Skip to main content

Alpha This is a new website theme. Help me improve it and give your feedback (opens in a new tab).

/var/log/irl

Free Software Efforts (2018W27)

Last week was my first week working full time in the Metrics team at Tor Project.

On Tuesday, my Internet connection was interrupted for the entire workday which did make it a little more difficult to work. I was able to use my 4G connection but, unfortunately, access to the Tor bug tracker and all of the Metrics websites were blocked requiring me to verify I was over the age of 18 to access. Tor Browser was quite happy to go around the censorship so it was not impossible to work.

A Virtual Machine Host

It’s very easy to set up libvirt with QEMU/KVM on a Linux box and have it work for a while. It’s more difficult to have a system set up that’s going to be somewhat robust and maintainable over a longer period of time.

I am using a dedicated server from Hetzner. I have not personally had any serious problems with Hetzner, and price is the main reason that I’ve chosen them over other providers.

Mastodon + XMPP + SIP

This is an idea. I haven’t looked at actually doing it yet, but I might.

Mastodon needs complimentary instant messaging and I’ve been thinking about how this might be achieved. XMPP and SIP are great federated protocols and it’s possible to use the same domain used for Mastodon for these through SRV records.

Authentication for XMPP and SIP is based on passwords. Mastodon could be extended to write out password hashes to a database to have one password for each service per device. You could then have those servers query the database and check password hashes. I’m not sure what the security properties of this would be compared to OAuth, but I think it’s similar just without the in-band setup.

Contact