My YubiKey purchase experience in China

December 3, 2022 - 6 mins read

Yubico is famous for its excellent hardware keys, and somehow they have become the industry standard. But unfortunately, for unknown reasons*, they don’t offer services to China (mainland), not even sell to China. That sucks since I live in China. (oof, don’t worry, but that’s how the story starts) How did I make up my mind to buy a YubiKey? It’s a long story, but long story short. I have been interested in cryptography for a few months, especially when it comes to things like OpenPGP, and I got to know a thing called Smart Card, which is a card that stores your private key.

Kimsufi 4.99€ Dedicated Server Benchmark

November 13, 2022 - 4 mins read

Kimsufi is an affiliated company with one of the biggest providers in France – OVH. A couple of months ago, all of Kimsufi’s services are migrated to OVH and everything is now OVH’s. For 4.99€ (before tax, more on that later), you will get the following spec. Intel ATOM N2800 @ 1.86 GHz - 2 Cores / 4 Threads; 4 GB DDR3 1066 MHz; 1 x 1 TB SATA HDD*; Symmetric & Dedicated 100 Mbps Internet Connection.

Friendhosting 2.99€ Storage HDD VDS Benchmark

October 29, 2022 - 1 min read

Friendhosting is a VDS provider established back on April 20, 2009. So pretty old merchant. They offer Web Hosting, SSD VDS and HDD VDS for storage. The location for HDD VPS is only Bulgaria and Netherlands. Since they are all DMCA-ignored, it will be nice for torrenting. (Ignoring the disk speed, more on that later.) The base model is 2 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, and 100 GB HDD. I bought one, in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Nacsshost $2.98 VDS Benchmark

September 24, 2022 - 2 mins read

Nacsshost is a VDS provider located in Turkey. Currently they are not providing any further information, so be careful when you are purchasing. They use PayTR as their payment gateway, just like most Turkish merchants would do. They only supports Credit Card/Debit Card payment with 3D-Secure. So no PayPal whatsoever. But your credit card info is still safe since PayTR is widely used. I bought the VDS #3 Bundle, cost $2.

Why is Linux's logo -> Penguin 🐧?

August 29, 2022 - 1 min read

This post will be Q&A formed, just see if this is great. Q1: Where does penguins live? A1: Antarctica. Q2: Who owns Antarctica? A2: …? Nope. Q3: Does any countries or any people own Antarctica? A3: No. Q4: So does any of above own penguins? A4: No. Q5: Move back to Linux, what’s Linux’s avatar? A5: Penguin. Q6: Does Linux owned by anybody? A6: No, that’s open-source software. Q7: Do you understand now?

Matrix, the new era of open-source instant messaging

August 16, 2022 - 8 mins read

Speaking of instant messaging, you may think about WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc. But those apps are stealing your privacy for business reasons, which is sad, especially when you are discussing some indescribable topics with your friends. You may run into trouble at any time. So that’s when Matrix comes in! According to their website, Matrix is an open-source project that publishes the Matrix open standard for secure, decentralized, real-time communication, and its Apache licensed

IPFS, the distributed web.

August 12, 2022 - 6 mins read

We’ve heard a lot about Web3.0, Blockchain, Distributed Web, etc. But most of them are just in concept and a bunch of essays. Did you know that there’s a real-life example, which powers the distributed web? I’m talking about IPFS, the InterPlanetary File System. WARNING: IPFS Website & default Gateway are blocked in the People’s Republic of China, so make sure your network condition is okay to access related information. But IPFS itself can’t be blocked, more on that later.

Gullo $10 annually VPS Benchmark

August 11, 2022 - 1 min read

Gullo is a one-man virtual server provider. Further information is unknown. They didn’t provide any information, so be careful when buying their services, I’ve seen their offers in the forum LowEndTalk, so I’ve ordered a few months ago (March 2022). The setup is really bad. 1 ancient Xeon CPU, 256 MB DDR3 RAM, 5 GB HDD… For $10 bucks, please no… Well, bench.sh is here anyways. Australia location, please don’t buy it.

idc.wiki Los Angeles CU4837 Lite - Mainland optimized VPS Benchmark

August 5, 2022 - 1 min read

idc.wiki (formerly 50network) is a virtual private service provider, established in 2016 (unsure, seen from domain RDAP data). They’ve been famously known for their great optimized network connection between Los Angeles and mainland China. The network is provided by China Unicom. There are two kinds of network, one is the China Unicom Backbone (AS4837), and the other is China Unicom Global (AS10029/AS9929). The China Unicom Global is mainly targeting the China Telecom Next Carrier Network (CNCN, CN2).

Interserver $6 Monthly Storage VPS Benchmark -- Best bang for the buck you would ever see.

August 3, 2022 - 4 mins read

Interserver is an ancient cloud service provider which is established back in 1999! So the reliability is ensured. Their Storage VPS is famously known as the best in the LowEndTalk forum. Yesterday (Aug. 3, 2022) was a guy in the LET forum’s birthday. The Interserver guy has posted a coupon code to celebrate his birthday—code happybirthdaylala. It is a 50% off recurring discount, which is very sweet. I’ve bought one Storage VPS.