And it is a big one that I dont think people are treating too lightly. If the goal of IPv6 is to give everything a global IP address, how do we name them all, or do we? Does the current naming scheme scale in terms of human factors?
And why oh why would they be on a different subnet to being with?
Because the "lightswitch" is actually your mobile phone. I'll have to take a look at this MobileIPv6 thing...
With a discovery protocol
Yup. Will UPnP scale up to a a buttload of local devices though? I'm not that familiar with how it works. For that matter, if everything in your house has an IP address, how does routing work within your own home? Does everything sit on the same, giant, subnet or does each room need a/24?
The alternative is you have to remember a bunch of new IP addresses
A thought did occur to me. What if DNS allowed you to "chop off" bits of the domain name when addressing. That way you could program your devices to use "lightbulb.upstairs" instead of "lightbulb.upstairs.some.long.hostname.com" - either form would work depending on where you were in relation to your home network.
If you were using them for the lower parts of your DNS, now you've got to "rename" every device in the house. "Buy a domain name" you say? Too late, with IPv6 everybody will try to register a domain name to get around "domain name lockin" and nothing good will be left.
Plus, none of this addresses the fact that whatever DNS server you use will also have to manage "knowing what all these devices to". If your lightbulb is on a different subnet from the lightswitch, how will they discover eachother? DNS? Whose DNS server?
(the answer, I suspect, is your netgear router will manage your DNS records and let you set up a private top level domain name... the problem will be that now everybody has private TLDs that cannot see eachother and you wind up with exactly the same problem as you did with NAT boxes)
We already are "out" of human friendly domain names. Do you really think there are enough easy to remember domain names for every single home on the planet?
And if you dont buy your own domain name, is your ISP's DNS going to be ready to handle the burden of every device, every speaker and every lightbulb all trying to register themselves and get unique, globally routable hostnames?
Look at how poorly this kind of stuff scales already. If you are named "Kim Nguyen" and want to use your name on MySpace or Facebook, you are probably gonna be kimnguyen40000 by now. You think it is bad now, wait until every lightbulb on the planet wants to register a hostname.
PS: lightbulb21.myhome.mycity.mystate.myisp.com won't cut it either.
IPv6 has so many addresses that the IP address becomes opaque and meaningless (pretty much like we dont care what our MAC address is). The problem then becomes, how do you give every single device a unique, human readable name? Sure DNS will scale on the technical end find, but DNS as it exists today will fail in the human factors end. When your shoes have dozens of devices like moisture sensors in every part of them, "moisturesensor.shoelace.left.favorite-shoes.cust29534.seattle.wa.comcast.com" is not exactly an easy to remember name.
What will happen, I suspect, is your home router will start doing your DNS. You'll get your own private top level domain (say,.local). Then your kitchen sink will be "kitchensink.local", your dryer will be "dryer.local", etc. Your car and laptop will use your netgear DNS server instead of somebody elses.
The problem will then become how to two homes talk to each other when they both have a device named "xbox.local"? Will both have to get a "real" hostname from their ISP? Sounds a bit like NAT to me, only now it is NAT'ing DNS addresses instead of IP addresses.
The architects of IPv6 envision an environment that *everything* has a globaly unique address. If everything in my apartment has a unique address, what, exactly, are these hostnames going to look like?
If every speaker in my stereo system has its own IP address, what will the hostnames be--ltweeter.livingroom.myhouse.mycity.mystate.myisp.com? How will they differ from my bedroom stereo? Keep in mind I mean *every speaker*.. every tweeter, midrange and woofer should be controlled by the amplifier.
What if your thermostat could get the weather forcast for the next 3 hours. That way it wouldn't need to heat your house up if it is just gonna be 70 degrees out in an hour anyway. Big buildings already do stuff like this, why can't our home systems do it too?
What if your car or mobile phone could tell your thermostat you just left the house and that it doesn't need to maintain a temp of 70 degrees anymore? For that matter, why cant I use my 1080p hi-def monitor (aka, my TV) to manage my HVAC system? Why cant the HVAC system talk with my SageTV/Tivo/MythTV so I can control it with a remote? Likewise, why can't my apartments dryer notify my DVR that the laundry is done so I can go down and get it?
IPv6 doesn't help home automation at all. Once you expand beyond your little subnet, network addressing becomes a challenge. Sure it is great all these devices have globally routable IP addresses, but the *exact* IP address changes every network you get onto.
Here is a good scenario that even has cars:
- You own a car. You would like to get to your music collection at home to play some of the latest tunes from Back Street Boys.
Question: 1) What is the address of my media server at home? If you said DNS, wrong. Who controls the DNS - you or your ISP? Given you are not a nerd, odds are good your ISP will give it a name... something like cust0323.provo.ut.qwest.net. Sure you can change that to joesmedia.provo.ut.qwest.net, but some other jerk is named joe and he owns a media server too. Odds are high your hostname will be joe210949.provo.ut.qwest.net
2) While I'm driving down the road, my cars IP address is changing every couple miles as I switch between providers and cell towers. How does this get handled? If you said the application should handle this, I think you are wrong. Handling network address changes and keeping a session is something the bowls of the stack should handle.
3) Since cars IP is changing all the time, how will my VoIP calls get sent to my car stereo instead of my home phone? If you said DNS, you are wrong. DNS has too much caching to deal with my always changing IP address. Plus, which DNS servers will my car be using on each network? More importantly, which DNS servers will my car contact to update the AAAA record for my car. Even more important, what does that DNS hostname look like anyway? Is it gonna be car395323.autos.btinternet.net?
My point is, IPv6 doesn't solve anything. Both your examples and mine are examples of what happens when all our devices are always on "the net". The problem people seem to think the only way to get everything connected is by trying to force fit everything into a TCP/IP way of doing things. Nobody said the net has to be IPv6. In fact, IPv6 probably is *not* the best way to get everything on the net.
Because unless you set your TTL to like 60 seconds, you cannot "roam" between network addresses. How will your iSink be able to inform you of is washer failure when it has a stale DNS record because your laptop changed access points and network addresses?
Plus, what do these mythical DNS hostnames look like and who is managing them? Do I have to assign a DNS record to every device in my home in order to contact them? Do we all have to own a domain name, or will my iSink become corysink4032.seattle.wa.comcast.net? How will my parents manage this at their home?
I dont care how SMS works (though I do know how it works). But I do know it is a good way to contact my mobile phone to notify me of a washer failure. In fact, SMS is a far better way to contact me because my cell phone number is globally unique *and* can roam across providers and still be reachable. Your DNS hacks aside, you can't do that with TCP/IP.
It does *not* connect to a proxy server outside of your nat. NAT transversal means "Use a protocol called UPnP to talk to the NAT box and get it to hook me up with a few forwarded ports".
In otherwords, uTorrent or whatever asks your Netgear router to forward a couple ports for it. It does *not* connect to a proxy server, that would be insane for a number of reasons no the least of which is *whose* proxy would it connect *to*?
Your plan for world domination might work in theory, but there is some flaws in it.
1) Unless you are "big", your IP addresses come from you ISP. The second you switch ISP's, your appliances will have to renumber and you'll have to get your "iKitchen" software to use the new addresses. 2) Why does it matter where the toaster gets on "the net" anyway? Why can't it use the cell phone network instead of my Netgear router? In theory, those two entirely different networks can talk to eachother, right? Why does TCP/IP make it so difficult to do so? It shouldn't matter if the data packets are sent via SMS to my laptop's hotel internet connection. 3) What if my iSink has a washer malfunction and starts to flood the kitchen? I have a cell phone that is almost always on and I have a laptop that might be on. How does the iSink know where to locate me and which device to use? TCP/IP only makes it easy for my laptop to continually poll my iSink for equipment failures. TCP/IP makes it almost impossible to *push* information to my devices. It doesn't even began to address *which* device to push the information to!
So really, NAT has nothing to do with anything. No NAT, no stable IP addresses. No VPN, my iSink will flood the iKitchen and nobody will stop it.
Totally blew it! I must not have had my coffee yet. Those examples I gave were not 128-bit addresses, they were like 256-bit and I made a whole case around an address space that had twice the string length as IPv6.
Sheesh. Now I'm embarrassed. Better hand in my nerd card.
But still... my Base64 and Base32 examples are right and my point still stands. Just ignore the hex & decimal examples. heh...
What is IPv6, 128-bit address space? That is what, 16 bytes?
Worse case in decimal (I added the dashes so *I* could make sure I typed it right:-) 216:126:59:03-58:95:58:32-126:43:55:129-59:59:59:1
Worse case in hex (same deal). FA:FA:FA:FA-12:55:43:BA-55:DA:CC:DB-89:A1:C1:01
Basically, you are boned:-) Maybe we need a different number system that is like Base64 instead of Base16? Heck... why not just base64 encode the IP address. Base64 is what, A-Z, a-z, 0-9,+,=? A Base64 encoded IPv6 address is just: Az.
Or make it Base32 instead so you can be case insensitive (A-Z, 0-9 and only drop a couple easy to mix up characters like i, l and o to get to 32 chars). A Base32 IPv6 is: A1Y2.
You could even break out subnets with Base32: A1Y:2/96 (subnet mask ZZZ0)
So yeah... why didn't they go Base64 or Base32 instead of Base16?
Seems to me like nobody wants IPv6. Why should we force something like IPv6? It isn't like earth will implode the day we run out of address space.
If we force IPv6, we run the risk of pushing back something else--innovation. Odds are good there is a better way to do this interweb thingy, and if the governments start mandating IPv6, you can forget about network research. That or worse, conservative people blow tons of money on IPv6 upgrades only to find themselves on a virtual island because everybody else has move on to StarNetV8 (now with free ponies).
It isn't backwards compatible in any real sense with IPv4. You might as well switch to a different protocol entirely then switch to IPv6. IPv6 can talk back to IPv4 through crazy tunnels that nobody but people on slashdot understand. But nobody on IPv4 can talk with IPv6 easily (from my understanding, anyway)
Plus, IPv6 doesn't solve any other problem besides address space. It doesn't solve:
1) Roaming between different networks and keeping your sessions alive. 2) Multicast in any kind of sane way. Nobody cares about where a named document is served from--chunks might come from my microwave, my cell phone, my neighbors dog collar... I dont care. All I care about is that the document originally came from the right source, it is the most current version, and it hasn't been modified. Think BitTorrent meets GNUtella meets Freenet, only way down in layer 3, not the application layer. 3) Mesh networks. Ever try to set up a mesh of wireless network access points and maintain a sane address scheme? Think of the hacks your cell phone provider must use. 4) Doesn't do a damn thing about DDOS attacks or other kinds of network nasties. It doesn't matter how good your firewall is if an attacker can flood one end of it. 5) Doesn't provide any real authentication. The network itself should let you be as anonymous or as "real" as possible. Fixing SPAM of all forms requires real authentication at the deepest bowls of the network stack. Layer 3 could be handling authentication for SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, AIM, whatever-- right now every protocol has to re-invent their authentication scheme... some suck (OpenID, which doesn't work with anything but HTTP) some are pretty slick (SSH + public key crypto), some are even at layer 2 (WiFI - WEP/WAP). 6) Doesn't somehow magically fix the ability for people to use botnets or open proxys to screw you over. I dunno how you fix this, or if you even really can. All I know is right now the IP address is meaningless... it is useless to block IP's, it is useless to to use an IP for tracking a session (a single AOL user hitting your page will use several IP addresses). Maybe layer 3 needs some kind of "cookie" or way to maintain a session that doesn't require a stable network address. That way, a session could be maintained even if I hop between access points and change network addresses.
Does Intrade take bets on IPv6 adoption? I'd like to put money on it never getting widely adopted. I'd wager some guy like Vint Cerf will pimp a new, better protocol by the time we really, really run out of IP addresses. I'd also wager this magical new protocol will solve at least a few of the problems I've given above. I also would bet it will challenge how we look at the network... maybe the OSI network model isn't the best way to think about networking?
Our public computer labs would let you install anything on them. You could install games, warez, spyware, whatever. The only problem with the ghosting process is it basically made the computer unusable for a good ten minutes after you logged off.
now that I think about it, the private computer lab used by our department wasn't ghosted either. Not ghosting a "public" lab would be insane though:-)
Look at your log file sometime. Full of useless crap that buries the good stuff. You've got 75% of your log full of stupid failed SSH attempts from script kiddies, 10% from "hi, I'm named and my log level is not perfect so I'm going to tell you that somebody looked for pornjunction.com and I couldn't find it". 10% for "errors" in daemons, only they aren't really errors. Then you've got 4% from some fucked up cron job. That leaves like 1% for the truely useful error message that might actually be of value.
My point? Linux, FreeBSD or any other unix OS has just as many inexplicable, frequent error messages, only instead of dialog boxes, they pollute your log files instead.
Isn't your normal dialog. Unlike other modal dialog boxes, a UAC is a *sytem wide* model dialog box. You cannot do *shit* until you confirm it. You might snark, but I think UAC dialogs are "scary" and with a minor amount of training, they'll call you when they get one. A normal user, doing normal things should never get a UAC dialog. You should only get one when you are installing a driver, software or you have a program like Digsby or Firefox that auto-updates as part of loading itself (which is retarted, IMHO).
At the university I went to, the ghosted the machine the second you logged off. I couldn't imagine it being any other way. How would you even know the machine was owned? Some of the latest malware can dig itself almost as deep into the OS as you can on Linux (it is trivial to bury malware in a linux box as root)
We dont like fucking up our planet for iron, silver and other nice metals. There are plenty of ugly, presumably uninhabited floating rocks out there that have more metal on them then we could possibly dream of.
Hell, Mars alone is covered with a farily refined form of iron pellet. Many astroids are like 50% iron (vs our 7%).
Mining. Mining is what will make all this stuff pay off. Mining and space porn.
Now they get to live with it. They killed trivia (I mean, seriously, what a perfect fit wikipedia is for trivia) and in killing it, created a flamewar that is still heating homes in Alaska. They wanted everything to be referenced, so a new class of witch-hunters tag up every damn article, no matter how well written and factual with bullshit "references needed" and "citation needed".
Seriously, it is like they took every single step possible to a) suck all the fun out of wikipedia and b) ensure it attracted nothing but anal retentive assholes with overinflated egos.
Slashdot Mirror
And it is a big one that I dont think people are treating too lightly. If the goal of IPv6 is to give everything a global IP address, how do we name them all, or do we? Does the current naming scheme scale in terms of human factors?
Because the "lightswitch" is actually your mobile phone. I'll have to take a look at this MobileIPv6 thing...
Yup. Will UPnP scale up to a a buttload of local devices though? I'm not that familiar with how it works. For that matter, if everything in your house has an IP address, how does routing work within your own home? Does everything sit on the same, giant, subnet or does each room need a /24?
A thought did occur to me. What if DNS allowed you to "chop off" bits of the domain name when addressing. That way you could program your devices to use "lightbulb.upstairs" instead of "lightbulb.upstairs.some.long.hostname.com" - either form would work depending on where you were in relation to your home network.
If you were using them for the lower parts of your DNS, now you've got to "rename" every device in the house. "Buy a domain name" you say? Too late, with IPv6 everybody will try to register a domain name to get around "domain name lockin" and nothing good will be left.
Plus, none of this addresses the fact that whatever DNS server you use will also have to manage "knowing what all these devices to". If your lightbulb is on a different subnet from the lightswitch, how will they discover eachother? DNS? Whose DNS server?
(the answer, I suspect, is your netgear router will manage your DNS records and let you set up a private top level domain name... the problem will be that now everybody has private TLDs that cannot see eachother and you wind up with exactly the same problem as you did with NAT boxes)
We already are "out" of human friendly domain names. Do you really think there are enough easy to remember domain names for every single home on the planet?
And if you dont buy your own domain name, is your ISP's DNS going to be ready to handle the burden of every device, every speaker and every lightbulb all trying to register themselves and get unique, globally routable hostnames?
Look at how poorly this kind of stuff scales already. If you are named "Kim Nguyen" and want to use your name on MySpace or Facebook, you are probably gonna be kimnguyen40000 by now. You think it is bad now, wait until every lightbulb on the planet wants to register a hostname.
PS: lightbulb21.myhome.mycity.mystate.myisp.com won't cut it either.
Dammit, slashdot ate my comment.
IPv6 has so many addresses that the IP address becomes opaque and meaningless (pretty much like we dont care what our MAC address is). The problem then becomes, how do you give every single device a unique, human readable name? Sure DNS will scale on the technical end find, but DNS as it exists today will fail in the human factors end. When your shoes have dozens of devices like moisture sensors in every part of them, "moisturesensor.shoelace.left.favorite-shoes.cust29534.seattle.wa.comcast.com" is not exactly an easy to remember name.
What will happen, I suspect, is your home router will start doing your DNS. You'll get your own private top level domain (say, .local). Then your kitchen sink will be "kitchensink.local", your dryer will be "dryer.local", etc. Your car and laptop will use your netgear DNS server instead of somebody elses.
The problem will then become how to two homes talk to each other when they both have a device named "xbox.local"? Will both have to get a "real" hostname from their ISP? Sounds a bit like NAT to me, only now it is NAT'ing DNS addresses instead of IP addresses.
The architects of IPv6 envision an environment that *everything* has a globaly unique address. If everything in my apartment has a unique address, what, exactly, are these hostnames going to look like?
If every speaker in my stereo system has its own IP address, what will the hostnames be--ltweeter.livingroom.myhouse.mycity.mystate.myisp.com? How will they differ from my bedroom stereo? Keep in mind I mean *every speaker*.. every tweeter, midrange and woofer should be controlled by the amplifier.
What if your thermostat could get the weather forcast for the next 3 hours. That way it wouldn't need to heat your house up if it is just gonna be 70 degrees out in an hour anyway. Big buildings already do stuff like this, why can't our home systems do it too?
What if your car or mobile phone could tell your thermostat you just left the house and that it doesn't need to maintain a temp of 70 degrees anymore? For that matter, why cant I use my 1080p hi-def monitor (aka, my TV) to manage my HVAC system? Why cant the HVAC system talk with my SageTV/Tivo/MythTV so I can control it with a remote? Likewise, why can't my apartments dryer notify my DVR that the laundry is done so I can go down and get it?
IPv6 doesn't help home automation at all. Once you expand beyond your little subnet, network addressing becomes a challenge. Sure it is great all these devices have globally routable IP addresses, but the *exact* IP address changes every network you get onto.
Here is a good scenario that even has cars:
- You own a car. You would like to get to your music collection at home to play some of the latest tunes from Back Street Boys.
Question:
1) What is the address of my media server at home? If you said DNS, wrong. Who controls the DNS - you or your ISP? Given you are not a nerd, odds are good your ISP will give it a name... something like cust0323.provo.ut.qwest.net. Sure you can change that to joesmedia.provo.ut.qwest.net, but some other jerk is named joe and he owns a media server too. Odds are high your hostname will be joe210949.provo.ut.qwest.net
2) While I'm driving down the road, my cars IP address is changing every couple miles as I switch between providers and cell towers. How does this get handled? If you said the application should handle this, I think you are wrong. Handling network address changes and keeping a session is something the bowls of the stack should handle.
3) Since cars IP is changing all the time, how will my VoIP calls get sent to my car stereo instead of my home phone? If you said DNS, you are wrong. DNS has too much caching to deal with my always changing IP address. Plus, which DNS servers will my car be using on each network? More importantly, which DNS servers will my car contact to update the AAAA record for my car. Even more important, what does that DNS hostname look like anyway? Is it gonna be car395323.autos.btinternet.net?
My point is, IPv6 doesn't solve anything. Both your examples and mine are examples of what happens when all our devices are always on "the net". The problem people seem to think the only way to get everything connected is by trying to force fit everything into a TCP/IP way of doing things. Nobody said the net has to be IPv6. In fact, IPv6 probably is *not* the best way to get everything on the net.
Because unless you set your TTL to like 60 seconds, you cannot "roam" between network addresses. How will your iSink be able to inform you of is washer failure when it has a stale DNS record because your laptop changed access points and network addresses?
Plus, what do these mythical DNS hostnames look like and who is managing them? Do I have to assign a DNS record to every device in my home in order to contact them? Do we all have to own a domain name, or will my iSink become corysink4032.seattle.wa.comcast.net? How will my parents manage this at their home?
I dont care how SMS works (though I do know how it works). But I do know it is a good way to contact my mobile phone to notify me of a washer failure. In fact, SMS is a far better way to contact me because my cell phone number is globally unique *and* can roam across providers and still be reachable. Your DNS hacks aside, you can't do that with TCP/IP.
It does *not* connect to a proxy server outside of your nat. NAT transversal means "Use a protocol called UPnP to talk to the NAT box and get it to hook me up with a few forwarded ports".
In otherwords, uTorrent or whatever asks your Netgear router to forward a couple ports for it. It does *not* connect to a proxy server, that would be insane for a number of reasons no the least of which is *whose* proxy would it connect *to*?
Your plan for world domination might work in theory, but there is some flaws in it.
1) Unless you are "big", your IP addresses come from you ISP. The second you switch ISP's, your appliances will have to renumber and you'll have to get your "iKitchen" software to use the new addresses.
2) Why does it matter where the toaster gets on "the net" anyway? Why can't it use the cell phone network instead of my Netgear router? In theory, those two entirely different networks can talk to eachother, right? Why does TCP/IP make it so difficult to do so? It shouldn't matter if the data packets are sent via SMS to my laptop's hotel internet connection.
3) What if my iSink has a washer malfunction and starts to flood the kitchen? I have a cell phone that is almost always on and I have a laptop that might be on. How does the iSink know where to locate me and which device to use? TCP/IP only makes it easy for my laptop to continually poll my iSink for equipment failures. TCP/IP makes it almost impossible to *push* information to my devices. It doesn't even began to address *which* device to push the information to!
So really, NAT has nothing to do with anything. No NAT, no stable IP addresses. No VPN, my iSink will flood the iKitchen and nobody will stop it.
Totally blew it! I must not have had my coffee yet. Those examples I gave were not 128-bit addresses, they were like 256-bit and I made a whole case around an address space that had twice the string length as IPv6.
Sheesh. Now I'm embarrassed. Better hand in my nerd card.
But still... my Base64 and Base32 examples are right and my point still stands. Just ignore the hex & decimal examples. heh...
I hate doing what I'm about to do, link to my own comment, but what the hell.
IPv6 would be way easier to remember if they Base32 encoded it instead of using Hex (Base16 encoding). See here
What is IPv6, 128-bit address space? That is what, 16 bytes?
Worse case in decimal (I added the dashes so *I* could make sure I typed it right :-)
216:126:59:03-58:95:58:32-126:43:55:129-59:59:59:1
Worse case in hex (same deal).
FA:FA:FA:FA-12:55:43:BA-55:DA:CC:DB-89:A1:C1:01
Basically, you are boned :-) Maybe we need a different number system that is like Base64 instead of Base16? Heck... why not just base64 encode the IP address. Base64 is what, A-Z, a-z, 0-9,+,=? A Base64 encoded IPv6 address is just:
Az.
Or make it Base32 instead so you can be case insensitive (A-Z, 0-9 and only drop a couple easy to mix up characters like i, l and o to get to 32 chars). A Base32 IPv6 is:
A1Y2.
You could even break out subnets with Base32:
A1Y:2/96 (subnet mask ZZZ0)
So yeah... why didn't they go Base64 or Base32 instead of Base16?
Seems to me like nobody wants IPv6. Why should we force something like IPv6? It isn't like earth will implode the day we run out of address space.
If we force IPv6, we run the risk of pushing back something else--innovation. Odds are good there is a better way to do this interweb thingy, and if the governments start mandating IPv6, you can forget about network research. That or worse, conservative people blow tons of money on IPv6 upgrades only to find themselves on a virtual island because everybody else has move on to StarNetV8 (now with free ponies).
It isn't backwards compatible in any real sense with IPv4. You might as well switch to a different protocol entirely then switch to IPv6. IPv6 can talk back to IPv4 through crazy tunnels that nobody but people on slashdot understand. But nobody on IPv4 can talk with IPv6 easily (from my understanding, anyway)
Plus, IPv6 doesn't solve any other problem besides address space. It doesn't solve:
1) Roaming between different networks and keeping your sessions alive.
2) Multicast in any kind of sane way. Nobody cares about where a named document is served from--chunks might come from my microwave, my cell phone, my neighbors dog collar... I dont care. All I care about is that the document originally came from the right source, it is the most current version, and it hasn't been modified. Think BitTorrent meets GNUtella meets Freenet, only way down in layer 3, not the application layer.
3) Mesh networks. Ever try to set up a mesh of wireless network access points and maintain a sane address scheme? Think of the hacks your cell phone provider must use.
4) Doesn't do a damn thing about DDOS attacks or other kinds of network nasties. It doesn't matter how good your firewall is if an attacker can flood one end of it.
5) Doesn't provide any real authentication. The network itself should let you be as anonymous or as "real" as possible. Fixing SPAM of all forms requires real authentication at the deepest bowls of the network stack. Layer 3 could be handling authentication for SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, AIM, whatever-- right now every protocol has to re-invent their authentication scheme... some suck (OpenID, which doesn't work with anything but HTTP) some are pretty slick (SSH + public key crypto), some are even at layer 2 (WiFI - WEP/WAP).
6) Doesn't somehow magically fix the ability for people to use botnets or open proxys to screw you over. I dunno how you fix this, or if you even really can. All I know is right now the IP address is meaningless... it is useless to block IP's, it is useless to to use an IP for tracking a session (a single AOL user hitting your page will use several IP addresses). Maybe layer 3 needs some kind of "cookie" or way to maintain a session that doesn't require a stable network address. That way, a session could be maintained even if I hop between access points and change network addresses.
Does Intrade take bets on IPv6 adoption? I'd like to put money on it never getting widely adopted. I'd wager some guy like Vint Cerf will pimp a new, better protocol by the time we really, really run out of IP addresses. I'd also wager this magical new protocol will solve at least a few of the problems I've given above. I also would bet it will challenge how we look at the network... maybe the OSI network model isn't the best way to think about networking?
Our public computer labs would let you install anything on them. You could install games, warez, spyware, whatever. The only problem with the ghosting process is it basically made the computer unusable for a good ten minutes after you logged off.
Trade off, I suppose
now that I think about it, the private computer lab used by our department wasn't ghosted either. Not ghosting a "public" lab would be insane though :-)
Can you copy stuff into and out of /usr/bin without being root? How is Vista any different?
Look at your log file sometime. Full of useless crap that buries the good stuff. You've got 75% of your log full of stupid failed SSH attempts from script kiddies, 10% from "hi, I'm named and my log level is not perfect so I'm going to tell you that somebody looked for pornjunction.com and I couldn't find it". 10% for "errors" in daemons, only they aren't really errors. Then you've got 4% from some fucked up cron job. That leaves like 1% for the truely useful error message that might actually be of value.
My point? Linux, FreeBSD or any other unix OS has just as many inexplicable, frequent error messages, only instead of dialog boxes, they pollute your log files instead.
PS: The event log is no different.
Unix systems blame-shift too. Once you log into root, you can install just as much malware as if you click through a UAC dialog.
What do you want them to do?
Isn't your normal dialog. Unlike other modal dialog boxes, a UAC is a *sytem wide* model dialog box. You cannot do *shit* until you confirm it. You might snark, but I think UAC dialogs are "scary" and with a minor amount of training, they'll call you when they get one. A normal user, doing normal things should never get a UAC dialog. You should only get one when you are installing a driver, software or you have a program like Digsby or Firefox that auto-updates as part of loading itself (which is retarted, IMHO).
At the university I went to, the ghosted the machine the second you logged off. I couldn't imagine it being any other way. How would you even know the machine was owned? Some of the latest malware can dig itself almost as deep into the OS as you can on Linux (it is trivial to bury malware in a linux box as root)
Mining. Mining. Mining. Mining. Mining.
We dont like fucking up our planet for iron, silver and other nice metals. There are plenty of ugly, presumably uninhabited floating rocks out there that have more metal on them then we could possibly dream of.
Hell, Mars alone is covered with a farily refined form of iron pellet. Many astroids are like 50% iron (vs our 7%).
Mining. Mining is what will make all this stuff pay off. Mining and space porn.
I'm pretty sure there is a config switch for it too, but ALT+L works for me.
Now they get to live with it. They killed trivia (I mean, seriously, what a perfect fit wikipedia is for trivia) and in killing it, created a flamewar that is still heating homes in Alaska. They wanted everything to be referenced, so a new class of witch-hunters tag up every damn article, no matter how well written and factual with bullshit "references needed" and "citation needed".
Seriously, it is like they took every single step possible to a) suck all the fun out of wikipedia and b) ensure it attracted nothing but anal retentive assholes with overinflated egos.