Given the FBI complaining about its encryption, this bug bounty, etc, the general impression (and yes, it might be wrong) is that the iOS platform is pretty secure.
So how secure is Apple in terms of physical security, employee security, etc?
You would think the next level of attack would be the HQ itself -- getting somebody inside, either secret agent style or compromising an Apple employee somehow.
Are people who work on iOS device security watched 24/7 by security themselves? Do they work in some kind of high security vault? Is the guy pushing the mail cart actually a deep cover FSB agent?
If you work for Apple on iOS security do you think twice when some pretty girl at the bar starts talking to you, especially if she says her name is Natasha?
The only real long-term survival platform is an isolated farm where you can grow your own food.
Nomadic is fine, but the cannibals they encountered on their trip would have eaten even the homeless guy with the shopping cart.
And nomadic has certain risks -- uncertain access to food or water, crossing paths with other dangerous nomads, crossing into territory held by hostiles, exposure to weather and so on.
It's amusing to think about survivalism but really, things go south without a community structure pretty fast. Even a very isolated bunker has a limited timeline without access to outside resources -- 5 years, 10 at the outside for a large quantity of food stuffs amenable to long term storage? This also assumes you have no energy needs, dependence on anything that might wear out or need repairs unless you have multiple replacements which don't age in storage.
I suppose someone could treat a bunker like a long-haul space ship and provide it with a nuclear power source, a water recycling system, air filtration and the necessary parts and replacement equipment to keep it running but even that becomes a challenge past a certain timeline and requires extensive skills and a large community, and the community itself can become a liability as people aren't totally dependable.
Well, what you really want is a the starship Enterprise...
Obviously a nuclear powered submarine would be impossible even for Paul Allen money.
But even if Elon Musk designed a submarine, a submarine is simply too complex of a marine system to realistically manage (outside of the short-duration tethered submersibles used for finding wrecks).
A sub-surface habitat is an interesting idea, but I think the systems involved with air production and circulation would be too complex and the entire thing would be too dependent on energy.
A surface vessel has the advantages of access to wind and solar and it's not hard to imagine a system of fold-out solar panels and fold-up wind turbines to keep a large battery array charged for long-endurance anchorages. Diesel power would only be used to move the vessel to avoid serious storms or seek different anchorages.
The problem with a conventional yacht is they're fuel pigs. I'd wager Allen's yacht runs a high powered generator continuously to maintain the internal electrical systems, ventilation, and so forth even when docked unless docked at a location where you could get an industrial grade shore power feed.
What I'm thinking of is more along the lines of a more purpose-built boat that would require much less continuous electrical power and what it needed could be taken from wind, solar or even wave generation from deployed buoys. Tesla-type Li battery storage for nights or periods of poor weather, although in a marine environment with wind turbines some kind of power could always be generated.
I could see a solar panel system that would fold out from the sides when at anchor, as well as wind turbines that could be folded down along with fixed panels for supplemental power when the boat was in motion. The folding stuff would be folded in poor weather or in transit and deployed as weather conditions allowed. With enough solar panels, you might even be able to provide air conditioning for smaller interior spaces during sunlight hours.
The idea would be the ability to have long-duration self-sustaining electric power at anchor. Firing the engines would be done only when you needed to move and the engines sized for minimal fuel consumption -- there's a lot of recreation trawlers with top speeds of 9-10 knots off single engines capable of a few thousand mile ranges on full fuel tanks.
I would think a superior solution to a fixed bunker would be some kind of specialized boat designed for long endurance. Wind turbines, fold out solar panels for electric power. Water could be supplied by marine water makers. Food supplies could be supplemented by fishing.
Simply being out on the water gets you away from the most common threats. Maybe there are mobile pirates you have to worry about, but there will always be fewer of them than roving mobs of people with cutting torches.
If you were super rich, why not look into retrofitting an oil drilling platform into a sea bunker?
Whether Obama has been merely thoughtful and cautious or actually indecisive and passive is something that can be debated, but whatever it is it has created something of an impression that he lacks an appearance of decisiveness and strong leadership.
I kind of wish he had made some bold moves, even if they weren't necessarily the most ideal moves, simply to demonstrate he was moving forward and not settling for a status quo ante.
We're not talking about the real issues because the possible solutions are all impossibly complex or entirely unpalatable and come with huge costs. It's like the light switch wall plate in my bedroom. It needs to be replaced, but it'll come off and I'll realize the switch needs to be replaced. I'll find I can't do that because the box is hosed and the wire is too short. So now I have to rip the wall open to fish in a new run to another power source (and remove the old one to stay code compliant about not burying the old one). And while I've got my wall open, I might as well insulate and then god know what else I might find...
Middle East? No possible solution that achieves any of our geopolitical goals. Do nothing? Russia/Assad victory, continued purges and bloodlettings by Assad secret police. Bombings of ISIS and other minor players? Status Quo. Strategic bombing campaign against Assad? Probably not enough, risks war with Russia. Same for any ground deployment -- needs to be more like total warfare and occupation.
Migrations? See fixing the Middle East.
Economy? There are no winners here, nearly everything will involve significant structural changes which undermine the prosperity of either whole populations or threaten the economic hegemony of powerful people.
Most of the UPS step vans are custom made for them, although I have noticed an uptick in what look like standard "Eurovans" lately. I think their over the road trailers are also custom made for them.
I could see Amazon partnering with a major vehicle company to come up with an electric delivery van.
I could also see them picking up a few retired airliners to manage moving bulk quantities between distribution centers to balance inventories.
It wouldn't surprise me if the full consumer install on these printers has a "keep my printer software up to date" opt-in selected along with "spam me with offers" and "upload my information to HP and our partners every hour".
It also wouldn't surprise me if they mean this to be a temporary solution for the average consumer -- OK, add this firmware, use up the remaining third party ink, and in 4 months we'll issue a new auto-installed firmware which makes them unusable again.
NOW is the time to start planning for how to deal with the protomolecule.
I sometimes wonder if The Expanse series will end with a Terminator-style time travel conclusion where they end up going back in time to vaporize the protomolecule on whatever moon or asteroid it was found on before it can be discovered and set loose.
Not a great comparison, the 10 gig switch is mostly SFP ports which are only useful for short run twinax or with fiber optic SFP modules for anything beyond twinax lengths. 10g copper SFP modules don't exist. Useful in a rack with servers with SFP NICs or if you want to fuck around with fiber, but in my mind that rates them as less useful than base-T which has much simpler and cheaper cabling demands.
I see a lot of twinax/optical deployments as converged core server + iSCSI storage but mostly in new cluster deployments where the expectation is everything is new and there's a few fiber handoffs or for core network deployments in larger networks.
But the most useful is always the base-T version because it drops in easily and handles pre-existing equipment with only 1g copper connections.
To be slightly fair with switch vendors, there is something complex about 10g-baset PHYs which makes them more expensive, but not THIS expensive for this long.
I still think IEEE messed up by not rolling variable (2.5/5/10) link speed into the 10g-base-t standard up front. It would have driven switches with broader footprints and driven more adoption by giving full speed where the cabling was good and 2-5x speed where cabling was just OK. More adoption, more unit volume and lower prices.
The payout from the lawsuit was probably over time and the people who got the proceeds probably paid less taxes to take it over time. Keeping the shell of the business running for a few years made sense financially even if it was just a sham operation that would eventually fold.
Vendors will end up playing games where the features you want won't be available unless you buy into their new product lines featuring 802.3bz ports at increased prices. Dumb, unmanaged 1 gig at today's managed 1 gig prices or managed L2/L3 802.3bz at the price you paid 5 years ago for 1 gig.
Server and desktop vendors will have a new upcharge option for 802.3bz ports that will allow them to hold the line on 10 gig port prices, and stupidly, many people will go for it thinking "bargain!" and we'll end up with a bunch of deployed 802.3bz as a sunk cost, further pushing out widespread adoption and the commensurate economies of scale and price cuts for 10 gig.
IMHO, this is a solution looking for a problem. Too much speed ot justify to the desktop and not enough speed to justify the price increase over 1 gig. If anything IEEE should have built this into the 10G-BaseT spec, knowing full well that the copper restrictions would hinder adoption and economies of scale. Had they put a variable signalling rate of 2.5/5/10 into the 10G-BaseT spec we'd be paying 1 gig prices for those ports now, instead of the highway robbery prices 10 gig gets now.
This will only be a useful spec if it replaces the commodity 10/100/1000 ports out there now and becomes the defacto baseline ethernet option.
I'm kind of struggling for what this is good for besides giving switch vendors a reason to push needless IDF upgrades and technology vendors yet another upcharge option.
1 gig Ethernet is already overkill for just about every desktop purpose and still has some useful life left in many data center applications, especially for lower performance areas, even in network storage.
The only place it becomes somewhat weak is in heavy use AC wireless deployments where it can be truly taxed, but most often even these deployments the vast majority of use reverts to the average of typical cabled clients.
It also feels like a reason to keep prices artificially high on 10 gig copper. 1 gig was sky high expensive when it first came out, but quickly became commoditized and very soon nearly everything came with 1 gig ports. 10 gig base T seems like it's been out for ages but prices really haven't dropped nearly as fast and I can't quite figure out why, other than it's fast enough to cut port densities by at least half while still providing 5x or greater throughput of 1 gig ports in most server deployments (ie, if you had 4x 1 gig ports and switch to 2x 10 gig ports, you have 20 gig aggregate vs. 4 gig aggregate and single stream throughput 10x the 1 gig solution).
And as usual, vendors can't stand the idea of the customer buying half of what they did before and getting 5-10x more value than they used to.
I guess the new standards will be great, but only if they replace 1 gig wherever you used to expect 1 gig, ie, everywhere. Otherwise it's either irrelevant or a new way to pay higher prices for 25-50% of the performance you should be getting out of 10 gig at the price -- or higher -- you ought to be paying for 10 gig these days.
My guess is that MS really wants to kill of basic (SMB) file sharing. The protocol is open enough that world+dog has already implemented in everything, so every file server upgrade faces the prospect of losing out to something else -- shit appliances all the way up to big ticket EMC devices.
Trying to move everyone to Sharepoint has so many layers of lock in I get dizzy just thinking about them. The endless licensing sales for server, SQL and 3 different kinds of CALs. Relentless sunk costs of developer time and migration. Files sequestered away in a database unmigratable to competing file sharing platforms.
It's a perpetual motion machine of IT spending, right up to and including Office365 hosted migrations once the painful costs of adopting and infrastructure become realized.
I've never understood the attraction to it. I work at an IT consulting firm that sells Sharepoint services and our site is a complete joke, used mostly as a way to host OneNote notebooks.
How could you call yourself culturally aware and not know of the Dead Kennedys? While "cult" stars at the peak of their performing career, they remain a defining element of punk rock music.
They and their lead singer Jello Biafra made the national TV news when they were charged with "obscenity" for a poster included in their albums. Tipper Gore, Al Gore's wife, a critic of "offensive" rock music, sparred with Jello.
In Minnesota user fees (of which gas taxes are just a subset) doesn't cover the maintenance cost of the roads and less than half the total cost of the roads. And the bitching about deferred maintenance and delayed capital spending for roads is endless.
Politically you would never get away with the $2-3 in statewide tax increase directly funneled to mass transit. The people who don't or can't use mass transit (ie, they live hundreds of miles from it) would never agree to a huge gas tax and the $4-6 increase you would need to impose on people who *could* use it in metro areas would be an economic disaster for almost everyone and a political impossibility.
If you imposed a metro-area transit gas tax of $5/gal to meaningfully fund transit improvements it would jack up my personal fuel expenses by 300% and I drive barely 10,000 miles a year.
I could probably afford it financially, but the reality is almost all of my driving for work to client sites is impossible *now* with mass transit -- and I live in the city and have clients in the city. The schedule and timing is not remotely viable for that, let alone reverse commuting to some suburb on a schedule designed around driving.
I always thought the Netware IPX/SPX network numbering system was quite clever -- 32 bits of network addressing and a 48 bit node address, usually based on MAC addresses.
I always think of how much simpler IP would have been with a similar structure -- subnets could have scaled easily without renumbering or routing when common/24 limits were hit. The use of MAC addresses for node addresses would have eliminated DHCP for the most part or essentially automated it as clients would have only had to query for a network number, not a node address.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the FBI complaining about its encryption, this bug bounty, etc, the general impression (and yes, it might be wrong) is that the iOS platform is pretty secure.
So how secure is Apple in terms of physical security, employee security, etc?
You would think the next level of attack would be the HQ itself -- getting somebody inside, either secret agent style or compromising an Apple employee somehow.
Are people who work on iOS device security watched 24/7 by security themselves? Do they work in some kind of high security vault? Is the guy pushing the mail cart actually a deep cover FSB agent?
If you work for Apple on iOS security do you think twice when some pretty girl at the bar starts talking to you, especially if she says her name is Natasha?
Those are just the lesser branches of government. The parent government of all them wants it.
The only real long-term survival platform is an isolated farm where you can grow your own food.
Nomadic is fine, but the cannibals they encountered on their trip would have eaten even the homeless guy with the shopping cart.
And nomadic has certain risks -- uncertain access to food or water, crossing paths with other dangerous nomads, crossing into territory held by hostiles, exposure to weather and so on.
It's amusing to think about survivalism but really, things go south without a community structure pretty fast. Even a very isolated bunker has a limited timeline without access to outside resources -- 5 years, 10 at the outside for a large quantity of food stuffs amenable to long term storage? This also assumes you have no energy needs, dependence on anything that might wear out or need repairs unless you have multiple replacements which don't age in storage.
I suppose someone could treat a bunker like a long-haul space ship and provide it with a nuclear power source, a water recycling system, air filtration and the necessary parts and replacement equipment to keep it running but even that becomes a challenge past a certain timeline and requires extensive skills and a large community, and the community itself can become a liability as people aren't totally dependable.
Well, what you really want is a the starship Enterprise...
Obviously a nuclear powered submarine would be impossible even for Paul Allen money.
But even if Elon Musk designed a submarine, a submarine is simply too complex of a marine system to realistically manage (outside of the short-duration tethered submersibles used for finding wrecks).
A sub-surface habitat is an interesting idea, but I think the systems involved with air production and circulation would be too complex and the entire thing would be too dependent on energy.
A surface vessel has the advantages of access to wind and solar and it's not hard to imagine a system of fold-out solar panels and fold-up wind turbines to keep a large battery array charged for long-endurance anchorages. Diesel power would only be used to move the vessel to avoid serious storms or seek different anchorages.
The problem with a conventional yacht is they're fuel pigs. I'd wager Allen's yacht runs a high powered generator continuously to maintain the internal electrical systems, ventilation, and so forth even when docked unless docked at a location where you could get an industrial grade shore power feed.
What I'm thinking of is more along the lines of a more purpose-built boat that would require much less continuous electrical power and what it needed could be taken from wind, solar or even wave generation from deployed buoys. Tesla-type Li battery storage for nights or periods of poor weather, although in a marine environment with wind turbines some kind of power could always be generated.
I could see a solar panel system that would fold out from the sides when at anchor, as well as wind turbines that could be folded down along with fixed panels for supplemental power when the boat was in motion. The folding stuff would be folded in poor weather or in transit and deployed as weather conditions allowed. With enough solar panels, you might even be able to provide air conditioning for smaller interior spaces during sunlight hours.
The idea would be the ability to have long-duration self-sustaining electric power at anchor. Firing the engines would be done only when you needed to move and the engines sized for minimal fuel consumption -- there's a lot of recreation trawlers with top speeds of 9-10 knots off single engines capable of a few thousand mile ranges on full fuel tanks.
I would think a superior solution to a fixed bunker would be some kind of specialized boat designed for long endurance. Wind turbines, fold out solar panels for electric power. Water could be supplied by marine water makers. Food supplies could be supplemented by fishing.
Simply being out on the water gets you away from the most common threats. Maybe there are mobile pirates you have to worry about, but there will always be fewer of them than roving mobs of people with cutting torches.
If you were super rich, why not look into retrofitting an oil drilling platform into a sea bunker?
Whether Obama has been merely thoughtful and cautious or actually indecisive and passive is something that can be debated, but whatever it is it has created something of an impression that he lacks an appearance of decisiveness and strong leadership.
I kind of wish he had made some bold moves, even if they weren't necessarily the most ideal moves, simply to demonstrate he was moving forward and not settling for a status quo ante.
The only way you will be able to trust any kind of AI for sorting personal information will be if the software is something you buy and own.
But any AI development will be built around monetizing your information, so they will always be "free" and untrustable.
We're not talking about the real issues because the possible solutions are all impossibly complex or entirely unpalatable and come with huge costs. It's like the light switch wall plate in my bedroom. It needs to be replaced, but it'll come off and I'll realize the switch needs to be replaced. I'll find I can't do that because the box is hosed and the wire is too short. So now I have to rip the wall open to fish in a new run to another power source (and remove the old one to stay code compliant about not burying the old one). And while I've got my wall open, I might as well insulate and then god know what else I might find...
Middle East? No possible solution that achieves any of our geopolitical goals. Do nothing? Russia/Assad victory, continued purges and bloodlettings by Assad secret police. Bombings of ISIS and other minor players? Status Quo. Strategic bombing campaign against Assad? Probably not enough, risks war with Russia. Same for any ground deployment -- needs to be more like total warfare and occupation.
Migrations? See fixing the Middle East.
Economy? There are no winners here, nearly everything will involve significant structural changes which undermine the prosperity of either whole populations or threaten the economic hegemony of powerful people.
Trouble was, the trains ran on time but the only place they ran was some rural location in Poland..
"I know you're using Exchange server, but I have a script for Postfix installations I use on Ubuntu and it works great"
Most of the UPS step vans are custom made for them, although I have noticed an uptick in what look like standard "Eurovans" lately. I think their over the road trailers are also custom made for them.
I could see Amazon partnering with a major vehicle company to come up with an electric delivery van.
I could also see them picking up a few retired airliners to manage moving bulk quantities between distribution centers to balance inventories.
It wouldn't surprise me if the full consumer install on these printers has a "keep my printer software up to date" opt-in selected along with "spam me with offers" and "upload my information to HP and our partners every hour".
It also wouldn't surprise me if they mean this to be a temporary solution for the average consumer -- OK, add this firmware, use up the remaining third party ink, and in 4 months we'll issue a new auto-installed firmware which makes them unusable again.
NOW is the time to start planning for how to deal with the protomolecule.
I sometimes wonder if The Expanse series will end with a Terminator-style time travel conclusion where they end up going back in time to vaporize the protomolecule on whatever moon or asteroid it was found on before it can be discovered and set loose.
The reason this is not implemented is that governments and/or tax-payers don't want to pay for logging features and auditors.
While the cost is real, I think it gets inflated or used as a red herring to prevent implementing audit features.
Removing the ability to search at will is like taking away a job perk.
Not a great comparison, the 10 gig switch is mostly SFP ports which are only useful for short run twinax or with fiber optic SFP modules for anything beyond twinax lengths. 10g copper SFP modules don't exist. Useful in a rack with servers with SFP NICs or if you want to fuck around with fiber, but in my mind that rates them as less useful than base-T which has much simpler and cheaper cabling demands.
I see a lot of twinax/optical deployments as converged core server + iSCSI storage but mostly in new cluster deployments where the expectation is everything is new and there's a few fiber handoffs or for core network deployments in larger networks.
But the most useful is always the base-T version because it drops in easily and handles pre-existing equipment with only 1g copper connections.
To be slightly fair with switch vendors, there is something complex about 10g-baset PHYs which makes them more expensive, but not THIS expensive for this long.
I still think IEEE messed up by not rolling variable (2.5/5/10) link speed into the 10g-base-t standard up front. It would have driven switches with broader footprints and driven more adoption by giving full speed where the cabling was good and 2-5x speed where cabling was just OK. More adoption, more unit volume and lower prices.
The payout from the lawsuit was probably over time and the people who got the proceeds probably paid less taxes to take it over time. Keeping the shell of the business running for a few years made sense financially even if it was just a sham operation that would eventually fold.
You mean it will cost a lot of money.
Vendors will end up playing games where the features you want won't be available unless you buy into their new product lines featuring 802.3bz ports at increased prices. Dumb, unmanaged 1 gig at today's managed 1 gig prices or managed L2/L3 802.3bz at the price you paid 5 years ago for 1 gig.
Server and desktop vendors will have a new upcharge option for 802.3bz ports that will allow them to hold the line on 10 gig port prices, and stupidly, many people will go for it thinking "bargain!" and we'll end up with a bunch of deployed 802.3bz as a sunk cost, further pushing out widespread adoption and the commensurate economies of scale and price cuts for 10 gig.
IMHO, this is a solution looking for a problem. Too much speed ot justify to the desktop and not enough speed to justify the price increase over 1 gig. If anything IEEE should have built this into the 10G-BaseT spec, knowing full well that the copper restrictions would hinder adoption and economies of scale. Had they put a variable signalling rate of 2.5/5/10 into the 10G-BaseT spec we'd be paying 1 gig prices for those ports now, instead of the highway robbery prices 10 gig gets now.
This will only be a useful spec if it replaces the commodity 10/100/1000 ports out there now and becomes the defacto baseline ethernet option.
I'm kind of struggling for what this is good for besides giving switch vendors a reason to push needless IDF upgrades and technology vendors yet another upcharge option.
1 gig Ethernet is already overkill for just about every desktop purpose and still has some useful life left in many data center applications, especially for lower performance areas, even in network storage.
The only place it becomes somewhat weak is in heavy use AC wireless deployments where it can be truly taxed, but most often even these deployments the vast majority of use reverts to the average of typical cabled clients.
It also feels like a reason to keep prices artificially high on 10 gig copper. 1 gig was sky high expensive when it first came out, but quickly became commoditized and very soon nearly everything came with 1 gig ports. 10 gig base T seems like it's been out for ages but prices really haven't dropped nearly as fast and I can't quite figure out why, other than it's fast enough to cut port densities by at least half while still providing 5x or greater throughput of 1 gig ports in most server deployments (ie, if you had 4x 1 gig ports and switch to 2x 10 gig ports, you have 20 gig aggregate vs. 4 gig aggregate and single stream throughput 10x the 1 gig solution).
And as usual, vendors can't stand the idea of the customer buying half of what they did before and getting 5-10x more value than they used to.
I guess the new standards will be great, but only if they replace 1 gig wherever you used to expect 1 gig, ie, everywhere. Otherwise it's either irrelevant or a new way to pay higher prices for 25-50% of the performance you should be getting out of 10 gig at the price -- or higher -- you ought to be paying for 10 gig these days.
My guess is that MS really wants to kill of basic (SMB) file sharing. The protocol is open enough that world+dog has already implemented in everything, so every file server upgrade faces the prospect of losing out to something else -- shit appliances all the way up to big ticket EMC devices.
Trying to move everyone to Sharepoint has so many layers of lock in I get dizzy just thinking about them. The endless licensing sales for server, SQL and 3 different kinds of CALs. Relentless sunk costs of developer time and migration. Files sequestered away in a database unmigratable to competing file sharing platforms.
It's a perpetual motion machine of IT spending, right up to and including Office365 hosted migrations once the painful costs of adopting and infrastructure become realized.
I've never understood the attraction to it. I work at an IT consulting firm that sells Sharepoint services and our site is a complete joke, used mostly as a way to host OneNote notebooks.
How could you call yourself culturally aware and not know of the Dead Kennedys? While "cult" stars at the peak of their performing career, they remain a defining element of punk rock music.
They and their lead singer Jello Biafra made the national TV news when they were charged with "obscenity" for a poster included in their albums. Tipper Gore, Al Gore's wife, a critic of "offensive" rock music, sparred with Jello.
Bullshit.
In Minnesota user fees (of which gas taxes are just a subset) doesn't cover the maintenance cost of the roads and less than half the total cost of the roads. And the bitching about deferred maintenance and delayed capital spending for roads is endless.
Politically you would never get away with the $2-3 in statewide tax increase directly funneled to mass transit. The people who don't or can't use mass transit (ie, they live hundreds of miles from it) would never agree to a huge gas tax and the $4-6 increase you would need to impose on people who *could* use it in metro areas would be an economic disaster for almost everyone and a political impossibility.
If you imposed a metro-area transit gas tax of $5/gal to meaningfully fund transit improvements it would jack up my personal fuel expenses by 300% and I drive barely 10,000 miles a year.
I could probably afford it financially, but the reality is almost all of my driving for work to client sites is impossible *now* with mass transit -- and I live in the city and have clients in the city. The schedule and timing is not remotely viable for that, let alone reverse commuting to some suburb on a schedule designed around driving.
Kids these days don't know how accurate the Dead Kennedys criticisms were at the time or how weirdly prescient and ironic they seem now.
Every time I hear about a cop shooting going down I want to cue up "Police Truck".
You will croak, you little clown
When you mess with President Brown!
I always thought the Netware IPX/SPX network numbering system was quite clever -- 32 bits of network addressing and a 48 bit node address, usually based on MAC addresses.
I always think of how much simpler IP would have been with a similar structure -- subnets could have scaled easily without renumbering or routing when common /24 limits were hit. The use of MAC addresses for node addresses would have eliminated DHCP for the most part or essentially automated it as clients would have only had to query for a network number, not a node address.