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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Honestly, these days I have no idea. When I said “wouldn’t recommend” that wasn’t an assertion to avoid; just a lack of opinion. Most of my recent experience is with Cloud vendors wherein the problem domain is quite different.

    I’ve had experience with most of the big vendors and they’ve all had quirks etc. that you just have to deal with. Fundamentally it’ll come down to a combination of price, support requirements, and internal competence with the kit. (Don’t undermine the last item; it’s far better if you can fix problems yourself.)

    Personally I’d actually argue that most corporates could get by with a GNU/Linux VM (or two) for most of their routing and firewalling and it would absolutely be good enough; functionally you can do the same and more. That’s not to say dedicated machines for the task aren’t valuable but I’d say it’s the exception rather than rule that you need ASICs and the like.






  • I can potentially see that scenario if your transit provider is giving you a dynamic prefix but I’ve never seen that in practice. The address space is so enormous there is no reason to.

    Otherwise with either of RADVD or DHCPv6 the local routers should still be able to handle the traffic.

    My home internal network (v6, SLAAC) with all publicly routeable addresses doesn’t break if I unplug my modem.









  • I used Netscape “back in the day”. With some interim transition attempts including the likes of Opera, I eventually switched to Chrome because it was genuinely more featureful and faster.

    I was a happy Chrome user until they decided to deprecate manifest V2 and fuck up my ad blocker, at which point I switched to Firefox and haven’t looked back.

    Everything in this industry is circular I guess.


  • My problem is with the influence that a hostile foreign state actor has with TikTok.

    Google is an independent company; I’m 99% certain their motivation is to make money and I’m confident their algorithms are tailored purely for engagement and profit. Whilst I’m sure they have some back room deals with US intelligence organisations I suspect that it’s a case of providing data vs providing influence (though I would not rule it out).

    TikTok is controlled by the Chinese government. That’s not up for debate; if you have an entity in China it has to work that way. Imagine the damage they could do if they actively decided to increase, for example, messages of reunification with Taiwan in their algorithm by just 1% on a global scale. That frightens me and I’m not convinced it isn’t happening already on specific topics of concern to China’s foreign policy.

    And that’s putting aside the amount of data that the Chinese are getting without even exerting any influence. They can likely discern worldwide sentiment on a range of topics and adjust political posture accordingly.

    I’m not saying Google is perfect. I hate social media in general for the way it’s warping the zeitgeist. But I personally consider TikTok to be a huge threat to the world.