To me the hoops that smoothbrains will jump through to avoid IPv6 and stay on legacy IPv4, especially when hosting, is pathetic. NAT, port forwarding, tunnels, blah blah blah blah.

I have something like ~1.2 trillion times the number of routable addresses that the entire IPv4 space has. Not all are reachable, of course, just the services that need incoming access and they're each on their own isolated DMZ.

Forgot to add: if you enable IPv6, be sure to use the browser extension IPvFoo. It shows a small 4 or 6 in your URI bar to let you know what protocol you're connecting to. Once enabled, you'll see just how much stuff out there actually is IPv6.

Started the move about 18 months ago when I decided to get off my lazy ass. My ISP gives out a /56 prefix, so that lets me run 256 /64 subnets/VLANs in the house, currently there are ~10 in use. Everything get a GUA through SLAAC and I use RAs (Router Advertisements) to give ULAs to everything. Any external facing services get their own VLAN and /64 for the system(s) as needed. Firewall blocks all incoming as they usually do by default and I punch a hole for the external-facing systems. They can't reach back into the network, they only answer the phone. All the systems update DNS dynamically if the prefix or full address ever change.

I have an SSH bastion set up. In all this time there has not been a single SSH attempt from the internet. On IPv4 it was constant background noice.
For those legacy IPv4-only systems on the internet, I set up NAT64. I have an IoT VLAN and IoT 2.4 GHz wireless network that are only IPv4 because a lot of IoT network stacks are junk.

I'm still farting around with it, but man oh man, there's no way I'd go back to IPv4. It was one of the best moves I've done in ages.

Well also Ford and everyone else that spent a decade or more saying “nobody wants EVs”, saw Teslas’ success, and various government invcentaves and says “we are all in on EVs!”, and then when the incentives went away said “nobody wants EVs!”, is after the last week or so seeing record EV sales about to swing back to: “Yes EVs!”

So I won’t really take their opinions on the future with a lot of faith.

”only” about 20% of the world oil passes through it, so if we cut oil needs by 20% that’ll take a significant amount of the problem away. Which I know takes more then say filling half a desert with solar panels, we also have to buffer that energy for non-productive times, and convert things like oil burning heating systems into heat pumps and/or resistive heat systems, or regular cars into EVs (which mostly come with their own solution to the buffering issues). Very little of that is an engineering issue, it is mostly a “pay money and it can be done” problem. Which is the boring kind to fix because it is so “easy", but also frequently doesn’t get fixed (want to end homelessness? Buy everyone a home! End world hunger? Move the food from where it is currently rotting to where the hungry people are! We know how to move food (and people!), we just don’t do it!).

...My installation of minidlna still works fine, is Free Software, and doesn't phone home or exfiltrate my metadata.

You may be right, but there are definitely PC vender executives who claim to be very worried about the Neo. Maybe foolishly, or maybe for once they are seeing a bigger picture, Apple is hitting one narrow slice here but in ways they can’t counter. They may be legit worried about other configurations taking other slices with no real counter.

I think Windows will provide an extremely large area for that market to “retreat” into though where Apple won’t really follow. I mean with some serious compatibility systems maybe, but this isn’t an x86 Mac, I don’t think BootCamp or any sort of windows emulation systems are going to take large chunks of the market...and then I remember SteamOS. So yes, Apple could embrace something like that, and that would take a big chunk out of the traditional laptop market...

You might have intended it as a joke, but semiconductor supplies go through the SoH, and while I don’t believe production has been interrupted due to a lack yet the supplies are being drawn down and will eventually run out resulting in increased cost for RAM, CPUs and GPUs and possibly even shortages. About a third of the helium supply goes via SoH and without it you ain’t getting more RAM, nor am I. Or MRI scans. Fortunately there are a few months of supply, more or less. Maybe less.

Definitely not “nobody”, but for sure “not enough to build a business on it”, the more surprising conclusion is “not really enough people to make expensive configurations of something that is basically an existing system”, at least not if you are Apple blunts the surprise a bit.

Apple discontinues a lot of things that other companies could survive on as a sole product. The iPod mini when the nano came out, the iPod Touchok, maybe just products with the name “iPod” in them. Oh! Also a whole line of 802.11 bas stations including one with a backup disk in itand the iPhone mini, and a bunch of other iPhone variants that sold less then the other iPhones but still better then the majority of Android phones.

Big configuration desktops do sell, just not a lot. I mean back pre-COVID I worked for a company that bought and handed out $16k iMac Pro configurations like they were candy! Granted that was mostly for the large memory config and doesn’t need the MacPro to keep existing! I assume the current Mac Studio is filling that role for them now, and obviously as they were iMac Pros when I was there if Apple makes a big iMac configuration they could be iMac Pros again (although I hope if Apple brings back the iMac Pro they have a target display mode for them!)

Given that the Roberts Court is one of the most corporate-friendly in history, this decision comes as something of a surprise.

Nonetheless, it appears to be largely concordant with the so-called "Betamax case" from the early 1980's which established the principle of significant non-infringing uses as a defense and, despite passage of the DMCA, still largely informs the contours of contributory infringement.

I'm doing just fine with a 128g Mac Studio M1 Ultra. Editing 4k video weekly for Airwindows. Not sure 'certain tasks' is anything BUT local AI.

OpenAI is amending its Pentagon contract after CEO Sam Altman acknowledged it appeared "opportunistic and sloppy." [ ... ]

Well, if there's anyone who would know about slop...

Sounds like Micros~1 doesn't want to deal with actual people, much less the consequences of their own boneheaded decisions.

Of course, if Discord had a backbone (and ethics), they would summarily remove the filters, and smack Micros~1 for making them look bad. And if Micros~1 gave them any back-talk about it, they could reply, "Well, it sounds like you should set up your own rules on your own globally accessible chat network. I hear you already have something along those lines. Something called... Teams, I think?. Knock yourselves out..."

That said, I'm surprised there's no market for travel routers that VPN back to home whether for personal travel or for college students.

I’m not. It is a hard value proposition to describe, and not an easy product to set up (I mean as a software product, “make sure the server is on a device you never power off and stays at home...” -- if you make a hardware product it won;t be too hard, one device you leave at home and another you take with you...), if you make it a hardware product it is less difficult to set up, but it is going to cost more. If you make it out of say a pair of RPis it is going to run $70 to more. So “save $17 (a month) by paying $70” is a hard sell. Partly because people aren’t long term thinkers (4+ month payoff is a “long time” to many people), and partly because people have bought things that don’t turn out and they trust things like this less, maybe it appears to work for a few weeks and they spend the $70 and it stops working halfway to the 4 months and they lose out.

It isn’t intuitively obvious to people that a VPN is a fundamental solution to the problem, it is more fancy technical crap. So the people that will trust this product to be a “real answer” aren’t all that numerous, and of those that know a VPM is basically the answer the majority of them know how to set one up already. So the real market is the vanishingly small number of people that know they want a VPN and also don’t know how to set one up already. (to be clear I think it is a fine solution, but you face a marketing issue, you have to convince people that they have a problem that you have the answer for)

Additional complication, some number of people that are the ideal market would be people that legit have the right to use these streaming services and will use the VPN to route around inappropriate roadblocks. Some other (I believe larger, much larger) number of people actually don’t have the rights to use these services and you are helping them violate the terms of service they agreed to. I won’t debate the wisdom of building a business with the primary market being people who are not just willing to violate terms of service but that they desire to do so. I will note that if you basically build a business on “screw netflix and warner and everyone else!” that if netflix&warner&friends feel enough of the pinch that they decide to “see you in court” it is more then an outside chance that you get crushed.