Author: Luki

ADO Pipeline library export and import

Post author By Luki
Post date 2025-02-11

Azure DevOps migration as seen by DALL-E

In the Azure DevOps world, moving from one tenant to another is not a very familiar concept based on Microsoft documentation. I had to do exactly this. The Azure DevOps Migration Tools did the trick for most of the ADO Boards-related things.

Repos were copied over by pushing to a new Git source.

Pipelines are stored in the Git repository as YAML and were imported / linked again.

One large task was migrating the pipeline library. You can’t export the values secrets in the library, but I used a tool to make sure to copy everything over. Having the secret variables copied over with empty values was already very valuable to me.

Security

ReCaptcha – Invalid key type

Post author By Luki
Post date 2025-02-06

https://www.google.com/recaptcha/about/ (2025-01-14)

This is a quick bit: I recently had to add a reCAPTCHA key to a website. However, the keys provided did not work directly and I saw the Invalid key type error.

ERROR for site owner: Invalid key type

https://*** (2025-01-08) reCAPTCHA ERROR for site owner: Invalid key type.

In my case, this could be fixed by reissuing the key, switching from a version 3 key to a version 2 key.

https://*** (2025-01-14) reCAPTCHA ERROR for site owner: Invalid key type.

Some considerations

A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2

A 2023 UC Irvine study titled “Dazed and Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2” revealed startling findings about Google’s reCAPTCHA system, suggesting it has become more of a data harvesting tool than an effective security measure. The research, which analyzed 3,600 users over 13 months, found that CAPTCHAs not only fail to prevent bot traffic effectively (with bots often outperforming humans), but have also collectively wasted an estimated 819 million hours of human time—equivalent to 1,182 lifetimes—while generating up to $888 billion in value for Google through tracking cookies and valuable AI training data. The study concluded that reCAPTCHA has essentially become “a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service,” raising serious questions about the widespread use of this purported security tool.

Studies show that CAPTCHA tests are ineffective against modern AI bots.
Google uses reCAPTCHA v2 and v3 primarily for data collection.
AI programs solve image puzzles with nearly 100% success rates.
reCAPTCHA v3, with the “I’m not a robot” checkbox, is easily bypassed by bots.
Users with VPNs or anonymized data are blocked more frequently than bots.
The value of the data collected through CAPTCHAs is estimated at $888 billion.
The study recommends eliminating reCAPTCHA v2 and similar systems.

My experience with LLM use cases

Post author By Luki
Post date 2025-02-04

As I work every day, I constantly see recurring work that I would like to optimize and automate. There are use cases that feel obvious that they should work and easy to do, but the real-world experience is different. Read about my learning.

What i learned about Ollama

Post author By Luki
Post date 2025-01-30

Ollama is great for running a local self-hosted AI REST API. You can load all kinds of models, whether they’re for chatting, vision, or embedding. At this time, I’m not aware that voice models can be used for input or output, but that might only be a matter of time.

Why Ollama

Why would you like to run Ollama? First of all, the models you can load are likely less powerful than what you can consume from the OpenAI API or Anthropic API. However, you can fully locally process, gaining the privacy of not having to process in a US datacenter but rather it does not even have to leave your house. Additionally, if you need to process massive amounts of data and the precision is sufficient from the open models, you might have to wait longer for all to be processed, but using public APIs can also rack up vast amounts of cost to do so. Even by error, you might burn through $80 in no time when you missed a error catch in your code. In the Ollama case, you only have your upfront cost for the device and the energy burned. But then you have no sudden surprises. But also your processing is of course limited; you can’t massively parallel process. So it highly depends, but there is a sweet spot to solve issues on your own machine.

News

Instrumentation Keys to Connection Strings

Post author By Luki
Post date 2025-01-28

On March 31, 2025, Microsoft will end support for instrumentation key-based global ingestion in Azure Monitor’s Application Insights. After this date, while your resources will still receive data, updates and customer support related to this method will no longer be available. This change marks the transition from global endpoints to regional ones that utilize connection strings, offering benefits like authenticated telemetry ingestion, regional data residency, and endpoint customization for intranet or hybrid environments.

Security

Upgrading Ubuntu 23.04 to 24.04.1 LTS

Post author By Luki
Post date 2025-01-28

Upgrading Ubuntu 23.04 to 24.04.1 LTS

I recently had to upgrade my Linux tiny VM from Ubuntu 23.04 to 24.04.1 LTS. However, as I waited too long, a simple do-release-upgrade no longer worked in January 2025.

An upgrade from 'lunar' to 'noble' is not supported with this tool.

News

App Service Node 22 availability

Post author By Luki
Post date 2025-01-27

App Service Node 22 availability as seen by DALL-E

Azure App Service on Linux does not currently support Node 22 LTS. As of January 27th 2025, the latest supported Node.js version on Azure App Service for Linux is Node 20 LTS. The support timeline for Node.js versions on Azure App Service is as follows:

Node 20 LTS: Active LTS, supported until April 30, 2026
Node 18 LTS: Maintenance, supported until April 30, 2025

On Ignite Node 22, support was announced for December 2024 but seems to be delayed in rollout. I was unable to find further information though.

App Service is planning to release both Node 22 and Python 3.13 onto App Service for Linux with expected availability in December!
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/appsonazureblog/whats-new-in-azure-app-service-at-ignite-2024/4289488 (2025-01-27)

There is no mention of Node 22 LTS support in the current documentation or recent announcements for Azure App Service. It’s worth noting that Azure typically adds support for new Node versions after they are officially released and after completing testing for compatibility with the platform.

Update February 2025

In my case Node 22 is now available in Azure Portal.

https://portal.azure.com/#***/configuration

Node 22 is now available and also present in the documentation; it was added on February 19, 2025.

https://github.com/Azure/app-service-linux-docs/blob/master/Runtime_Support/node_support.md (2025-03-04)

Azure

Find your Azure DevOps

Post author By Luki
Post date 2025-01-23

You might have the problem that when you are opening dev.azure.com you will be redirected to portal.azure.com. Likely you were not looking for portal.azure.com but rather for Azure DevOps. This is how you can find your Azure DevOps organization and gain access back.

Deepseek-r1 (Reasoning models)

Post author By Luki
Post date 2025-01-21

DeepSeek’s first generation reasoning models with comparable performance to OpenAI-o1.

Deepseek logo (2025-01-22)

What is a Reasoning model

In the words of OpenAI.

A new series of AI models designed to spend more time thinking before they respond. As AI becomes more advanced, it will solve increasingly complex and critical problems. It also takes significantly more compute to power these capabilities.
https://openai.com/o1/ (2025-01-22)

Or as an excerpt from Wikipedia.

It spends time “thinking” before it answers, making it better at complex reasoning tasks, science and programming…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI_o1 (2025-01-22)

Security

NoName057(16) DDoS January 2025

Post author By Luki
Post date 2025-01-08

On January 20-24, 2025, we have the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. Last year this caused various DDoS attacks on Swiss websites. ~~If this year we see DDoS activity again is yet unknown~~. Being only days away from the forum taking place, we might soon see if Switzerland is again in focus of NoName057(16) or other actors.