timrice

The magic of the existing hourglass model, and the entire premise of the end-to-end principle [1], is that you can build all those features on top of the infrastructure provided by IP. IP as the skinny neck allows service providers to focus on delivering one thing very well, and enables anyone who wants to use that infrastructure to build anything they can think of on top of it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle

This is not entirely true with PON (passive optical networks). The ONT is more than a media converter (optical -> copper), it facilitates the conversation with the OLT (Optical Line Terminal) further upstream. That connection is not an ethernet connection and needs specialized hardware that can communicate using the PON protocols.

The ONT is managed by the service provider and provisioned with their tooling. It typically holds the user profile of the customer, and contains information about the subscribers service level. It is not something that can reasonably be replaced by the end user with their own hardware.

Upsetting that in an article all about photos being used to scam people, there's not a single sample of an offending image!

I mean, I think I get why. But still, it's the first thing I want to see when I read a story like this.

Spec fiction - Nona the Ninth (my review: https://timothyrice.org/nona/)

Third entry in the absolutely fantastic Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir. Highly, highly recommended it.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/229503-the-locked-tomb

The bandwidth depends on the equipment connected to it on each end, which I don't think is public information.

I'm not entirely sure what you're hinting at. Are you saying that the US military and intelligence agencies use metadata to track down and kill people that they deem as enemies? And that Meta/Google/etc. are in cahoots with them to do this?

Can you link me example of this happening? Is there credible evidence that an ordinary citizen (like myself) is in more danger from state actors because of the information harvesting that large corporations engage in? I feel like if the government wants to track down and kill me they already have my address, cell phone records, etc. No need to contact Meta or Tiktok.

Yes, I am very aware of all the potential dangers, which contributes to my blocking everything in the first place. I am curious if, in the United States, there are any realized dangers to these privacy violations.

The Udemy thing is interesting, but it's also (as far as I can tell) just doing stuff with first party cookies and region lookups. Nothing at all the level of sophistication that is being observed from Meta or Tiktok.

I'd love to hear stories of people who got screwed because of facebook or Google's broad web of surveillance, but as near as I can tell, nobody is actually being harmed.

So I have a pi hole for my home network, and a wireguard connection back to it when I'm out and about. I run ublock on everything, block all the javascript, all the stuff.

But I do it because ads are annoying -- I don't like how they look and I don't like how they slow down every experience. I...don't really care about the tracking aspect? As far as I can tell, nothing bad happens to people because some faceless entity is tracking all your browser history.

Is there some secret malice that I'm not aware of that I should be more concerned about? Near as I can tell all this vast tracking infrastructure is really only there to more precisely target me with ads and doesn't really do anything else.

As far as privacy goes, I'm much more weirded out by the fact that my property tax records are public. Or that cell providers have the ability to fairly accurately track my location if they want to. Facebook seems pretty benign compared against that.

Author here

Surface contact is one reason you want an ice/water slurry instead of just ice, but the real reason is that ice melting consume a lot more energy than just ice being warmed up to it's melting point.

The ice will quickly come up to it's melting (equilibrium!) point, without cooling the ice cream mixture very much. Remember, we're trying to freeze the ice cream (not just cool it down), which is proportionally just as thermodynamically expensive as melting ice. Bringing the ice up to it's melting point alone won't suck enough heat out of the ice cream mixture to freeze it.

Author here, thank you!

It's been bouncing around in the back of my brain for a long time.

I couldn't find any clear and concise explanations about what really happens when salt is added to ice, so I did some research and wrote it out myself :D