I’m the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

  • 2 Posts
  • 893 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 29th, 2023

help-circle

  • This does tally up with what I’ve been hearing. Where I’m at there’s been a few hires straight into senior. I’ve not heard of an official junior freeze. At the same time it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a new one.

    The problem, as I commented prior, is that if we no longer bring in junior devs to gain this kind of experience, we lose the flow of junior -> senior. But in most places, the people making the decisions won’t consider anything beyond the end of the current fin year.




  • I think it goes further than that. There’s two things happening with regard to AI and software development.

    1: Stack overflow has become less common as a resource to solve problems. This, as you say has a problem of input into LLMs for future problems to solve.
    2: Junior developers are being hired less because of AI. I assume the idea is that seniors will use AI in the same way they would usually use juniors. Except, they’ve done what business always does. Not think one bit about the future. Today’s senior developers are yesterdays junior developers.

    The combination of AI performance drop due to point 1, and the lack of new developers because of point 2 makes for potentially, a bad future for the profession.


  • Specifically answering this question. It works transparently with IPv4. Organisations running servers can run both IPv4 and IPv6 operations with very little effort on their part. ISPs can deploy this and router makers include support with only a reasonable amount of effort.

    As users AND servers get IPv6 addresses, in the background they will just be used. At some point there would be so much IPv6 adoption they could turn off IPv4. There is a thing called “6to4” but dual stack has (I think rightly) became the main way people run both.

    In the UK I think at least half the ISPs provide IPv6 now. I think also in Europe it’s the same or better. But still we’re far from replacing IPv4 and I wonder when it might ever happen.


  • I’m going to just answer each point in turn. Maybe it’s useful. I don’t know.

    It offers a shitload of IP addresses

    It does. Generally most ISPs assign each user the equivalent of the IPv4 address space multiplied by itself. There’s a lot of address space to go around.

    They look really complicated

    This is true. But you rarely need to remember a full IP address. Most resources you access via DNS. If you have servers on your own network you will probably need to remember your own prefix (first 3 or 4 blocks of 4 hex numbers) and your servers you want to access would likely be ::1 and ::2 etc in that allocation. So you’d learn them. Also most routers allow for local DNS entries and there’s other things that will help here.

    Something about every device in your local network being visible from everywhere?

    This is a concern, but that’s mostly because router makers now are often badly configuring their routers. The correct way to configure a router is to allow outgoing/established connections by default and block all incoming (until you specifically open a port). Once this is done the security is very similar to NAT.

    Some claim it obsoletes NAT?

    Yes, NAT was created to make a small address space work in an era of multiple internet consumers behind a single connection. But when each device can get a routable IPv6 address, NAT is not needed. However the security I talk about above IS essential to apply to consumer routers.

    Now, I’ll elaborate on some of the features of IPv6 (a lot of which are just not being used when they could have been).

    IPv6 privacy extensions (RFC4951)

    This allows normal client machines (the kind that would usually be behind NAT entirely) to have a similar level of security and privacy provided by NAT. One concern with just plain IPv6 with a fixed IPv6 allocation is that people could ID a specific machine from web logs etc and could be used against you in privacy terms. This extension ensures that you have multiple active IPv6 addresses. One could be the one you perhaps have some ports open on. That address will not be used for outgoing connections. A random IP will be used for outgoing connections and this IP will not have any ports open and will change frequently. I think on windows this is enabled by default (when you look in ipconfig you will often see multiple “temporary addresses”).

    Harder to portscan

    Currently it doesn’t take THAT long to portscan the whole IPv4 address space. And because almost every public address is hosting multiple hosts behind it, there’s a good chance ports will be open on a lot of the IPs scanned.

    With IPv6 the public address space is huge. With normal machines having their allocations made randomly within a huge allocation per user and every IP would still need every port scanned. This makes active port scanning much harder. The above privacy extensions also mean that passive port scanning (port scanning IPs found in web logs for example) is harder too.

    User experience

    Provided consumer routers are configured well from the factory and ISPs are making sensible decisions regarding allocation of address space, the user will benefit from the advantages and not even know they’re using IPv6 in many cases. When you go to google/facebook/youtube etc you will be on IPv6 and not even know it.


  • We used to have it terrible in the UK in the 90s and 2000s. Basic ADSL was trialled in 1999 and available in maybe late 2000 I think. But it stagnated for a while.

    When it came to fibre, interesting things are happening. As well as the “national” (although privatised) telco installing it, there are many independent companies fitting it. Where I live I have the option of the official telco (1000/110) and a private company (1000/1000). Of course I chose the latter :P

    Some people have 3 or more options.

    Yeah in the future there might well be a handful of overall winners that vacuum up the losers and carve up the territory. But right now, it’s a good time for the normal people… At least for internet.

    EDIT: Just to add, some are ISPs and will only sell their own product. Some are wholesale, so even if they’re the only company in your area, you can often buy from multiple ISPs through them.












  • The way I read it, the developer wanted opt-out but it’s likely it will be opt-in. I’m find with opt-in and vehemently against opt-out for telemetry.

    I would prefer the information was statistical only. Rather than hostname (making the assumption they only want hostname to be able to somehow separate the data to follow changes over time), a much better idea would be some kind of hash based on information unlikely to change, but enough information that it would be unlikely possible to brute-force the original data out of the hash. So all they know is, this data came from the same machine, but cannot ID the machine. Maybe some kind of unique but otherwise untrackable unique ID is created at install time and ONLY used for this purpose and no other.