as a search query. For the most part, this is fairly obvious—anything with spaces in it won't be a URL, for example. But it gets tricky when you consider intranets—private networks, which may use equally private TLDs that resolve to actual websites. > > If a user on a company intranet types in "marketing" and that company's intranet has an internal website by the same name, Chromium displays an infobar asking the user whether they intended to search for "marketing" or browse to https://marketing. So far, so good—but many ISPs and shared Wi-Fi providers hijack every mistyped URL, redirecting the user to an ad-laden landing page of some sort. Generate randomly > > Chromium's authors didn't want to have to see "did you mean" infobars on every single-word search in those common environments, so they implemented a test: on startup or change of network, Chromium issues DNS lookups for three randomly generated seven-to-15-character top-level "domains." If any two of those requests come back with the same IP address, Chromium assumes the local network is hijacking the NXDOMAIN errors it should be receiving—so it just treats all single-word entries as search attempts until further notice. > > Unfortunately, on networks that aren't hijacking DNS query results, those three lookups tend to propagate all the way up to the root nameservers: the local server doesn't know how to resolve qwajuixk, so it bounces that query up to its forwarder, which returns the favor, until eventually a.root-servers.net or one of its siblings has to say "Sorry, that's not a domain." > > Since there are about 1.67*10^21 possible seven-to-15-character fake domain names, for the most part every one of these probes issued on an honest network bothers a root server eventually. This adds up to a whopping half the total load on the root DNS servers, if we go by the statistics from Verisign's portion of the root-servers.net clusters. The Small Internet stuff — tilde servers, Gemini, etc. — has really piqued my interest. So much so that I haven't watched TV tonight or last night. It's nice to be interested in something again. Tilde radio is pretty fun, like an old-school college radio station. Wrote a very, very simple Gemini client to basically curl Gemini content. ssh://paulgorman.org/~/repo/gurl Not a bad day. Servings: grains 7/6, fruit 2/4, vegetables 2/4, dairy 2/2, meat 2/3, nuts 0/0.5 Brunch: Cheese curls Lunch: cucumber, banana, peach, wrap with egg and avocado, coffee Dinner: cookie, ramen -29

< ^ txt