techsupporter

It is the classic example of FYGM. I'm old enough to remember when being a "good netizen" would have meant that medium-sized organizations would be pushing for the new standards and practices that would allow newcomer organizations, maybe even orgs that didn't yet exist, to join and participate on the network.

Now we've wound up where IPv4 addresses are like houses: everyone who already has one is quite content with the situation (and even sees them as "investments" to be traded and hoarded and leveraged) while newcomers are absolutely hosed. And doing the right thing of expanding the pool of availability, whether by allowing more housing to be built or by migrating to IPv6, is met with cries of "there's no money in it for me so I'm not interested."

And lest anyone thing this is petulant whining on the part of a sysadmin from a new network, where I work has several legacy IPv4 assignments and we own four or five low-digit ASNs. We are set for life for IPv4, yet we've picked up our IPv6 allocations from ARIN and have actively updated our internal network such that all applications can work in a v6-only environment and we've even donated some of our address space to new organizations in our field (medicine) who needed it to get started. That is how the Internet is supposed to work, through cooperation.

I use Fastmail for personal e-mail for myself and two family members and where I work uses Microsoft's Office 365. I've never had issues with mails I send from Fastmail landing in spam, even to Google users, and I prefer their webmail UI over Outlook for the web or whatever it's called these days.

This looks a lot like a direct clone of https://forwardemail.net/, except that ImprovMX isn't open source. I wonder which came first?

I like simplelogin.io (also open source, so can be selfhosted) because the aliases can be used to send and receive, though you do have to set the domain up on their platform first.

> do you really think that it's not a basic assumption that a government service is tax funded?

My impression is that they are fully aware but they don't want, for whatever reason, to come right out with the "taxes are theft" framing. The astounding irony of posting these messages using a set of technologies and infrastructure originated via taxes collected and then used by the government makes my head hurt.

> Cool stuff don’t pay bills.

I'm very much on board with this. I put stability and money on about the same pedestal and is why I still work where I do after many years for a salary that is fantastic for 90% of the country but is "merely average" for Seattle.

Working for a rock solid medium-sized that's been in existence for a hundred years and funded by a stable endowment and a pile of public service contracts and has never had a layoff is more interesting to me than knowing that the odds of me still having a job in the 2030s, if I still want it, is well above 90%.

If you log into your My T-Mobile and go to Profile, your line, Blocking, Other there's an option to "Block Tmomail.net Messages."

This is clever but due to the astounding amounts of spam and scams I got through that mechanism (not this script specifically), I had to set this to blocked on my T-Mobile account.

A lot of people will point out that the difference of a relative handful of cents doesn't matter much to the individual buyer, and they're probably right. I think the change has happened largely on the supply side. Businesses didn't want to change the price of a soda and so swapped in zero-sugar versions that don't carry the tax. Anecdotally, I've noticed a distinct rise in the number of places offering several more zero-sugar options (though, for some blasted reason, it's still easier to find Coke Zero at restaurants in the suburbs than it is in the city and no, Diet Coke is not OK come on now).

(Alternatively, they did raise the price of all sodas, sugared or not, but I haven't seen much of that.)

Well, for one, I'm not a software engineer. I do system administration work and, yes, it happens a lot that there's the "bang my head against it for weeks to make it Be Correct" outcome or the "I've beaten my head against it for a week and the user or my boss or both are mad and time to do the obvious workaround."

They've told him what they want: a bank account. So...give them another one? If the author wants to keep spending hours trying to get $2,300 to go exactly where he wants and debugging Amazon's system, he is of course free to do so.

Me, I would have done one thing he did--remove Amazon Pay--and gotten my $2,300 four weeks ago. That's not a criticism, just a difference in tactics.

This is kind of what I'm wondering as well. I understand the compulsion to try to get the other side to just fix their shit, but when a gnat is buzzing around Godzilla, the gnat can't exert enough pressure to convince Godzilla to dance.

Go to another bank or go to CashApp or TransferWise (now called Wise I think) or any number of the dozens of apps-masquerading-as-banks and get a new set of ACH details. Get the $2,300 you're owed.

> We were all on the early Internet ("early" meaning before 1995 or so.)

This is basically why he had such a big interest in it. He was old enough to have been around to get a subnet but either didn't or lost it or something (he never said) and had worked for our employer forever. He seemed to be very "Internet hipster" about it. One of his big claims to fame was operating a FidoNet BBS that Clifford Stoll logged into.

We weren't exactly sad to see him go but it really cemented for me how wrapped up some people get in things. (We also have a four-digit ASN and he loved being snide about sites with six-digit ASNs, like I have.)

I'm not, at least in the ARIN region. ARIN has gotten more picky about what transfers they allow so selling blocks to an ARIN member is more difficult. I figure RIPE will follow soon, though I hope the screeching owls on the Address Policy list who want to slam the door after the horse burned down the barn, by banning all transfers, lose out.

A former coworker is, for some reason, incredibly proud of our medium-sized medical group having a legacy block. He takes such a proprietary interest that he became a former coworker when he quit, among other reasons, after our board voted to give a /23 to another group in our industry.

I'm not quite old enough to have been able to get a free /24 with no recurring fees but I'll happily use the provider-independent /24 I got in the RIPE area some years ago. Only costs $150/year to my sponsoring LIR and they give me a /44 of IPv6 addresses included.

You can set up all of the shell companies you want, but what you can't do is fake notarized statements and induce others to take actions based on them by transmitting them "over the wires." That's what he is being charged with here, because otherwise ARIN would have said "all of these companies are owned by the same person and our rules don't permit address allocations in this manner."

You can rig this up yourself with Tasker and Pushover. There is an plug in for Tasker that enables using REST API calls and with variable names in the call so you can capture the text of an SMS. I used to do this for an old hotline phone.

I don't know what the SMS service part of Pushover uses as we don't send SMS through Pushover. The part we use, the main feature, sends a notification through an app the user installs on their device. All of us who receive push notifications through our system have the Pushover app on our phones, some also have it on their tablets and computers.

I like the Apple Watch integration as I can interact with urgent notifications just on my watch without my phone handy.

Where I work, we use Pushover (https://pushover.net/) for this. A message comes in via SMS and then a handler stores it in a database then turns around, does some light filtering[0], and then sends a notification to a Pushover group. It's $5 per user per month for their teams feature, which we happily use.

0 - The handler doesn't send out via Pushover any message that contains words we're unlikely to use; Facebook is one, for example. If a message isn't forwarded via push notification, it is emailed to the sysadmin list for one of us to manually look at during daytime hours.

> they may still choose

Which is the biggest problem, the TSA does not have to follow its own rules. And if you dare point out the rules to them, you will be told that "for your safety and security" individual screening is "up to the agent's discretion" and asked "do you want to fly today" while also being loudly informed that you obviously "do not care about the security of others."

This is why I am such a huge advocate for trains, though I imagine that if rail got more usable and widespread here the TSA would just infest it as well. Until that happens, I will always take a train for short regional trips. SEA to PDX might be scheduled for 45 minutes on the plane and 3 scheduled hours on the train, but the experience is so much better on Amtrak not having to put up with the sad mess our airports are.

I sent this article to a friend of mine who works for Microsoft and they came back with an interesting anecdote: several groups inside Microsoft, including theirs, have recurring "hack for good" gatherings, especially during the pandemic when regular get-togethers aren't happening. One of the things they do for this is to log into a community team (I'm not sure of the exact term, I don't contribute to OSM) and spend a couple of hours tagging landmarks and streets and edges of farms and various other geographic features while BSing together as a team.

Sounds kind of relaxing to me, and a way to contribute a bulk of hours to OSM that I hadn't thought of.

> That’s because you never actually bought the item. You got a license to run it on someone else’s server.

Don't mean to sound too cranky but this "you just bought a license" crap has been a thing since software began being software. It was no more fair back then than it is now.

No one is arguing, at least I don't think they are, that a company has an obligation to keep servers running in perpetuity. But to tell me I have no portable way to retain the bits I bought--excuse me, "licensed"--from a company is just crap. If a game can run in single-player mode without a server, or if a movie file can be played, or a song file listened to, then the act of "buying" it should mean I can do that for as long as I can keep my computers running and the onus on keeping backups of those files is on me.

We call them app "stores," we use the moniker of "purchased," and the ads call them "ours." If companies don't want to let us keep the ability to independently use the software or content files we "purchased," then they should be prohibited from using the lexicon of buying things and be very explicit that this is a one-time fee for a rental that can be taken away at any time.

Being explicit does not mean burying it in a multi-thousand word document that no person with a regular command of English can understand and that none of us have the power to negotiate for ourselves.

I'm just thrilled there is a time-limited trial and that the purchase is one-time.

Based on how iOS usually goes, I anticipated being disappointed by a "just a cup of coffee every quad-fortnight" subscription of $3.99/56 days or the like.

I'm glad it worked out for you and that some hams are able to use the process. I might have just been unlucky. I believe Chris is the person who handled my request, since it was for a block to announce, but I can't remember for sure and I've deleted the emails long ago. I worked out another way to accomplish what I want to do, so I'll leave a /24 for someone else to potentially have.

The AMPRnet system is not really, or at least doesn't seem very, approachable for a bunch of reasons, so it doesn't surprise me that hams might not be fully taking advantage. And even once you get a block, using it on the Internet is more difficult than it needs to be. ARDC went to the trouble of having the parent net moved under ARIN's management (changing it away from Legacy status, another self-own), yet ARDC still won't use delegations or IRR/ROA for whatever reason. It all just seems backwards.

I think it's very interesting that this person found the AMPRnet largely unused. I wonder how much of that is ham projects that don't traverse the Internet, how much is hams not knowing they can receive allocations from this subnet, or how much is the difficulty in actually getting an allocation.

Just my anecdotal experience in the U.S. but about a year ago I tried (again, after many years) to get a /24 from AMPRnet to announce via BGP. After not hearing back for two months, I was told that my request wasn't correctly submitted and to try again. So I did, and never heard back. Yes, the AMPRnet people go to great lengths to say that this is an all-volunteer effort and coordinators have many other things they'd rather be doing than processing request for addresses, but on the other hand the ARDC did manage to, uh, "acquire" nine figures of money from a large company by selling off a shared resource with minimal notice or community involvement so maybe paying a couple of staffers could be on the roadmap?

I was also wondering how this person managed to get a /24 in short order to do their "Easter egg," which definitely isn't a valid use according to ARDC's rules:

> But by only using a /24 (or almost $8,000 today) and more hours than you should, you can write your own callsign on the IPv4 map! Here you can see my own callsign, SV2OIY, written on the image, by carefully calculating the exact IPv4 addresses that need to be online and then making sure that they respond to pings.

And then...

> The reason I analyzed the 44/8 space was due to my role as a member of the ARDC TAC, and my duties of managing the IPv4 Address Space, planning for the future, and improving the processes under which it is being operated and allocated

So as with everything in life, it's not the rules you read, it's who you know.

> Interociter

Oh, this thing? I use it to make hot chocolate.

I was born in Texas and lived the first part of my adult life there. All of my family still lives there. But many years ago, I decamped for Seattle (before the tech boom really got started here) and, bluntly, I'm never going back. I wish everyone who is moving to Texas the best of luck and truly hope you succeed. But if you think moving to Dallas or Austin or Houston and putting a Beto sign on your front window is anywhere near comparable, I disagree a great deal.

Putting aside the politics, weather, and economic structure of Texas, the "mystical ethos" of Texas is the thing that really gets me, and I had to leave the state before I could get a good vision of it. The pervasive myth of Texas being larger-than-life, exemplified by the "I wasn't born in Texas but I got here as fast as I could" and persistently quoting "you may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas" is really something, and it seeps into everything. It's like taking American exceptionalism and raising it several more notches.

> Which streaming service do I go to now for the science fiction?

Exactly. Every company has segmented their content by company, not by type. Sure, I can buy a subscription to Boomerang and get a lot of cartoons, but it's just the cartoons owned by Warner. But not all of them, because they've moved some of them--like Dexter's Laboratory--off to be HBO Max exclusives.

There's no way to say "I want a science fiction themed service" that includes Paramount and HBO and the old PTEN and the like, because no company would stand for another service mixing their IP like that.

> Some sites, instead of using a blacklist of every single disposable e-mail service, just use a whitelist of 'popular' email domains

This is very interesting to me as I've had my own domain for a very long time and haven't encountered this more than twice in that time. If you don't mind sharing, on what kinds of sites have you seen this?

I am not at all discounting your experience. We probably have different interests and visit different sites so I'm interested to explore that.

I have very often hit the "you can't use emails from that service here" deny list which is why I think these kinds of services are neat but will quickly be rendered useless once the deny lists are updated.

> Compared to the House of Representatives which has 4 year terms, and half up for reelection every 2 years.

BTW, terms for Representatives are two years; the entire House stands for election every even-numbered year.

> Should I buy the CD or a download?

> Answer: The CD. It is very hard for them to make money from streaming.

For what it's worth, and I am not a musician and maybe every deal is different, the people I know who earn a living from playing music have told me that buying the physical CD or buying a digital download from an online store like iTunes or HDTracks nets them within a dollar or two of the same payout.

There's a substantial, as we all know, earnings difference between buying a CD and streaming the artist on a platform like Spotify or Apple Music. But the difference between buying the CD and buying a set of MP3s or FLACs or the like is, supposedly, far smaller.

(If your preferred artist is on BandCamp, I've been told it's even smaller or almost to the point that the CD makes them less money than the download.)

No need to apologize, we all didn't like him. If you'd told us that the easiest way to get him to depart in a huff would be to donate some unused IP addresses to other groups that needed them, we'd have deployed NAT64 and heaved the legacy allocations overboard in a long weekend.

Stackoverflow's quote you pasted makes me feel like an old fart on the Internet. I imagine there are a lot of rose-tinted glasses at play here, but I kind of remember an Internet when we would do things for the good of the network as well as for the good of the user.

Taking action as a group to speed adoption of a technology that makes the kind of innovation and autonomy we had in the first thirty years of the Internet accessible to the next thirty years of the Internet is impactful for users. The gigantic companies who have bought /8s and /9s of IPv4 space are not going to undermine their investments. It will take companies and network operators who are big enough to decide but small enough to still be idealistic who say "yes, IPv6 is worth it and we are going to spend the time and people and money and resources on doing it."

This is the same problem we have with housing; it can't be an investment and a thing everyone needs. At least the difference here is probably no one winds up hungry under a bridge taking ill-advised substances to handle daily life simply because they don't have a /24 to call their own.