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phire commented on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers   blog.adafruit.com/2026/02... · Posted by u/ptorrone
ls612 · 6 days ago
When the FBI comes to you, an executive at a printer manufacturer, and says “implement tracking dots or we will discover criminal images on your son’s laptop” or some similar situation the existence or lack thereof of any legal requirement is irrelevant.
phire · 6 days ago
Blackmail an Executive? That's a complete overkill.

It's so much easier just to "recruit" the direct manager of the firmware engineering team. Convince them it's their patriotic duty to add "tracking dots" to the design requirements without drawing attention to where the requirement came from.

The engineers implementing it will assume the requirement came from somewhere above, or another engineering team. And if the executives ever notice, they will assume it came from somewhere below. Both will probably assume the legal department was responsible, and that there is some kind of law somewhere requiring them to implement that functionality.

phire commented on Data centers in space makes no sense   civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon
MagicMoonlight · 6 days ago
You don’t even need the desert. Just put it in India and use coal power or whatever. AI training doesn’t care about latency to the data centre, so you could put it anywhere, as long as it is cheap.
phire · 6 days ago
I mean, I'd prefer they used some form of renewable energy.

But there should be plenty of options once you start actually optimising for the same use-case as space data centres. Many places have very predictable wind (especially off-shore, which gives you bonus access to cooling water). Or maybe you could set up small hydro power schemes along remote rivers.

phire commented on Data centers in space makes no sense   civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon
phire · 6 days ago
As far as I can tell, Data centres in space only seem viable because their advocates insist on comparing them to standard terrestrial data centres.

And nobody ever calls them out on it.

Today's data centres are optimised for reliability, redundancy, density, repairability, connectivity and latency. Most of advertised savings come not from placing the data centre in space, but the fact that advocates have argued away the need for absolutely everything that modern data centres are designed to supply, except for the compute.

If they can really build a space data centre satellite for as cheap as they claim, why launch it? Just drive it out into the middle of the desert and dump it there. It can access the internet via starlink, and already has solar panels for power and radiators for cooling. IMO, If it can cool itself in direct sunlight in space, it can cool itself in the desert.

The main thing that space gains you over setting up the same satellite in the desert is ~23 hours of power, vs the ~12 hours of power on the ground. And you suddenly gain the ability to repair the satellite. The cost of the launch would have to be extremely cheap before the extra 11ish hours of runtime per day outweighed the cost of a launch; Just build twice as many "ground satellites".

And that's with a space optimised design. We can gain even more cost savings by designing proper distributed datacenter elements. You don't need lightweight materials, just use steel. You can get rid of the large radiators and become more reliant on air cooling. You can built each element bigger, because you don't have to fit the rocket dimensions. You could even add a wind turbine, so your daily runtime isn't dependant on daylight hours. Might even be worth getting rid of solar and optimising for wind power instead.

An actual ground optimised design should be able to deliver the same functionality as the space data centre, for much cheaper costs. And it's this ground optimised distributed design that space data centres should be compared to, not today's datacenter which are hyper-optimised for pre-AI use cases.

-------------------

Space data centres are nothing more than a cool Sci-Fi solution looking for a problem. There have been mumblings for years, but they were never viable (even bitcoin mining was a bit too latency sensitive). Space data centre advocates have been handed a massive win with this recent AI boom, it's the perfect problem for their favourite solution to solve.

But because it's a solution looking for a problem, they are completely blind to other solutions that might be an even better fit.

phire commented on IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT   johnmaguire.me/blog/ipv6-... · Posted by u/johnmaguire
zrail · 20 days ago
Out of curiosity how did you discover this?
phire · 20 days ago
Went to double check what my static IP address was, and noticed the router was displaying it as 198.51.100.48/28 (not my real IP).

I don't think the router used to show subnets like that, but it recently got a major firmware update... Or maybe I just never noticed, I've had that static IP allocation for over 5 years. My ISP gave it to me for free after I complained about their CGNAT being broken for like the 3th time.

Guess they decided it was cheaper to just gave me a free static IPv4 address rather than actually looking at the Wireshark logs I had proving their CGNAT was doing weird things again.

Not sure if they gave me a full /28 by mistake, or as some kind of apology. Guess they have plenty of IPs now thanks to CGNAT.

phire commented on IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT   johnmaguire.me/blog/ipv6-... · Posted by u/johnmaguire
fc417fc802 · 20 days ago
It's also trivial to roll your own version of dropbox. With IPv6 it's possible to fail to configure those nftables rules. The firewall could be turned off.

In theory you could turn off IPv4 NAT as well but in practice most ISPs will only give you a single address. That makes it functionally impossible to misconfigure. I inadvertently plugged the WAN cable directly into my LAN one time and my ISP's DHCP server promptly banned my ONT entirely.

phire · 20 days ago
> In theory you could turn off IPv4 NAT as well but in practice most ISPs will only give you a single address

So, I randomly discovered the other day that my ISP has given me a full /28.

But I have no idea how to actually configure my router to forward those extra IP addresses inside my network. In practice, modern routers just aren't expecting to handle this, there is no easy "turn of NAT" button.

It's possible (at least on my EdgeRouterX), but I have to configure all the routing manually, and there doesn't seem to be much documentation.

phire commented on IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT   johnmaguire.me/blog/ipv6-... · Posted by u/johnmaguire
bigstrat2003 · 20 days ago
This is a terrible argument. First, NAT doesn't provide the security behavior users want. The firewall on their router is doing that, not the address translation. Second, that firewall is on by default, blocking inbound traffic by default, so why on earth would you conjecture that router manufacturers will suddenly stop doing that if NAT isn't on by default? Third, it's not remotely likely that a user will misconfigure their firewall to not secure them any more. Non-technical users won't even try to get in there, and technical users will know better because it's extremely easy to set up the basics of a default deny config. There is no security regression here, just bad arguments.
phire · 20 days ago
The firewall on your typical IPv4 router does basically nothing. It just drops all packets that aren’t a response to an active NAT session.

If the firewall somehow didn’t exist (not really possible, because NAT and the firewall are implemented by the same code) incoming packets wouldn’t be dropped, but they wouldn’t make it through to any of the NATed machines. From the prospective any machine behind the router, nothing changes, they get the same level of protection they always got.

So for those machines, the NAT is inherently acting as a firewall.

The only difference is the incoming packets would reach the router itself (which really shouldn’t have any ports open on the external IP) reach a closed port, and the kernel responds with a NAK. Sure, dropping is slightly more secure, but bouncing off a closed port really isn’t that problematic.

phire commented on Dead Internet Theory   kudmitry.com/articles/dea... · Posted by u/skwee357
sheept · 22 days ago
a reliable giveaway for AI generated videos is just a quick glance at the account's post history—the videos will look frequent, repetitive, and lack a consistent subject/background—and that's not something that'll go away when AI videos get better
phire · 22 days ago
I actually avoid most YouTube channels that upload too frequently. Especially with consistent schedules.

Even if I'm 100% certain it's not AI slop, it's still a very strong indicator that the videos are some kind of slop.

phire commented on My Snapdragon Dev Kit was healthy and working fine until a Windows update failed   jasoneckert.github.io/myb... · Posted by u/jasoneckert
fc417fc802 · a month ago
There's also the case where the hardware has failed but the system is already up so it just keeps running. It's when you finally go to reboot that everything falls apart in a visible manner.
phire · a month ago
I also notice that people with lots of experience with computers will automatically reboot when they encounter minor issues (have you tried turning it off and on again?).

When it then completely falls apart on reboot, they spend several hours trying to fix it and completely forget the "early warning signs" that motivated them to reboot in the first place.

I've think the same applies to updates. I know the time I'm most likely to think about installing updates is when my computer is playing up.

phire commented on Worlds largest electric ship launched by Tasmanian boatbuilder   theguardian.com/australia... · Posted by u/aussieguy1234
leoh · a month ago
10.5MW on demand is wild
phire · a month ago
It’s not that big when you consider many DC car chargers can deliver 0.25 MW.

So ”only” 42 car sized chargers for a massive boat, there are probably some massive Tesla superchargers sites that approach that.

phire commented on Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]   ece.uvic.ca/~elec399/2014... · Posted by u/tosh
computator · a month ago
> if your ISP-side modem directly outputs digital audio, the downstream channel capacity is significantly higher

But why is it higher? It's still an analog channel (the last mile from the ISP to your house), right? Doesn't it get filtered? So isn't it still subject to the Shannon-Nyquist limit?

Here's an ASCII drawing of which parts are digital vs analog as I understood your explanation:

  Rest of world<--- digital--->Telco<---digital--->ISPmodem<---analog--->HomeModem
Suppose you're saying that the link between the ISPmodem and the HomeModem is a bare unfiltered copper wire. In that case, I have a different question: Couldn't you send data at megabits per seconds over a mile long copper wire without using modems at all (using just UARTs?).

I hope you can clear up my confusion.

phire · a month ago
Yes, the actual bandwidth of the last-mile analog line was much, much higher. Hence why we eventually got 8mbit ADSL or 24mbit ADSL 2.0+ running across it. Or even 50-300mbit with VDSL in really ideal conditions.

Though the actual available bandwidth was very dependent on distance. People would lease dedicated pairs for high bandwidth across town (or according to a random guy I talked to at a cafe: just pirate an unused pair that happened to run between their two buildings). But once we start talking between towns, the 32kbit you could get from the digital trunk lines was almost always higher than what you could get on a raw analog line over the same distance.

u/phire

KarmaCake day7978March 18, 2011View Original