
Re: Amendment Zero
Which has (and always had) the unintended side-effect of encouraging corruption (often curiously described as "lobbying").
1841 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jan 2008
The Turing Archive would be the place. Whether Kings has enough spare money to bid, I don't know. It would have been nice if the Routledge family would have donated the material to the college, the Science Museum, or the British Library.
And it's always been so. Go back to a paper shop in the late 1980s and you will see a load of "PC" magazines full of tips on how to avoid BSoDs etc. There'll just be one magazine for Mac users, because they never crashed, even back then. But the muggles all thought that PCs must be much better than Macs, because there were so many magazines.
Are you by any chance confusing Burroughs Algol, which was very close to the original Algol 60 report, and ESPOL, which was Burroughs system programming language based on but extended from Algol, which they used instead of assembler to write the operating system?
I have in front of me the 1973 "Algol Primer for Burroughs B6700" by de Souza and Manley of Otago University, and the I/O doesn't strike me as strange. There's no memory access as such; that definitely existed in ESPOL but I don't have an ESPOL manual.
The conversation seems to have moved away from the actual problem: a right-wing, somewhat Trumpian, political grouping (actually aligned with NZ's ACT party and its neolib leader David Seymour) is trying to suborn a national Internet registry. That can't be a good thing.
The Russians found it fairly easy to copy the Williams tube but it took them some years to copy core memory.
True story. Imagine the staff tea room in the Manchester CS department in late 1969...
Tom Kilburn: "How much does a colour TV cost, then?"
Somebody: "About £250, I think."
[As a reminder, £1000 per year was a good starting salary back then.]
Tom: "Not worth waiting until they're cheaper, then."
Everybody: dead silence
It was utterly impossible to know whether Tom was being serious or not. We certainly all wondered how much his salary was.
There are many possible explanations (for a textbook on the subject, read "Moo" by Jane Smiley) but the generic answer to anomalies like CS and Maths being in Social Sciences (which I experienced many years ago) is simply academic politics and which senior professors and Deans hate each other (or the opposite). But generally speaking, everybody hates the university IT department for reasons amply explained above, so they are bypassed whenever possible.
How about reviving the radon-infused water business while we're at it? That used to sell very well back in the day.
"On many routers I've played around with, the routing of private traffic on the WAN ports had to be explicitly enabled."
Absolutely true, but (see my other comment) that is exactly the same for IPv4 and IPv6. NAT is irrelevant to opening and closing external ports, except of course that a NAT box can only support one instance of port 80 whereas an IPv6 router can support one port 80 for each host on your LAN.
"I expect ISP IPv6 routers will implement something akin to this rule"
What do you mean by "will"? Of course they do; I haven't looked at the code, but I can't see any reason why the same code path can't be used for both IPv4 and IPv6 firewall rules.
If I want an IPv6 app to be able to accept incoming traffic on port N for IPv6, I have to tell my home gateway. It's called "Port sharing" and it's configured on the same page for IPv4 or IPv6. There is simply no difference. The idea that network address translation adds any actual security is just bogus.
(It is true that NAT prevents an external attacker learning a little bit about the internal addressing of your network, and possibly guessing a few things about its topology if you have multiple LAN segments and routers. Some enterprise networks claim to care about that and want to hide their IPv6 topology.)
"IANA let's the rir play in 2000::/3"
More accurately: the IETF lets IANA let the RIRs play in 2000::/3
The large majority of IPv6 address space is still completely reserved. The authoritative information is at https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-address-space/ipv6-address-space.xhtml
Not so. Actually the top 48 bits aren't structured; they're allocated non-geographically just like IPv4 prefixes. And most ISPs don't allocate a /48 per subscriber anyway; /56 is more common unless you want to pay extra.
So we do have a ridiculous amount of address space for everybody. I can only assume that Huawei wants to pursue the idea of semantic addressing, i.e. using address bits for more than just network topology. Otherwise they could not conceivably need that much space. I think that's a REALLY BAD IDEA but some people don't agree, including some Huawei people.
"long on opinions and quite short on facts"
Exactly. As a kid I always loved the longer evenings after each change to BST, plus the fact that sunrise woke me up at the right time instead of far too early. Agreed, it's hard on the dairy cows in Scotland, but they don't get a vote...
Moaning about having to adapt your body clock is sad. Your body clock adapts to the longer and shorter days anyway; the change to and from BST is a minor hassle by comparison.
"... getting the big vendors to implement..."
What on earth are you talking about? Firstly the engineers who work on IPv6 standards mainly come from, and are paid by, big vendors. Secondly, product managers at big vendors don't do what the engineers tell them, they do what the accountants tell them. Those "useful, secure, and use friendly tools" would come from the big vendors or from startups trying to get bought out by a big vendor. Or they'd be open source (i.e. no paychecks at all).
I agree, more tools are needed, but it isn't IPv6 standards writers you need to convince, it's the accountants. Welcome to capitalism.
It's irrelevant. Phone numbers used to be for people, who used to have to dial them with their fingers in a dially thing. IP addresses are for computers.
Incidentally, your example above should be written fe80:cd00:0:cde:1257:0:211e:729c according to RFC5952, and looking at it anybody can tell that it's a link-local address. No human is expected to parse beyond fe80.
"...with an address scheme that no human being can personally translate."
Translate to what? Am I supposed to be able to translate "142.250.76.110" to "google.com" in my head?
What the designers recognised at a very early stage is that no human can readily memorise 128-bit addresses whatever format they're written in, so it was better to write them in hexadecimal to make them shorter to cut and paste.
"a far simpler, far more humanly-parsable address paradigm could have been (easily!) adoptable; the 'country code prefix' being just one easily-readable idea."
I'm not sure you understand how Internet routing works. It's non-geographical, so the notion of a country-code prefix is simply meaningless. In any case, human-parsability is not a requirement, so TBH your whole comment resolves to null.
I don't know which world you live in. In the one I inhabit, half the traffic is IPv6 and all operating systems support IPv6. There's no realistic prospect of an IPv7 in the next few decades. QUIC may well paper over some of today's glitches, and if it does you won't even notice when IPv4 fades away.
"Does he even know what an A or AAAA record is?"
<sarcasm>I doubt it, he's only been involved in Internet technology for 30 years or so, how would he know anything about DNS? After all, he wrote his first RFC as recently as 1994, and the first one concerning the DNS only in 2008. Clearly, he's an ignoramus.</sarcasm>
That said, I don't really agree with his conclusions, and with the Google IPv6 usage peaking at 47% recently I think we can say that IPv6 has made it.
I cannot upvote that more than once, but +1000. That is the whole point: an irrefutable archive makes people who lie for a living very, very nervous. There's very possibly big money behind this assault.
This isn't the first time: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/29/ddos_internet_archive/
Pure coincidence that the Archive is in a legal fight with the copyright industry, as the Vulture has previously reported: https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/20/internet_archive_lawsuit_latest/