Things That Moved Me in 2024

It’s the time of the year again to reflect on what has happened in the last 12 months and looking back, I’m happy to say that it has been an eventful year again. So let’s jump right into it.

General Computing

Depending on how you look at it, my years often end or begin with taking the time to learn new things at the Chaos Communication Congress right after Christmas. To much to tell about the event to mention individual highlights in this post, so I refer you to the post behind the link above 🙂

A number of things were a bit ‘opportunistic’ in 2024. I encountered ‘Opportunistic Encryption’ in Wi-Fi networks for the first time, and I was happy to see that vendors are working on such ‘optional’ features. Another ‘opportunistic’ feature I came across was the ‘opportunistic DNS over TLS’ mechanism of current Android OS versions that checks if DNS queries can be encrypted. It’s good to see that this exists but I didn’t find a DNS over TLS server in practice so far in the networks I use. A bit of a pity.

Another event I often go to is the GPN in Karlsruhe and this year, one of the important things I did during the event was to extend my Nextcloud/Onlyoffice cloud office suite to also support editing documents on tablets and smartphones. It works pretty well, but I have to admit, I have not used it much since then. But still, it’s good to have.

One thing I have noticed a number of times now is that ‘the world comes to visit you‘ the minute you request a new TLS certificate for a domain to check out if there is a vulnerable website behind it, such as a WordPress site that has not yet been initialized. The fix for this: Configure your web server or reverse proxy with ‘basic authentication’ for the site until it’s properly set up.

Mobile Networks

Quite a number of things have also happened in the mobile network domain. Earlier this year, I went to the US and Canada for two weeks and I could enjoy very good Internet connectivity while flying over the Atlantic and also while flying over the continental US. In the US, I didn’t even bother trying to get a physical local SIM card, but instead I just downloaded an eSIM from a roaming SIM provider. 5 minutes to being online, not bad. After switching back to the SIM card of my home network operator, I was delighted to see that I could connect to Verizon’s network for the first time ever! This is because my home network now offers VoLTE roaming with all network operators in the US. This includes Verizon which I could not use so far, because they never had a GSM or UMTS network for circuit switched voice.

Also, I made very good use of my time on the North American continent to check out which frequency bands are used in the US and Canada. There is the theory and then there is practice. While doing this, I noticed that some of my devices I brought along supported North American frequency bands and 5G better than others. After my return to Europe, this lead to a number of activities to improve the situation on the mobile device side, and I’m very happy to have discovered this shortcoming and having been part of a fix afterward.

Personally, I’m a bit sad that GSM is getting a bit dated these days and some even see it as a security risk, as authentication and encryption of the system is not up to date anymore. Fortunately, Google has gone ahead and implemented a “disable 2G” switch in their operating system. Disabling 2G also has the nice benefit that a network search after loosing coverage does not end up there. In other words, loss of coverage and return to LTE is faster and two very good reasons to switch-off 2G in my devices.

Having a LTE/5G signal is one thing, having enough capacity at a particular place is quite another these days. In this regard, London is a place of two extremes. London transport has finally started to bring cellular coverage to the tube and has done a superb job. In train stations, however, the situation is getting worse and worse. Let’s hope such public and highly frequented places do get a capacity upgrade soon, too.

And last but not least in this category, I would like to point to my posts on Starlink and One New Zealand having launched Direct to Device (D2D) SMS messaging (see here and here). Let’s see which countries and operators will follow in 2025.

The Cloud

Of course a few things have happened for me in the cloud as well. Right on my desk, I’ve learned how to run an Ubuntu installation on a physical NVMe of a notebook in a virtual machine. Sounds a bit strange, but I have a couple of good use cases for this. One of them is to backup and restore a system image with Clonezilla in a VM on my notebook rather than on a second notebook.

And finally, I significantly changed my personal cloud infrastructure that is hosted in a data center. In the past I’ve rented a physical server in a Hetzner data center in Finland, but for a number of reasons decided to move the setup to a data center in Paris owned by Scaleway. While it took a bit of time doing this, moving my Virtual Machines was pretty much straight forward, as I always made sure that I didn’t use any services that would result in a ‘vendor lock-in’. But truth be told, it was not entirely painless. KVM on Ubuntu 24.04 comes with a broken default NAT that needs to be fixed by hand, and I spent quite some time disabling the RAID for extra storage capacity. But in the process of transferring my services I discovered a lot of new things like cool Macvtap features, how a full featured Ubuntu can be run in a container, and I was happy to see that I could transfer my blog from Finland to France with only a few minutes of downtime.

And there we go, these where my 2024 highlights. Happy new year to you all!