Posts by Charles 9

Re: Default passwords...

Except there will be people who just don't get it and will complain to the point of filing lawsuits for defective products. And some of the complainants will have enough money or connections to cause problems regardless of fault, unless there's some king of law in the books that penalizes "being bloody stupid".

Re: It should just work

As they say, that's YOUR job. Either JFDI or come up with a Turing-style disproof so you have an alibi to put in front of a judge.

Re: GPS location on the router home page.

No good. Too many complaints. AND some of them have enough money to cause trouble. If you can't make it turnkey, you're not doing it right.

Re: It's almost like...

The government is fair game in caiptalism, too. You bribe, cajole, or vote in the most cooperative government you can. If all else fails, you bail out.

Re: This sounds like a really well thought out piece of legislation

But that's exactly the point where they get you: outside the envelope.

Re: Make it easy

Ever heard of, "Screw the Rules, We MAKE Them"?

Re: Who would pay?

Not even to a Utah-class data center and/or a secret quantum computer?

"This is also why fundamentally AOSP, lineageOS and other custom rom can work perfectly without google apps."

OK, know one that doesn't trip dm-verity?

Re: What exactly did they do?

But Google Play Services is built into every vanilla Android phone, and it alone can send all it needs to Google via base station triangulation (and the only way to stop that is to turn off the radio, at which point it's practically a paperweight. Remove GPS is only possible by tripping various safeguards built into the phone which can cause apps to balk.

Re: My solution

And then you get locked out from root-aware apps, and since Marshmallow dm-verity is enforced and can be checked, too.

Re: This is another easy win for Facebook

And what about multiple accounts for each actual human?

"They might be resistant to fire (or even feed on it) but are they resistant to a good hanging?"

An iron neck would make them hang- AND decapitation-proof. They'd probably break the rope first and revel in it. IOW, the worst thing you can do to someone crazy is to give them airtime. Problem is, the crazies are crazy enough to make NOT giving them airtime EVEN WORSE.

Re: "Broadcast TV fee" has not existed for decades

They'll just fire back even the strongest signal allowed by the FCC can do squat if you live in a concrete canyon. The physics of a city's structure tend to make radio signals difficult to handle. Ask any cell phone or GPS user. Under the FCC mandate, they're not obligated to reach a particular stretch of people (TV is not considered essential). In fact, the cable company could (theoretically) drop the local channel if it can't reach a certain area (the onus is on the cable company, not the broadcast network).

Re: Conspicuously Missing...

Well, as they say, things could be worse. Newspapers suffer the same issues, I hear. Most people only buy newspapers for one or two sections. Without all of them, though, they wouldn't have enough buyers to stay in business. So you may not speak Spanish but your neighbor may be Hispanic, yet without both your subscriptions, television can be a much sparser world.

Re: Out of pure spite to my "free market" cable provider

But even that smacks of cutting one's nose off to spite one's face. There are plenty of fish in the sea who simply cannot live without ESPN. Say no, and they'll reply You Might as Well Be Walking on the Sun.

Re: "the world is clinging stubbornly to IPv4"

Because ANOTHER problem hit: with the IPv4 address drought, routing tables got complicated, and no matter how much you try, complicated routing tables introduce latency, especially at the upper-tier routers that have to churn through a ton of this stuff every second. The reason IPv6 went so big was so it could go sparse...and simplify the routing problem WITH plenty of room to grow. Now instead of complicated lookup tables you can work with much simpler binary rules.

Re: Adoption of IPv6 is inevitable.

What about taxes? Sure, you'd like to hold them off, too, but it tends to be more trouble than it's worth most of the time.

Re: Overly complicated

"They have made IPv6 overly complicated, it's like you have to know more or less everything, before you start with the stuff, otherwise you'll end up having a network which might work, but you don't know why - and if you connect it to the internet you can't hide behind a NAT'd firewall - which is really really bad."

Well...there's a problem right there. Why does it have to be a NAT'd firewall. Why can't it be a straight-up firewall?

"And don't get me started on the notation, I've entered thousands of IPv4 address on my keyboard, on a numeric keyboard everything is there 0..9, and a '.' - everything which is needed."

IPv6 addresses CAN be entered in decimal, too, WITH the standard period notation. That's why the bracket notation: it helps to distinguish which is which. Hex notation is simply easier to read for the longer addresses and allows for the double-colon shorthand, but the spec DOES accommodate.

Re: Mobile devices / 4G networks

Confirmed. I'm on T-Mobile and The IPv6 Test Site says it's native IPv6. And that was at least two years ago.

Re: Ipv4 origins

In addition, IINM there are special allocations set aside for setups that don't easily fit into a geographic or otherwise sane structure (like perhaps a pan-global company with multiple external gateways in multiple countries). IOW, part of the reason for 128 bits is to (unlike last time) try to take everything into consideration.

Re: Obvious need for..

UNLESS even the smallest change breaks the mold. That's the problem with IPv4. It was designed (DECADES ago) for fast processing on limited memory and computing power. Ergo, it was designed with a fixed (meaning impossible to adjust) packet structure. It wasn't designed with forward compatibility in mind, and without that, there's no way you can make an extended IPv4 work without breaking something. Otherwise, how does one cram 13 eggs in a carton only built for 12 without breaking something along the way? And no, something like EzIP won't work very well without the same kind of infrastructures you would need in IPv6 anyway (special edge routers et al--guess what NAT46 and NAT64 routers do).

Re: How to lie with statistics?

"Donn, there is no such thing as a free market. I can't set up a telco; I can't afford it. It isn't free.

The existing big telcos inherited most of their cable runs. Many of the rest were subsidised by the gummint they now despise. I can't inherit anything (and I can't afford to bribe a congressman/senator - they're not free, either)."

It's like I said: Barriers of Entry. A high barrier of entry tends an industry towards monopolies and cartels because it's easy for incumbents to keep upstarts out. Utilities have high upfront costs (utilities have a high capital prerequisite; they require lots of infrastructure to operate) and thus a naturally high barrier of entry (as in it's a trait of the industry itself, not of any particular part of it, and thus hard if not impossible to skimp).

Re: How to lie with statistics?

You forget about Barriers of Entry. Utilities, especially rural ones, are notorious for a combination of high initial cost (capital outlay for infrastructure) and NIMBY issues that make them among the most likely to form natural monopolies.

There was never an opportunity. Rollout to rural areas involves so much capital investment that providers would've refused to roll out AT ALL without sweetheart deals. When rural communities desperate to keep residents are stuck with a Hobson's Choice, it's literally a matter of Take It or Leave It.

I've been told the ADB backup system is not that reliable, not compatible with many devices, and hard to determine if the backup actually worked. Holo Backup has been abandoned on those grounds (couldn't trust the underlying system, no alternatives).

Re: No story here

"Tape is dead?"

It is in the consumer sphere. When was the last time you saw a tape drive at the local Best Buy? At least when QIC drives were around, consumers with a bit of cash could use them. No such analogue exists today, much as I wish there was, as we could really use some reliable way to archive a few TB at a time of stuff. As of now, the closest solution out there is rotating external hard drives.