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mikhailian.mova.org

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2FA is dead, it just doesn't know it yet

It is, and by 2FA I mean two-factor authentication and, by extension, Multi-Factor Authentication.

Actionable Security is Missing on the EU Horizon

I've been trying to find a password policy for EU that has the same level of practical detail as NIST SP 800-63B . The closest I found is this 1-page document from ENISA . So much for the EU leading the Digital Agenda.

Belgian politicians would rather risk treason charges than trust engineers

I always hosted my own mail, both for myself and for the few businesses I run throughout my career. Once in a while I would offer the family to use my email infrastructure, with ample storage space and cool domain...

European municipalities leak citizen data to US companies

It all started with mxmap.ch , then someone created mxmap.nl and someone else - mxmap.be . The results are similar. European municipalities use US cloud services, leaking citizen data to Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

Belgian Corruption Perception is Getting Worse

My favourite corruption story that I tell non-Belgians is the titres-services/dienstencheques racket. Titres-services/dienstencheques is a kind of money that can be used only for household tasks. Think cleaning lady....

No more certificates for non-HTTPS purposes

Google unilaterally restricts certificates to HTTPS usage only . The most plausible explanation is that Google wants to push hardware vendors, more specifically companies like Worldpay that distribute payment terminals...

Ban on DeepSeek will subvert Belgian Digital Sovereignty

For all the royal f-ups of the Kingdom of Belgium, this one is the saddest. Someone had the idea to ban DeepSeek in the Belgian government. One of the few open weights frontier models that we can just take and run...

In Praise of Busyness

I once knew someone highly praised by co-workers and managers alike, earning decent money doing great work in a core team of a multinational. At some point news came of his firing. Funnily, the first reaction everyone...

Security fixes are wasteful bugs

How about SSH sending 100 IP packets on each keystroke ? In a similar vein, I recently ran into trouble upgrading Dovecot from 2.3 to 2.4. There were lots of problems in this upgrade. For starters, Dovecot rewrote the...

On Word

Writing long documents in Word is painful to the point that people prefer to stick to old tools like FrameMaker. It's also painful in a different way than LaTeX. While LaTeX is complex but deterministic, Word just...

On the internet, living a double life is harder than it was before

Turns out, people lost the ability to have multiple profiles on the internet, and I think this due to costs. None wants to pay both to personal Gmail and to the business Google for Work, and if you have multiple...