neelc

Unpopular opinion: IMHO single family homes are an idea whose time passed, at least in big urban areas.

While the "American Dream" is to own a home with a backyard, it is logically easier if everyone lived in highrise condos and apartments in urban areas.

Homes would be cheaper, since you could scale up and not just out (e.g. avoid urban sprawl). Not to mention lower gas costs and we don't need to cut down as many trees to build homes.

My mom owns a home (which I rent the downstairs, it's cheaper for me), and it has a big backyard. That in expensive Seattle. Combine that with tens of thousands of homes (if not hundreds) and you have a lot of wasted land.

A lot of the housing problem isn't Amazon or Big Tech, its single-family zoning. Today's cities need high rise buildings to accommodate everyone.

I work at Microsoft (not on Azure) and run Tor relays. My Tor Exit hosts are Psychz Networks, Terrahost, and OVH, along with a middle relay on CenturyLink Fiber.

Why? Azure egress bandwidth is too expensive for a Tor relay, even for a well-paid software engineer like me. I have ~1.5 Gbps Tor bandwidth. If I were to put that on Azure, I would be paying a mortgage worth of bandwidth fees. Same can apply to AWS and Google Cloud.

However, Big Clouds charge more for bandwidth because (a) they're a leader and (b) they have paid peering deals with Big Telecom (e.g. AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, etc.). Smaller hosts like Hetzner don't peer with those ISPs and rely on "transit", but that also means slightly worse performance to Big Telecom.

In short, big clouds can use their market power and advanced technology to command a premium, whereas smaller clouds have to win over customers with lower prices to make up.

Tor relays are ill-suited for Big Clouds, but then your 5000-node Kubernetes cluster is ill-suited for OVH or Hetzner.

I do use the free Azure credit for Tor Bridges, however.

I did this deliberately mainly so it doesn't get a lot of attention.

I wrote this article when I was angry, but later felt sorry for it so that's why I renamed it to a mix of Chinese and Japanese, so the algorithms move it down.

I don't speak Chinese or Japanese.

+1

I'll admit: I have a bad habit of whenever I'm angry just rant online.

I deleted the article since I didn't want to put any more bad press against CenturyLink or myself.

I could just lie that "I turned off my Tor relay" and do nothing.

About the other CenturyLink issue, it turned out it's an issue with the ONT, not the DoS protection, but a hard limit on the Broadcom Packet Flow Cache which is none of CL's issues. I'm buying another ONT off eBay to hope to fix it.

Not an answer, but I work at Microsoft and unsurprisingly develop with C#. I can admit I miss developing primarily on Unix and FOSS.

At home I contribute to Tor's Rust codebase and it feels much more enjoyable than C#/.NET. Even unsexy languages are more enjoyable on Unix.

No wonder my home desktop and laptop run FreeBSD, as per personal email being self-hosted Postfix, even when I work in the Exchange umbrella. Old habits die hard

Yes, it is GPON.

OMG I wanted to create a similar service to Hoppy Network, but too bad you came first. Guess I'm stuck at a Big Tech job (for now).

Anyways, wish all the best luck to you.

There's also this service which I have for Tor bridges: https://www.aceinnovative.com/internet-access/static-ip-vpn/

Ace's "Static IP VPN" gives you more IPv4 space and is uncapped, but forces a long-EOL Cisco router and is very slow (meaning 2010 speeds). I had this on-and-off, and pushed my main Internet traffic over it from 2013-2015, but it is less flexible.

I'd love to join Hoppy Network if it had a Seattle PoP, and if I could get an "uncapped" plan or at least a higher bandwidth version (even if it is super expensive). I don't demand it from you, though.

And at the same time I totally understand why you have limits (for real), you don't want people to abuse your service and slow down everything. Maybe I will join, who knows.

I am the author.

Wave G is a crap service. Wave took CondoInternet and threw it down the drain. My "Gigabit" there was actually 10-20 Mbps most of the time. And where I had it, the building had wiring exclusivity to Comcast and Wave, so no Ziply Fiber or Atlas Networks. In fact, if I had to choose between Wave G or AT&T Fiber and it's forced router/802.1X, I'd pick AT&T any day.

From what I know, Wave G uses Layer3 Ethernet switches whereas CenturyLink uses GPON.

CenturyLink has a much better service which is sadly held back by the crappy ONT. But if you don't max out your TCP connection count and don't need IPv6 or can live with 6rd/HE.net tunnels, IMHO CenturyLink Fiber beats Wave G.

Google Fiber (actually Webpass) was real solid in my previous place, plus it has native IPv6 which CenturyLink lacks. CenturyLink 6rd sucks, and Hurricane Electric tunnels are getting blocked by sites now.

Most annoyingly, the FreeBSD mirrors are slow via CenturyLink 6rd so I have to route that via Tor since FreeBSD pkg lacks a IPv4-only flag.

CL does have slightly better IPv4 peering and throughput, but Google Fiber/Webpass is totally worth it for $5 more. Yes, Webpass is slightly "slower" on IPv4, due to microwave links, but the real IPv6 and support and even sticky IPs make up for me.

+1

I feel a lot of the "ThinkPad running GNU/Linux" crowd I described were originally descended from the Usenet crowd, and the culture propagated.

They are the Unix die-hards who refuse to use non-FOSS solutions at any cost, and actively are hostile to Microsoft (and maybe Apple/Google).

Whereas the people used to top posting were trained that way because that's how Outlook worked.

Thanks for the upvotes.

I have updated my article. It seems Chase is whitelisting OSes, but they seem to allow Linux and not FreeBSD based on comments and using a Linux user agent.

Chase may not block Linux because does Chase exactly want to deal with angry Linux users on the phone, or see Linux die-hards switch to competitors. Even if 1% of customers leave and don't come back, it could anger Chase's investors.

They may not officially support Linux but the web developers allow it anyways since it's too big of a minority.

They still block FreeBSD. Whether Chase's web developers don't know about BSD or they're willing to let BSD users switch to Citi Bank, I don't know.

I mean, they shouldn't whitelist by OS, but I don't know what the reasoning of blacklisting FreeBSD is.

While I don't own any recent Dell hardware (maybe apart from two thin clients I got off eBay), I own a similarly-spec'd HP Omen 30L desktop (AMD Ryzen 5800X version) that was shipped to WA.

I did get the 30L from eBay without a GPU, but Best Buy was willing to ship the GPU-encumbered version to me (Full disclaimer: I don't game, I develop FreeBSD in my spare time and need a powerful PC to compile kernels/packages, I am nc@ in FreeBSD).

Maybe HP is already complying since they are based in California versus Dell being Texas-based, who knows?

I get two Lenovo ThinkPads from work, and have two personal HP Spectres, along with one Gateway (2020, not Acer) and ThinkPad (both low end).

I love the 2020 HP Spectre hardware-wise (better than my work ThinkPads), but sometimes forced NVMe RAID gets annoying with FreeBSD when Lenovo and Asus let you disable it. At least it's not Acer with forced Secure Boot. Yes, I'll take a Mac over an Acer, and I work at Microsoft (but not Windows).

One of the work ThinkPads I get has a locked BIOS, the other (that I normally use for work) doesn't. But I won't use a ThinkPad as my main personal laptop unless FreeBSD only works on one and nothing else.

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows (and I deal with a SaaS at MSFT). I am a FreeBSD committer and help maintain FreeBSD's GNOME packages and (very recently) the graphics drivers.

The reason why Windows is full of UI inconsistencies is (largely) because of one thing: backwards compatibility.

While backwards compatibility has it's perks, it also means having lots of old code in Windows that can't be touched very easily without breaking compatibility, And that means many old UI elements may stay, that's a side effect.

While desktop Linux/BSD isn't exactly well known for it's UIs, I found GNOME 3/40 to be more consistent UI-wise than Windows 10, being a user of GNOME 3 on FreeBSD at home (which I am typing this comment from), and helping port GNOME 40, while (unsurprisingly) using Windows 10 at $DAYJOB.

But then GNOME, KDE, Apple, et al. is more willing to break things than Windows is. They aren't as bound to legacy compatibility, so old UI elements can be shed easily.

And when Wave bought them, Wave put incompetent people in charge. I moved to a Seattle suburb and had "Wave G" (post-Wave CondoInternet).

I had throughput issues, first on my apartment. That got resolved via Reddit. Then the backbone is slow from time to time which persisted. Sometimes I get a Gigabit, other times I only get 10-20 Mbps.

What did Wave say? Let's bring a tech out. I told them "it's a backbone issue" and they didn't understand me. I don't know how I would explain how networking works to a field tech who only knows how to enable a port or run basic diagnostics.

Another time, I tripped Port Security, and told them they can re-enable my port. Wave said "we need to bring a tech out" as if that will magically solve everything.

This is made worse by my apartment's exclusivity deals: only Comcast and Wave, nothing else. Ziply Fiber (bought Frontier) and Atlas Networks were denied.

Bigger companies like Verizon FiOS in NYC had better tech support, I could still get hold of a Level 2 tech for a much smaller issue (and not even on FiOS).

Wave G makes AT&T's forced router (but not the flipping bits) seem decent in comparison. I don't want Comcast but I'll happily take AT&T Fiber over Wave G even if it means trading my pfSense box for a crappy AT&T gateway (worse case scenario I could bypass or root the gateway, or pay $15 for static IPs).

I fortunately moved (for another reason) and have Google's Webpass. Webpass may not give me a full Gigabit, but it's usually 400-800 Mbps all the time and not 10-20 Mbps 95% of the time with an occasional Gigabit. I wish CondoInternet sold to Webpass instead of Wave (I don't want a merger now, but still).

Surprisingly, I may have preferred CenturyLink Fiber if available mainly for GPON over a 60GHz PtP microwave link (less oversubscription!), well unless PPPoE+6rd kills my pfSense. But Webpass works pretty darn well, and I think I'll stay unless CenturyLink suddenly gives me 2 Gbps FTTH or something, or I move.