Monthly Archives: July 2020

urls, wordpresser

URLs "p1" 20200705 – 65 resources

I am an avid WWW surfer, with hundreds of websites visited each month, sometimes daily. I bookmark them all, at least for logging purposes. These posts having the "urls" category, capture what was on my browser on a specific date. I hope you enjoy some of these shared resources.

gaming, racing, wordpresser

F1 2020 at the Estoril circuit

This is a 01:14:xxx lap around the current (2020) layout of the “Estoril” circuit, @Portugal, Europe. The car is Esteban Ocon’s 2020 Renault F1, using “RFactor2” – the simulator selected for the first ever official “24 hours of Le Mans Virtual” (check https://www.studio-397.com/2020/06/celebrating-24h-lmv/).

Relatively to the layout that hosted real Formula1 / F1 races in the 1980s, and in the 1990s, the key changes are at turn #1 – now a ~90 degrees corner, instead of a pedal-to-the-metal right – and, by the end of the lap, at what was called “curva do tanque”, which also became slower, but not as slow as in the horrible version, used for some races, following Senna’s death, when there was a literal stop-and-go “S” segment.

This is an unprepared lap, done just to test the 2020 F1 cars and the circuit. For now, the cars sound bad and have much to improve in terms of credibility – I full-throttled the Renault at the exit of several slow corners and indeed got some wheel spin, but it was too easy to control. Nevertheless, a promising first version of these cars.

The video has four segments: from in-car, then two different from-halo angles, finally one lateral perspective.

F1, wordpresser

F1’s shameful return – by FP2 F1TV was already down

F1’s shameful return – by FP2 F1TV was already down

Formula 1 / F1, is finally back, for its first race of the much delayed 2020 season, without spectators on the circuits and several other strong preventive measures in place, to minimize health risks.

One would expect that after the many technical issues that plagued the associated “F1TV” service, during its first season, this second round – the coverage of the 2020 season – would run more smoothly. Moreover, I suspect F1TV has become many fans’ primary channel to keep live contact with the sport.

Unfortunately, by the time of the “FP2” (Free Practice #2) event, the service was already down, with frustrating technical messages on display, no matter the device used, from mobile to desktop. It was a brutal failure, especially hurtful to an audience who has been getting persistently decreasing entertainment quality, over the recent years, with races that systematically reward the same racer(s), with rare natural overtakes, and boring tracks with no design features to highlight some sense of speed.

As I write (2020-07-03 1400), the URL
https://f1tv.formula1.com/en/current-season/austrian-grand-prix/2020-austrian-grand-prix-formula-1-practice-2
should be giving access to the FP2 live stream, to paying subscribers.

The pictures show what one was getting, instead.

In a tweet’s length (@my_dot_com – https://twitter.com/my_dot_com/): “Incredible! By FP2, @F1TV #F1TV #F1 already NOT working. That was fast. This should not be happening after such a long preparation and one full experimental season already factored in.”

https://twitter.com/my_dot_com/status/1279045286200070150


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https://arturmarques.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/f1tv_down_as_usual_on_desktop_2020_07_03_02_10_09_768.jpg (image/jpeg)

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    security, sw, wordpresser

    Ridiculous Twitch, or how I went 2FA with Auhty

    Today, my Twitch login process was one of the most ridiculous web interactions ever! As usual, Twitch sees every new browser session (cookies cleaned, no memory of the previous visited sites) as a “new device” and forces the user to provide a 6-digit code, to complement the user-password challenge. Unfortunately, those 6-digits came via email, and sloooowly, with a latency of minutes between the code request and the arrival of the corresponding email message. Maybe due to this latency, every time I entered the correct code, Twitch reacted as if I was writing the wrong number. Very frustrating.

    At some stage, I finally succeeded and took the opportunity to change my Twitch security settings:
    https://www.twitch.tv/settings/security

    I decided to enable two-factor authentication (2FA), which means a second authentication challenge, after the user-password. First, I provided a phone-number, which indeed got associated with the account, but future logins will require not a SMS sent to the phone number, but a code generated by the “Authy” app, Twillio’s (twillio.com) equivalent to “Google Authenticator”.

    When I first started using 2FA, SMS seemed the best option: I controlled the number, it required no extra app, so it was simpler, and that was – and is – something of great importance!
    Unfortunately, as many are bound to find, sooner rather than later, SMS is now considerably insecure and more prone to failure than using time-sensitive security apps. The top reason SMS has failed me in the past, was phone-network operator restrictions, temporary phone-network traffic issues, and/or other reasons strictly under the phone-network operator control: there were situations when I needed a SMS in 30 seconds, and it would never arrive that promptly. That was the day when I quit SMS for app-based 2FA. The data comes from an operator agnostic network – the Internet.

    Nowadays, SMS should be a second choice, relatively to Authy and equivalents, not only because of not depending on one specific phone-operator network, but also because the system is more vulnerable, with increasingly more documented SIM-card hijacking events.


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    Technical Details
    urls, wordpresser

    URLs "p1" 20200701 – 71 resources

    I am an avid WWW surfer, with hundreds of websites visited each month, sometimes daily. I bookmark them all, at least for logging purposes. These posts having the "urls" category, capture what was on my browser on a specific date. I hope you enjoy some of these shared resources.