Re: @Fibble
"For example: my IPv6 router (WAN side) only spits out IPv4 addresses on the LAN side."
That's because it's been configured not to provide IPv6. Go into the control panel and enable it.
15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"Here, in Germany, many ISPs have been offering IPv6 for a few years and, for many customers, any new connection is automatically and exclusively IPv6"
You might think it's bad in the UK. Meantime in outer Bumfuckistan, the only thing ISPs are selling is NATed IPv4 addresses (If you want a single IPv4 then paying $100 a month is the norm) and NO IPv6
"So, we should be waiting for IPX, surely?"
You may be trying to be ironic but you're closer to the mark than you realise.
IPv4 was a short-term kludge designed to cater to increasing network sizes until the REAL Internet Protocol that was being developed by Novell was released - and that REAL Internet Protocol is IPX
Of course IPX turned out to be unroutable, so we were stuck with the IPv4 kludge.
"It's time that misleading advertising claims were launched."
Following up on my own post: People should be prodding Ofcom.
Seriously. Phone the wankers up and ask why they're allowing ISPs not offering IPv6 to say they're offering Internet access.
The more people who do that, the more likely it is they'll take action.
"requires them to actually spend loads-a-money on their infrastructure."
Bullshit.
Core equipment used by ISPs has supported IPv6 for a long time. This is being blocked by accountants.
Even the large ISPs which "don't offer IPv6" do offer it to business accounts and it's definitely there in their core networks.
"There is a bunch of fancy shit out there I know that has never had any value to me(e.g. TRILL -- but that is a layer 2 thing totally independent of course of layer 3 IP)."
You haven't been paying attention:
https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/90/slides/slides-90-trill-2.pdf
TRILL keeps being pushed as a data centre protocol, but the reality is that it's better used as a large campus WAN/MAN one - the reason Radia Perlman created it was spanning-tree storms that took out a hospital network, caused by continued joining up of previously-isolated switch networks until the entire ediface fell over horribly.
TRILL distributed L3 gateways take away the SPOF of routers and the extreme traffic loads which can occur on router links. It's better than the Anycast L3 gateway proposal which proceeded it.
Yes, it works on IPv6 as well as IPv4
The vast majority of readers might THINK they have no use for TRILL, but as soon as you have more than a couple of switches interconnected and/or start having to use LACP, it has advantages.
Spanning Tree should never be used for networks more than 4 switches wide - the wastefulness of having redundant links sitting idle is one factor as is the convergence time and the fact that ANY LACP link change (even to clients) will result in a spanning-tree reconvergence event. When I'm running multiple 10GB/s links around it's not sensible to waste their capacity by having one or more sitting idle when another may be maxxed out - this happens with both spanning tree and LACP.
"and failed to get buy in from the major firewall vendors to get fleshed out IPv6 routing and stateful packet inspection. "
Those "major firewall vendors" didn't exist that long ago and SPI was only just starting to be discussed.
Can I sell you a tardis?
" We're talkiing about a 10 billion node public network."
There are only 4 billion possible IPv4 addresses.
Which means that you're using NAT extensively, which in turn means you need to use 8 bytes to canonically refer to anything (PublicIP+PrivateIP) and possibly more if there are multilayer NATs going on.
So why not just use IPv6 and be done with the kludges?
"Perhaps there is limited support in the UK, but I can tell you quite clearly that the major ISPs in the US support IPv6"
The same applies across Europe.
The UK is seriously laggardly.
OFCOM promised 4 years ago that when IPv6 hit a threshold they would no longer allow ISPs not selling IPv6 to call their product "Internet access", but they wouldn't specify the threshold then and show no sign of applying it now.
It's time that misleading advertising claims were launched.
"Yes, but those are heavy machines operated by a *legally liable* human driver."
The number of kids mown down by those legally liable drivers is uncomfortably high. A robot is paying 100% attention 100% of the time, not looking in the back seat at fighting children, eating cereal at the wheel or screaming abuse at the driver in the next lane for having the temerity to want to merge.
"Cue kids playing chicken and winning every time. Traffic comes to a standstill."
As with human drivers, robots can and will be programmed to move slowly forward and nudge their way through.
And that's without the factor of the passengers getting out and forcing the issue. They're not helplessly locked inside the vehicle and they're likely to be pissed off.
(In the rural areas where I was a kid it was common practise for someone to get out and walk in front of the car if you were confronted with a mob of 5-10,000 sheep on the road that wouldn't let vehicles though. Sheep that are regularly moved on roads learn to get out of the way of cars so it wasn't always necessary)
" an article here on El Reg alerted me to the plans to feed phone numbers back to Facebook for some platform integration project, which you could not opt out of. "
Facebook has been ordered not to do this in the UK. They'll ignore the order anyway.
"Fine should be £1 per spam text."
No, emulate the USA where victims are entitled to $500 statutory damages per call/SMS/fax. (tripled if the target is in the TPS/FPS, etc)
That makes it worthwhile for individuals to file in small claims. Death of 1 million paper cuts (and going bankrupt doesn't protect you from court awards)
"4 - his customers never get challenged, let alone convicted so the market continues to exist"
Most spam law holds the hirer jointly and severally liable with the spammer. No sane (legitimate) outfit would hire Sanford and that's why most of what he's been pushing is flat out illegal fly-by-night stuff since the year dot.
" It has been used for years as way to have child predators locked up long after there sentence is over."
Western countries usually prefer to use "preventative detention" for such cases. It has the same effect without running the risk that some doctor might declare them safe enough to send into the bright wide world.
"because that could lead to an assessment that he's not competent on his own and has to remain in care."
He's amply demonstarted that he's a recidivist offender. Some people I know who've dealt with him have described him as a pure sociopath with no real concept of consequences.
So with any luck, that assessment will happen.
"The spammers generate leads which are sold on to companies that actually have some product or service."
This is exactly the model that the insurance scam callers operate on.
The insurance industry has tried to combat it by making commissions on leads illegal but so far that hasn't helped.
"If the call originated from another provider they charge that provider who can then add their own handling charge and bill the caller."
Except that calling data is frequently fraudulent and there is _no_ originating telco to charge.
One way of handling this is to make phone call routing fraud and caller-id falsification a serious criminal offence and then go after the directors for that.
Or simply enact a right of personal action and statutory £500 damages PER CALL - USA TCPA style - with triple damages for wilful violations (such as hitting TPS-registered numbers).
The death of a million paper cuts will take care of the rest.
"To set up any small business, the easiest way is to buy an "off the shelf" company, set up by a lawyer."
1: Most are setup by accountants.
2: Filing the paperwork yourself is trivial but takes a few days to activate and involves standing in an office. Tthe only advantage to an off-the-shelf is that it's available instantly.
3: If you're burning through companmies as fast as these scammers are, there's a good chance they've built up a stock of names already OR haven't even bothered registering the trading names they use.
"It is also possible at the switch, but the tel-co's make money by connecting calls and they won't get paid if they block the call"
The vast majority of these calls are being injected with fraudulent routing information (different to forged caller-ID), so they don't get paid at all, or end up in billing disputes with telcos who didn't originate the calls.
This is why some of the mobile companies have started filtering such calls.
"It'd also help if domestic phone users were enabled to set up whitelists,"
Which will result in addressbook snatching and forged callerID using entries from the addressbook, as has been happening for many years when targetting mobiles.
A few of these spammy directors need to be found face down at their desks with the back of their skull missing.
" but the issue is that the companies are set up as limited companies, which protects the shareholders against such things as fines against the company."
Shareholders: yes
Directors: NO, absolutely not.
"Maybe it should target the people running the companies instead?"
maybe it should hold the spammer AND THE COMPANY WHICH HIRED THEM jointly and severally liable.
I'm currently getting spam for Greenpeace UK, Debenhams and M&S, amongst others.
>> "Elsevier is just a commercial publisher."
> No, commercial publishers PAY the writers. Elsevier behaves like a Vanity house.
It's worse than that. Elsevier has been taking freely available work and paywalling it without permission, then getting the non-paywalled copies taken down.
That's fullscale piracy. If the shoe fits....
Their activities have had a major chilling effect on scientific publication. Their business model needs to be terminate with extreme predjudice.
A planet-steriliser would need to be several hundred kilometers across. We can see those already.
Chicxulub shouldn't have been a planetary extinction event - even with the concurrent deccan traps eruptions- and wouldn't have been if it hadn't hit on a shallow sea full of carbonate rocks.
That was truely a case of "spectacularly bad luck" for the dinosaurs, because without the vulcanism it still wouldn't have been an extinction event.
"Planet-killers are big, and we spot them quite a bit further out."
The vast majority of potential planetkillers we've discovered so far have blindsided us by coming from the direction of the sun and only been seen AFTER they've been past us and are on the way outwards
It's even harder to see a small dark thing in front of (or in the vicinity of) an extremely bright, extremely large thing than it is to see a small dark thing in a large dark space unless it's far enough away to be well lit by the bright thing.
"Instead of having one massive rock hit in a vaguely predictable location, we have thousands of radioactive pebbles burn up in the atmosphere and coat the planet."
Realistically the added radioactivity from a "nuke the rock" scenario (which is unlikely to be successful) would be about a 0.01% increase in detectable planetary radioactivity. You'd have to be spectacularly unlucky to die from it.
"The USA almost certainly has nuclear weapons in orbit."
Doing so would breach almost every nuclear limitation treaty signed since the Cuban missile crisis.
The USA may be gung-ho, but it's not THAT gung-ho. The political stink if it was discovered would be unrecoverable - and there would be so many people involved that it's impossible to keep it secret for 50 years.
There are certainly nuclear power sources in orbit and even one nuclear reactor (it failed within weeks of orbit and has been up there over 50 years) but space is a demilitarised zone - which is why ASATS are a big deal.
"If Russia and America could launch their arsenal of nuclear missiles within 60 minutes of knowing an attack has been started, I think we could definately nuke an asteroid within 5 days."
A ballistic missile has enough energy to loft a lump of metal high into the air, but not into orbit. You really don't want to be letting off nukes only 600-800 miles above the surface (Think "EMP") with an intercept window measured in fractions of a second.
You need multistage rockets to intercept this kind of lump at a reasonable distance - which take weeks to assemble and get ready for launch - and even with a nuclear MOAB penetrator we still have no idea what would actually happen(*). These things are either pretty loosely held together (in which case the airburst scenarios that Craterhunter(**) has postulated might well sterilise a continent anyway) or solidly welded (in which case the effect would be minimal)
(*) A nuclear burst beside or on the surface of a rock or iceball won't have much/any deflection effect at close ranges so you're relying on breaking it up - and quite frankly without something a multiple of the Tsar Bomb'z size you're unlikely to have much effect(***)
(**) craterhunter.wordpress.com - this is the theory that a string of airbursting comet fragments ~10k years ago sterilised the North American continent and triggered the Younger Dryas cooling.
(***) Whilst the cold war doom scenario was multi-megaton bombs over cities using Castle Bravo as the example, virtually all nuclear weapons since the mid 1960s are smaller yield than Fat Man thanks to improved targetting meaning they simply don't need to be large to destroy their targets and those multi-megaton weapons simply don't exist anymore - which means months of work to build one. Even the modern stockpile of H-bombs are only 50-150kt dialable yield whilst "neutron bombs" (H-bombs with a Tungsten case instead of U238) are under 5kt. Most "conventional" nukes are in the 5-15kt dialable yield range and nuclear depth charges are around 0.3-0.5kt. These are enough to give the biosphere (and planet-side target) a "really bad day" but nowhere near enough to do much damage to a multi-billion ton rockpile.
"The only way networks will be improved if it hits actual network operators in the pocket, not their customers."
ITYM in the shareholders' and directors' pockets.
The problem at the moment is that fines are simply factored in as a cost of doing business.
Fines should be targetted against the people responsible for these decisions and levied against the operating profits/dividends.
The problem at the moment is that the UK mobile legal structure as laid down by Ofcom prohibits networks from pooling resources, which results in substantial unnecessary overbuilding.
The simple solution for NIMBYism on towers (more frequently - poles) is to make it very clear that those objecting are shooting themselves in the foot for coverage. Responding to every signatory on those petitions about shitty coverage with "We attempted to put up a tower in order to fix this and objections from this list of people killed it" will make the issue self-limiting.
Yes, the mobile companies have power of planning appeal but the more recent planning rules which were supposed to free things up have actually had the opposite effect in many areas and made it MUCH harder/far more expensive to appeal, with no guarantee of being awarded court costs, let alone the entire bill for taking it to court.
"you don't need four separate* base stations to serve some small village with five houses and a shop miles from a main road. "
A large chunk of the problem is that unlike other countries in europe, UK operators are NOT allowed to pool resources in low population density areas and build a single tower + radioset that will handle all networks.
They're frequently not even allowed to co-locate their kit on the same tower.
"Uber will hire human drivers to do the difficult driving, refuelling and loading, "
Haulage truck pulls into the yard, by the pumps. Monkey fills it up, checks the tyres, navigates it around the yard and docks it, then gets into another truck and returns to pump court and exits, waiting for for next truck.
Haulage truck drives off to destination, sans monkey.
Monkeys are happy - they can sleep in their own bed each night.
Bosses are happy. They can pay monkeys less than drivers, 8 hours are a time (3 shifts) for less than drivers and no restrictions on operating hours thanks to robots doing the longhaul stuff.
> Pilots have a long history of considering themselves special (lots of training, prestige job, high salaries)
Pilots have a long history of getting themselves into mind-stupifying levels of debt and working insane hours to qualify for those jobs. The reason they demand the salaries is to pay it all off.
Remember that when you complain about the rates your UK university-educated (and debt-laden) graduates are demanding for XYZ job.
"There are already large trucking depots on some state borders for assembling and breaking up triple hitch hauls, and there are yards outside cities for shifting trailers and loads before heading into town. "
You can and should expect such yards to become the norm everywhere. This model has been under development for several decades and robot drivers is a natural fit. Most of the big rig makers have been proposing "freeway-only" designs to service marshalling yards for a long time.
"And for any proper delivery vehicle, like for instance a supermarket truck, it's the driver who unloads the cages at each drop off. "
You're confusing "haulage" with "drayage"
You can bet that haulage will see drivers replaced long before drayage does. Haulage drivers don't load or unload their cargo either.
The estimate in 2012 was that robot drivers will make at least 400 million people redundant worldwide and big rigs are where it'll be felt most keenly.
Whilst simultaneously reducing the road toll by at least 90% - virtually all crashes are caused by human error.
The moment robot drivers are "good enough" (they don't need to be perfect, just better than humans for most tasks and that's not hard), you'll see insurance premiums for having a monkey behind the wheel skyrocket.
"But in those circumstances a human's pretty safe too."
No. Humans get bored shitless of driving at the same speed or staying behind the same truck for 100 miles and do things like 4mile-long overtakes or driving off the road when there's a bend, or running at non-fuel-consumption-optimal speeds (ie, with the loud pedal mashed to the floor and the limiter controlling the road speed)
Autonomous driving makes more sense in a big rig first, at least partly because there's a lot more space to fit sensors and CPUs and partly because (as with aircraft) saving a bit on fuel makes a big difference to fleet operational costs.