Posts by David Crowe 22 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jan 2012
Deadly virus? It's losing its sheen as more antibody testing is done.
And is it even a virus at all? I was perhaps the first to question whether Chinese scientists had jumped past the awkward question of whether their RNA actually was a virus and not endogenous:
http://theinfectiousmyth.com/book/CoronavirusPanic.pdf
I am pleased that some other scientists have come on board (including an 'in press' paper from Georgia public health scientists).
I was working on a shared hosting system and tried to set up SFTP. I was told that they blocked it entirely on their system, because it gave users ssh access, which meant that it was much more than just being able to transfer more securely. So, for a lot of uses, FTP is still the only game in town.
The problem with IPv6 is not whether it can be made to work, clearly it does. The problem is that it delivers no value until EVERY internet device is IPv6 capable and configured. Since that will never happen, we can predict that IPv6 will never deliver any value. There is absolutely nothing you can do on IPv6 that you can't do with IPv4. And with NAT technology you only need a teaspoon of IPv4 to supply an ocean of devices. And the world hasn't exhausted it's creativity with IPv4 addresses yet, such as utilizing the massive reserved 240.x.x.x block in intelligent ways.
I was told by someone from Apple a few months ago that Apple would stop supporting their OSX Server software, which would have killed my reason for having a Mac Mini, but hopefully he was giving me erroneous information, and the Server software would live on, because I really don't want to learn how to configure all the Unix configuration files myself.
Businesses that switch to IPv6 are still dual-stack, so they can't give up IPv4 addresses. Basically IPv6 has NO ADVANTAGES until everyone converts. Which will never happen. So anybody who implements IPv6 is wasting time and money. What we need is IPv7. Admit that IPv6 was a failure and do it right (i.e. as an extension to IPv4 that gradually sucks the life out of its host). IPv6's independence from IPv4 was its fatal flaw.
That's impossible. If you had a service accessible only by IPv6, and people really, really needed it, someone would build an IPv4/IPv6 adapter so that IPv4 could reach it. More likely your service isn't that important and nobody would ever use it, they'd use a similar service that was IPv4 only.
I think you mean that we need another octet at the beginning of the IPv4 address.
That's as unlikely as IPv6 ever being widely implemented.
If you consider the port number part of the IPv4 address (which it really is) and less use of port numbers by HTML5 etc., there is no shortage of IPv4 addresses from now until infinity. Sure it's messier than a clean new system, but IPv6 is hardly a clean system, and hardly new.
The elephant in the room is false positives, that they didn't address. If it was truly 75% accurate then it would diagnose 25% of non-schizophrenic people as schizophrenic. It is probably better than that but even if it's 99% accurate (optimistic!) at not diagnosing healthy people falsely it would still produce 10 false diagnoses out of 1000 scans of healthy people. And let's say the rate of schizophrenia in the general population is 1/1000 (probably less) then false positives would significantly out number true positives. The conundrum of Positive Predictive Value that makes medical screening dangerous.
If there were truly only 4 billion IPv4 addresses, we'd be f***ked already. But in reality the IPv4 address is essentially combined with the port number (16 bits) through NAT. That gives a theoretical limit of 2^48 addresses, which is: 281,474,976,710,656. Not as many as IPv6, but more than enough. Sure, not all of them could be used, because a server with a static IP address might hog the equivalent of 65k addresses. But there are a lot more client devices out there than servers - mobile devices, IoT modules etc. Basically anything that doesn't need a static IP address to be reached will only use a fraction of a single IPv4 address. And the harder it becomes to get an IPv4 address, the more value there is in reorganizing your network and selling off the majority of the addresses you don't need, and the more creative people will become with efficiency of use of IP addresses and port numbers.
True, but dual stack doesn't solve the problem of running out of IPv4 addresses. And we're not running out of addresses. NAT essentially extends the 32 bit IP address by another 16 bits, which gives you 2^48 addresses. Now admittedly, a lot of the 281 trillion can't be used, but even if 10% can, that's 28 trillion addresses. Even if only 1% can be used, that's still almost 3 trillion addresses. So dual stack solves no problem. We're not really running out of IPv4. What's the point?
I hate to say it, but it's IPv6 that's over. When does IPv6 have any value? When you can communicate with the rest of the internet without an IPv4 address. Dual-stack HAS NO VALUE. It doesn't save IPv4 addresses. This whole exercise is feel good for lovers of IPV6 who won't accept that they've lost. What's needed? A complete redesign with forward and backward compatibility between IPv4 and IPv7. IPv6 was a series of disastrous decisions and it is blocking the progress that would come by starting over.
IPv6 is of no value until real people, ordinary people, can configure a device, without an IPv4 address. Having IPv4 + IPv6 does not solve the problem because every device still needs at least one IPv4 addresses. I don't think this day will ever come. We need IPv7, not IPv6. Start from scratch and make it backwards compatible with IPv4. For starters there must be a reserved block for IPv4 addresses (all zeroes plus IPv4 address makes sense) and a mechanism for going IPv4-IPv6-IPv4 and vice versa without losing data or dropping packets. And I mean a single, standardized mechanism. If an IPv7 device could send and receive packets from IPv4 devices then every IPv7 device would save an IPv4 address, and IPv4 would start to dwindle quickly. And it wouldn't matter if it never went away because the smaller it gets the less likely we'll ever run out of IPv4 addresses.
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