by Bozho | Jan 5, 2015 | Aggregated, Opinions
Having worked for a project that was part of the Bulgarian e-government in the past, I have a good overview of what and how can and should be implemented in order for the administration of a country to function without paper. That said, I fully acknowledge the fact that the challenges for digitlizing the administration, and in that sense the “government” or in fact the whole country, are only 10% technological and 90% social, legal and administrative. And although I some some knowledge of the legal framework(s) and of administrative processes, I’m not an expert, so I won’t comment on that. But I am a software engineering expert, so here is my proposal for solving the 10% of the problem. It is a 10-page architectural overview, with some implementation details included, specifying broadly the way systems in the government should be implemented and connected to each other. The purpose of all that is to make communication between different branches of the administration automatic, so that nobody actually has to send regular mails, containing formal requests, which are due in 2 weeks, in order to provide a simple certificate to a citizen. In a simple example, if you are being hired, the company has to inform the income agency, which in turn must verify whether you have not been convicted, whether you are physically fit for the job and whether you don’t have outstanding liabilities (e.g. as a business owner of a bankrupted enterprise). In order to do that, it needs to get this information. In the worst case, it would require it from you – you go to the...
by Bozho | Dec 26, 2014 | Aggregated, Developer tips, Opinions
Last night I decided to try Uber. I already had a registration, so, while connected to the Wi-Fi at the house I was in, I requested the car. It came quickly, so I went out and got in. The driver (who didn’t speak proper English at all, although we were in New York) confirmed the address and we were on our way. A minute later he pointed to his phone and said (or meant to say, comprendo?) that the ride is over and the fee is only 8 dollars (rather than the estimated 35 I saw in the app). I could not open my Uber app, because I don’t have mobile data (mobile roaming in the US when coming from the EU is quite expensive). Then the receipt email I got confirmed that the ride was only 45 seconds (only two blocks away from the starting point). My dashboard does not show any cancellation, neither from my side, nor from the driver’s side, and my email to Uber’s support resulted in something like “we have no idea what happened, we are sorry”. Since they have no idea what happened, I will be speculating at best, but I would assume that the problem was due to my disconnect from the internet (it can be that the driver did something malicious, and pretended not to speak English, but that is just another aspect of the same problem I’m going to describe). So, let’s talk about edge cases. Handling edge cases might seem like the obvious thing to do, but (if my assumption above is right), a company with a 40 billion...
by Bozho | Dec 26, 2014 | Aggregated, Developer tips, Opinions
The other day I decided to try Uber. I already had a registration, so, while connected to the Wi-Fi at the house I was in, I requested the car. It came quickly, so I went out and got in. The driver (who didn’t speak proper English at all, although we were in New York) confirmed the address and we were on our way. A minute later he pointed to his phone and said (or meant to say, comprendo?) that the ride is over and the fee is only 8 dollars (rather than the estimated 35 I saw in the app). I could not open my Uber app, because I don’t have mobile data (mobile roaming in the US when coming from the EU is quite expensive). Then the receipt email I got confirmed that the ride was only 45 seconds (only two blocks away from the starting point). My dashboard does not show any cancellation, neither from my side, nor from the driver’s side, and my email to Uber’s support resulted in something like “we have no idea what happened, we are sorry”. Since they have no idea what happened, I will be speculating at best, but I would assume that the problem was due to my disconnect from the internet (it can be that the driver did something malicious, and pretended not to speak English, but that is just another aspect of the same problem I’m going to describe). So, let’s talk about edge cases. (This post is not meant to be Uber-bashing, after all I’m not sure what exactly happened; it’s just that my Uber experience triggered...
by Bozho | Dec 18, 2014 | Aggregated, Opinions
Today I watched the Google I/O presentation about HTTPS everywhere and read a couple of articles, saying that Google is going to rank sites using HTTPS higher. Apart from that, SPDY has mandatory usage of TLS, and it’s very likely the same will be true for HTTP/2. And that’s perfect. Except, it’s not very nice for small site owners. In the presentation above, the speakers say “it’s very easy” multiple times. And it is, you just have to follow a dozen checklists with a dozen items, run your site through a couple of tools and pay a CA 30 bucks per year. I have run a couple of personal sites over HTTPS (non-commercial, so using a free StatCom certificate), and I still shiver at the thought of setting up a certificate. You may say that’s because I’m an Ops newbie, but it’s just a tedious process. But let’s say every site owner will have a webmaster on contract who will renew the certificate every year. What’s the point? The talk rightly points out three main aspects – data integrity, authentication and encryption. And they also rightly point out that no matter how mundane your site is, there is information about that that can be extracted based on your visit there (well, even with HTTPS the Host address is visible, so it doesn’t matter what torrents you downloaded, it is obvious you were visiting thepiratebay). But does it really matter if my blog is properly authenticating to the user? Does it matter if the website of the local hairdresser may suffer a man-in-the-middle attack with someone posing as the site?...
by Bozho | Dec 18, 2014 | Aggregated, Opinions
Today I watched the Google I/O presentation about HTTPS everywhere and read a couple of articles, saying that Google is going to rank sites using HTTPS higher. Apart from that, SPDY has mandatory usage of TLS, and it’s very likely the same will be true for HTTP/2. Chromium proposes marking non-HTTPS sites as non-secure. And that’s perfect. Except, it’s not very nice for small site owners. In the presentation above, the speakers say “it’s very easy” multiple times. And it is, you just have to follow a dozen checklists with a dozen items, run your site through a couple of tools and pay a CA 30 bucks per year. I have run a couple of personal sites over HTTPS (non-commercial, so using a free StatCom certificate), and I still shiver at the thought of setting up a certificate. You may say that’s because I’m an Ops newbie, but it’s just a tedious process. But let’s say every site owner will have a webmaster on contract who will renew the certificate every year. What’s the point? The talk rightly points out three main aspects – data integrity, authentication and encryption. And they also rightly point out that no matter how mundane your site is, there is information about that that can be extracted based on your visit there (well, even with HTTPS the Host address is visible, so it doesn’t matter what torrents you downloaded, it is obvious you were visiting thepiratebay). But does it really matter if my blog is properly authenticating to the user? Does it matter if the website of the local hairdresser may suffer a man-in-the-middle...
by Bozho | Dec 11, 2014 | Aggregated, Opinions
After I wrote my first post about computoser.com, many were interested in the code. Then I open-sourced it. And now, to complete my contribution, I wrote a paper about my approach and findings. The paper is on Academia.edu and also on arxiv. I’d be happy to get honest peer reviews. It’s not a great novelty, I agree, but think it’s an improvement over existing attempts and possibly an approach to build upon in the...
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