yardstick

I don’t think it’s a silly question.

Before mobile phones, there were public phone booths. Along motorways there were often call boxes. There’s little to none of that anymore.

Also before mobile phones, if you had an accident in a remote area you were at the mercy of someone passing by and noticing you. Today, modern cars can call 911 on your behalf along with your location without you even being conscious. Or if you don’t have a car that does this, then your cell can be used. Let’s not also forget iPhones calling for help when they detect you had a fall at home.

Yes emergencies existed before mobile phones. I contend that the use of mobile phones has led to better outcomes when an emergency happens. I also admit mobile phones will have caused some of those emergencies (distracted driver etc).

No good when the upstream is some wifi connection provided by the building management, rather than a telco themselves.

May as well pick a single solution that works across all Internet connections and weird setups, be an expert in that, vs having to manage varying network approaches based on telco presence, local network equipment, operating country, etc.

On the later parts, VRF in my scenarios won’t scale.

Need to provide support access to 10k-50k locations all with the same subnet (industry standard equipment where the vendor mandates specific IP addressing, for better or worse). They are always feeding in data into the core too.

Much easier to just VPN+NAT.

The problem with talking to a telco, is you have to talk with not just one but any your customer may use. And if at the customer location there’s multiple routers in between the cameras and that telco router, it’s a shitshow trying to configure anything.

Much easier to drop some router on site that is telco neutral and connect back to your telco neutral dc/hq.

They’ve been planning this for a while. These datacentres and organisations don’t spring up overnight, especially at this scale.

I know at least one major European bank made it a requirement upon AWS to provide essentially this service. I believe back around 2020 or maybe a bit earlier.

> Or better still, this torrent file, where the bots would briefly end up improving the shareability of the data.

Depends on if they wrote their own BitTorrent client or not. It’s possible to write a client that doesn’t share, and even reports false/inflated sharing stats back to the tracker.

A decade or more ago I modified my client to inflate my share stats so I wouldn’t get kicked out of a private tracker whose high share ratios conflicted with my crappy data plan.

Do you take into account the iPhone not holding the original images of every photo? It will offload originals and just keep thumbnails if the library is too large.

Mine is approaching 1.5TB, I’ve got no hope of keeping that all on an iPhone, and also no guarantee that any given photo is fully available locally.

Or could just release the tool that issues new keys/serials/licenses.

It could have been action against any number of countries or people.

Russia, Iran, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, etc.

> burns out because he doesn't want to put up with a bunch of annoying work

It’s more than annoying work, it’s pointless work needlessly created by people other than him.

It’s like migrating from Java 8 to newer versions, the decision makers placed backwards compatibility at the back of their priority list. Literally a decade later it’s still griefing migrating users, all because “Jakarta not javax” nonsense. I’m greatly simplifying but that’s the essence of it.

Now we have some genius decision to I guess protect against untrusted code doing unexpected things. And at the same time Applets are gone and Security Manager is gone. And the reality is that Java applications aren’t run with untrusted code. The run scripts define all the jars/classes used. If there was some malicious code that wanted to run, I’m fairly confident it would also just modify the run scripts to include this new flag.

So all we’ve gained is support headache and pain, and no real net gain in practice.

From my own experience managing large numbers of routers, and troubleshooting issues, I will never use pool.ntp.org again. I’ve seen unresponsive servers as well as incorrect time by hours or days. It’s pure luck to get a good result.

Instead I’ll stick to a major operator like Google/Microsoft/Apple, which have NTP systems designed to handle the scale of all the devices they sell, and are well maintained.

Who knew I’d need to do this? I’d never needed to do this either my emails in the decades prior.

You’ve also got no idea what was in those emails. Could be some valuable knowledge or logs about some crazy rare bug or scenario, and would be useful to review today.

We just turned on S/MIME by default, to “be secure”, whatever that means. There was no warning in the email client about losing access to the email if you lost your keys.

Citing BOFH is all well and good inside certain circles. In the real world, people don’t like spending time or effort on poorly thought out and implemented solutions.

The article wasn’t great at laying out the concepts at the start. As I understand it, the big idea is essentially a bloom filter as the first phase of a retrieval.

No idea if it’ll trigger a lockout, but if it does at least I have a copy of my photos already.

Been running it for a couple years without issue. But yes your milage may vary.

Yeah that’s the one.

I do have a Mac so it didn’t seem difficult to me, but I accept it will be for those that don’t.

I run a Synology NAS with a docker container that periodically downloads new iCloud Photos to a local directory.

I’ve got hundreds of emails from the early 2010s between a couple of coworkers and myself that I can no longer read because they were S/MIME encrypted and I’ve got no idea what happened to my keys or even if my current client supports it anymore.

I wish the client stored it decrypted once received.

They tried this years ago with ICRA and others. Long gone, but it worked by the webmaster adding metadata to self classify a site. Browsers and other agents could then allow/deny after inspecting the tags.

https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/childmedia/chpt/internet-c...

While this is likely what the op was suggesting,

I would like to point out that in Australia and NZ, it can be a massive pain to find someone who will ship internationally.

Normally this is for things like Amazon US, and other US-based companies. There are services[1][2] that advertise virtual postal addresses in your purchase-country where they’ll box and ship it to you.

So yes, a Chinese name based in Australia with a shipping address in the US isn’t immediately a red flag. Lots of Chinese in Australia and NZ, and lots of people here like to use shipping services like this.

1. https://www.nzpost.co.nz/tools/you-shop

2. https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/online-shopping/buying-on... (Scroll to bottom)

Note: Java compiler versions from 9 onwards have lost the ability to -target 1.5 and earlier.

Sometimes you still need Java 8 to compile for super old programs — think decades old IoT devices too small to handle newer JVMs that you still need to do the occasional minor update for.

But really sdkman is just nice to be able to quickly install and quickly switch jvms without worrying about any opinions the os package manager may have. If I want an old jre8, do I need to fuss around with finding the right package repo for my arch etc, or should I just use sdkman and be done with it.

And that’s what the IETF uses but djb doesn’t like.

Within the IETF it’s not 100%.

See section 3.3 of one of their RFCs for proof.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2418.html#section-3.3

“ Working groups make decisions through a "rough consensus" process. IETF consensus does not require that all participants agree although this is, of course, preferred. In general, the dominant view of the working group shall prevail. (However, it must be noted that "dominance" is not to be determined on the basis of volume or persistence, but rather a more general sense of agreement.) Consensus can be determined by a show of hands, humming, or any other means on which the WG agrees (by rough consensus, of course). Note that 51% of the working group does not qualify as "rough consensus" and 99% is better than rough. It is up to the Chair to determine if rough consensus has been reached.”

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035639

A consensus isn’t always 100%

In practice, many gas stations have VPNs to various services, typically via multiple VPN links for redundancy. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be yet another service going over a VPN.

Gas stations didn’t stop selling gas during this outage. They have planned for a high degree of network availability for their core services. My guess is this particular station is an independent or the air pumping solution not on anyone’s high risk list.

I call them Wise now, have for at least a year. I first joined years before they renamed. Wise is a lot quicker to say.

Correct. This is not something Wireguard does, which was the original comparison.

tinc: One public node, thousands of private nodes, with NAT punching. That's fine and typical in my experience.

Last I checked, tinc supported NAT port punching natively.

> HTTPS doesn't have mandatory key rotation every 90 days. LetsEncrypt does for reasons that they document, but you can go elsewhere if you'd prefer.

A lot of this discussion is about how the browsers define their security requirements on top of HTTPS/TLS/etc.

Such as what CAs they trust by default, and what’s the maximum lifetime of a certificate before they won’t trust it. I believe it is now 2 years? Going even lower soon.

I don’t believe Android IPv6 stack supports dhcp, so won’t be much use there.

Do you upload events to a remote location? How is your storage box secured against theft? That’s my biggest concern for doing local cctv- if you are robbed, they’ll grab anything that looks of value.