johnklos

Let's step back for a moment and think about this example:

Do I, a highly technical person, want a machine that has been made in to an appliance, where I have very little control over what's going on in the background, where I have to trust one of the largest companies on the planet to Do The Right Thing™?

Well, I know I don't want to run an OS like Windows where the end user is treated with contempt and distain, where the price of the license means nothing because I'm still treated as someone who doesn't know enough to even choose my own browser, where third party programs have more control over my own machine than I do, unless I happen to have a lot of specialized knowledge and plenty of time to circumvent these biases.

But let's compare the Apple appliance to an open source OS running on an Intel CPU. Now I have an OS that gives me more freedom to do what I want and need, that has only documentation and technical issues as roadblocks, not intentional design. Better, yes? But now I'm also required to trust a company that has a literal hardware back door built in to it, that comes from a company that acts like they have no real understanding of security but might just be playing dumb, that has lied to users many times over years, that has knowingly chosen speed and marketing numbers over security time and time again.

Now add the fact that we need to trust binary blobs for wifi chipsets, some ethernet chips, GPUs, et cetera. Not great, if we want to both control our machine and trust it.

So, really, would I want to run an open OS on top of a janky CPU with lowest common denominator hardware, where each part might have issues, possibly security issues, or would I want an appliance?

I wish there were more options... AMD is better than Intel, but not sufficiently. They have less of a history of lying, of manipulation of marketing information, et cetera, but they still have that hardware back door. People are working on open source firmware for wifi chips, et cetera. ARM is nice, but ARM laptops and desktops still come at a premium.

So do I see the appeal of an appliance that has incredible performance, battery life, the best exploitation of the hardware on the planet, excellent quality and security? I do, particularly when all aspects of that appliance are in the hands of a company that makes their insane profits from being "premium". So long as their profits depend on being premium, I will trust them, because my trust needs align with their profit desires. When that stops, my trust stops.

Would it be nice if I could run my own choice of OS on it? It would. But sometimes we need a device that gets things done, and in many instances, an appliance is better than the alternatives.

Can I still run pretty much what I want on this appliance, aside from my OS of choice? Yes, I can. So unless I'm interfacing directly with hardware, these appliances mean less work for me.

That's not to say your case isn't valid, but it's easy to see a case for most people having appliances.

...so long as you're not in a market where they automatically opt you in to sending all your DNS requests to a for-profit company without asking, and if you are, you remember to set up a canary domain or go and update your settings for every new install and new profile.

My Diesel has an analog glow plug controller. That's literally the most complicated electronics in the whole car.

That's one way, but I suspect that even if they did disconnect the alternators, they could just charge the batteries overnight.

On the other hand, alternators should make way less EM noise than ignition coils.

If you just use Cloudflare as a registrar, then they can't see what resolution happens on your servers.

If you delegate a subdomain through Cloudflare to your own DNS servers, from what I remember from the animal book, the recursive server should ask Cloudflare for the address of the machine to which the delegation has been made (yours), and while any further resolutions would be answered by your machine, Cloudflare would at very least know of every query to that subdomain.

If you delegate a subdomain and have subdomains under that subdomain, then Cloudflare would only see resolutions to that subdomain and not to the sub-subdomains.

In other words, for most things, they'd have full insight.

So there are good reasons, aside from reliability, efficiency and ease of repair, for having a 1981 Diesel Chevette with a 100% mechanical engine :)

Serious question: Do you really think that Cloudflare is trying to keep these kinds of thing private? If so, I'd suggest that's not a reasonable expectation.

Considering that a modern Ryzen is 1375 times faster than a VAXstation 4000/60, and a VAXstation 4000/60 is around 1280 times faster, at least in clock, than an AGC, that would mean the M4 would need to be about 5.6 times faster than that modern Ryzen.

Hmmm... The M4 might be ten million times faster than the AGC, depending on the instructions per clock of the AGC and the VAXstation 4000/60 with which we're comparing it.

https://zia.io/notice/ApcPNCgTyrYXpUQU2S

Anyone who calls 512 gigs "over half a terabyte" is bullshitting. No, thank you.

Don't tell me what to do or what not to do, and especially don't tell me using provable lies and falsehoods.

It's an interesting article with some contrasts I hadn't considered, but as a tangent, why does the site think it needs 200% CPU constantly, even when not scrolling, just to show me a wall of text?

Organization with hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue and spend can't maintain servers?

I would wonder if this is really something much simpler: an excuse to make things read-only, while implying that people really should give them money if they want things to work.

Really, I can't lose any more respect for Mozilla at this point. It's all gone.

"other valuable consideration" would be what I'd consider the "transfer" of personal data (DNS lookups, browsing behavior) Mozilla makes to Cloudflare by defaulting United States users to using DNS-over-https without notice.

This is the kind of clarification we need, the same way we need actual laws so that companies can't play with the definition of "purchase" to refer to what are actually rentals.

Does it not strike anyone else as odd that if someone said they had a single CPU, and that CPU were running a normal priority task at 100%, and that caused the machine to barely allow ssh, we'd say there's a much bigger problem than that someone is letting on?

No 32 core (thread, likely) machine should ever normally be in a state where someone can "barely ssh onto it". Is Java really that janky? Or is "barely ssh onto it" a bit hyperbolic?

The first few steps on a slippery slope never do seem like a big deal, do they?

Google is evil, and Chromium has too many Google-isms. Also, monocultures are bad.

Is the site dead? Or does it use strange features that keep it from working universally? I just see strobing grey lines...

It finally loaded after several minutes. I see the device pulldown is large, yet there's no scrollbar, and there's no way to search. And from what I see, it doesn't seem to have any CPU based devices yet.

Hopefully it'll improve over time.

Forty years ago I had a Sinclair QL with an 8086 emulator. Because the Sinclair QL had preemptive multitasking, I could easily search memory for patterns, monitor locations, stop and start the emulation, or change memory programmatically and easily from the QDOS side. It was worlds easier than using a debugger, particularly since I didn't own an 8086 system.

I always thought it was a clever way to get insights in to software while it was running that wasn't available to people with 8086 systems, and it's interesting to see this idea so many years later.

The "IPv6 is Hard" source seems to be sarcastic, not serious. IPv6 is ridiculously easy, in the grand scheme of things.

What's hard is getting people who should know better to do what they're supposed to do, without playing games. The very fact that there are people who will argue why IPv6 is unnecessary tells us everything we need to know, because occasionally those people are in the path of deployment of something public. They don't write software which works agnostically with IPv6, they don't implement addressing that's stack agnostic, they don't bother taking the extra five minutes to test with IPv6.

Then you have a corporation that requires manager types to have enough "justification" to actually fix whatever Mr.-IPv4-is-good-enough, and because they don't understand that their own phone uses IPv6 all the time, they don't see a "business case" for it.

The title would be longer, but perhaps more accurate, if it were "Getting know-it-alls to stop stubbornly clinging to IPv4-is-good-enough and getting managers to realize that IPv6 is not only inevitable, but ubiquitous, are hard".

This article's conclusion isn't totally off, but in this case it's something that could easily be fixed by having a junior network admin just simply set things up. It's a trivial problem that's probably there because someone thinks they know better.

This has poorly considered generalizations and reads like an ad.

It's perfect for things that just need a modest amount of bandwidth, like a TV. Most streams are a few tens of megabits, and that's about all you can reasonably expect from powerline networking.

When you try to use as much bandwidth as you can, they fail in sometimes spectacular ways. I have some old Radio Shack 10 Mbps ones that have brought a high end Juniper to its knees when the Radio Shack box's "collision" LED was fully lit. Newer devices do better, but it's best to just use powerline networking for things that need steady, continuous traffic.

So other than Windows constantly and actively slowing down machines, we have dust collecting which then causes CPUs to throttle sooner... I'd be interested to see what the trend in average scores looks like for machines that don't otherwise change over time, although I can't imagine anyone would run Passmark every day or every week for a few years.

Is this news for anyone who is technical? Everyone already knows to not click links in SMS, and only silly people would click anyway...

I will always pronounce "DOGE" as "doggy" because it'd infuriate manchild Musk.

It's extremely telling that Republicans are blocking the subpoenaing of Musk. They're basically saying that asking questions is a Bad Thing™, and that we should just trust our new overlords and let them do whatever they want.

What other reason could there be for not wanting people to ask questions and get answers about what DOGGY is doing?

Cloudflare is discriminatory. They, and their fanbois, will likely claim that they can't publicly discuss their criteria for who they block, so some mysterious magic is going on in the background, and we're supposed to just trust them because they're big.

That in mind, I'd love even the most fawning of the fanbois to come up with rationalization for why for a very common browser (Safari on modern macOS), most links through Cloudflare work, but trying to get past the are-you-human checkbox on Cloudflare's abuse reporting page doesn't work half the time.

Obviously that shouldn't be on an abuse reporting page at all, but Cloudflare has been making abuse reporting extremely difficult for years. Adding rate limiting (a human can easily hit it) and prove-you're-human verification on their abuse page just unambiguously proves this.

You're focusing on the wrong kind of pedantry.

"Marginalized" has a specific connotation, sure, but people can be marginalized for reasons other than, or in addition to, those that fit the connotation.

You really do live up to your name!

You imply that archive.org is somehow doing something wrong by letting "vagrants" sleep on their steps. I'd assert that people who are compassionate are more trustworthy than people who think punishing others should be normalized. I'd definitely prefer my backups in the hands of compassionate people.

The problem is that the people who want to see others be punished can't be trusted to, you know, not do that. Removing information about climate change, about vaccines, about trans care, et cetera, very well could happen at the hands of those who get off on punishing others.

You say the National Archives already does this. What happens when the current administration fires everyone and replaces them with non-professionals?

So I really don't know why you'd be in here talking ish about ArchiveTeam.

I've been hosting web sites on my own bare metal in colo for more than 25 years. In all that time I've dealt with one DDoS that was big enough to bring everything down, and that was because of a specific person being pissed at another specific person. The attacker did jail time for DDoS activities.

Every other attempt at DDoS has been ineffective, has been form abuse and credential stuffing, has been generally amateurish enough to not take anything down.

I host (web, email, shells) lots of people including kids (young adults) who're learning about the Internet, about security, et cetera, who do dumb things like talk shit on irc. You'd think I'd've had more DDoS attacks than that rather famous one.

So when people assert with confidence that the Internet would fall over if companies like Cloudflare weren't there to "protect" them, I have to wonder how Cloudflare marketed so well that these people believe this BS with no experience. Sure, it could be something else, like someone running Wordpress with a default admin URL left open who makes a huge deal about how they're getting "hacked", but that wouldn't explain all the Cloudflare apologists.

Cloudflare wants to be a monopoly. They've shown they have no care in the world for marginalized people, whether they're people who don't live in a western country or people who simply prefer to not run mainstream OSes and browsers. They protect scammers because they make money from scammers. So why would people want to use them? That's a very good question.

Many / most bots use Chrome on Linux user agent, so you think it's OK to block Chrome on Linux user agents. That's very broken thinking.

So it's OK for them to do shitty things without explaining themselves because they "have access to more data than we do"? Big companies can be mysterious and non-transparent because they're big?

What a take!

Simple disagreements suffice. I don't have to make an argument for something just because you bring it up. I'm just pointing out that you bringing it up (hmmm - without backing it up!) doesn't make it a valid point.

You seem to have a bone to pick. I said owned storage is cheaper, and you made up something about it not being redundant. You're not making a salient point as much as you're trying to handwave and dismiss owned hardware as complex, expensive, not worth the "value" one might get from S3, whatever.

If you REALLY think that storage can't be cheaper than "cloud" unless it's not redundant, then show us numbers. Otherwise, you're just making shit up.

You mention all your other things as if you're saying, "Gotcha!" You still have to monitor Amazon. You still have to manage backups. You still have to monitor resource utilization. You're not being clever by trying to imagine that other admins are as bad as you are because all those things seem hard. Good admins do those things no matter where their stuff is running.