I use IPv6 exclusively for my homelab. The pros:

• No more holepunching kludge with solutions like ZeroTier or Tailscale, just open a port and you are pretty much good to go.

• The CGNAT gateway of my ISP tends to be overloaded during the holiday seasons, so using IPv6 eliminates an unstability factor for my lab.

• You have a metric sh*t ton of addressing space. I have assigned my SSH server its own IPv6 address, my web server another, my Plex server yet another, … You get the idea. The nice thing here is that even if someone knows about the address to my SSH server, they can’t discover my other servers through port scanning, as was typical in IPv4 days.

• Also, because of the sheer size of the addressing space, people simply can’t scan your network.

Also, icons. The icons in Windows XP are too recognizable. You need to minimalize them. In fact, minimalize it so hard that not one person could understand what the icon is even referring to.

The IDs of criminals are sometimes leaked on the web. People use those leaked IDs to register their account. Many systems don’t actually check whether the ID is already registered, it works as long as the ID itself is valid.

“Shits me to tears” lmao that’s amazing, I am gonna use it from now on.

This also explains why VPN is a possible workaround to this issue.

Your VPN will encapsulate any packets that your phone will send out inside a new packet (its contents encrypted), and this new packet is the one actually being sent out to the internet. What TTL does this new packet have? You guessed it, 64. From the ISP’s perspective, this packet is no different than any other packets sent directly from your phone.

BUT, not all phones will pass tethered packets to the VPN client – they directly send those out to the internet. Mine does this! In this case, TTL-based tracking will still work. And some phones seem to have other methods to inform the ISP that the data is tethered, in which case the VPN workaround may possibly fail.

Not sure if it’s still the case today, but back then cellular ISPs could tell you are tethering by looking at the TTL (time to live) value of your packets.

Basically, a packet starts with a TTL of 64 usually. After each hop (e.g. from your phone to the ISP’s devices) the TTL is decremented, becoming 63, then 62, and so on. The main purpose of TTL is to prevent packets from lingering in the network forever, by dropping the packet if its TTL reaches zero. Most packets reach their destinations within 20 hops anyway, so a TTL of 64 is plenty enough.

Back to the topic. What happens when the ISP receives a packet with a TTL value less than expected, like 61 instead of 62? It realizes that your packet must have gone through an additional hop, for example when it hopped from your laptop onto your phone, hence the data must be tethered.

Ackshually you still can blame Windows for not supporting live updates.

There are times when the original standard has zero forwards compatibility in it, such that any improvement made to it necessarily creates a new standard.

And then there’s also times when old greybeards simply disregard the improved standard because they are too used to the classic way.

To be fair: A notebook with a bunch of strong passwords is probably more secure than a human brain memorising a bunch of weak passwords.

Still really good but I wanted it to melt my face like the end of Indiana Jones.

Truly c/BrandNewSentence material.

Seriously though, never challenge Indian and Thai cooks on spiciness. They can be ruthless!

Not nearly as performant as either Java or COBOL.

Overall everyone will use less data when there’s a data cap, I found.

My ISP implemented data caps back then too (thankfully it’s all removed now, but 60GB was really bonkers!) and I just find it fascinating how much traffic I generate nowadays, when I don’t have to care how much data I have left this month.

Anyways, data caps shouldn’t be relevant anymore in 2023 when absolutely everything can handle gigabits and more. It’s interesting how American ISPs still implement them.

I sorta understand why data caps were implemented in the past. Some people hosted servers on their home connection, and their total internet traffic in a week would far exceed that of a normal user’s. Data caps were meant to force people to be conservative on their internet usage so this would not happen.

But come on now, it’s 2023. If your internet infrastructure could not handle that amount of traffic, you are a laughing stock of ISPs.

What, you don’t remember your time in Unix timestamps? Filthy casuls.

Tbh 20230810_0600 doesn’t seem that bad…

All of East Asia use the same format.

Maybe…

It gets less funny if 80% of the comments are missing the sarcasm/joke though. It can happen even when the sarcastic remark is obvious (usually because the first reply took it seriously, which set the trend for the subsequent discussions)

That’s why I put a /joke or /s mark preemptively in my comments.

You might hate the /s, but it’s really easy for peolple to miss the sarcasm (no matter how obvious it is!) when everything is in text.

It’s not necessary to firewall every device. Just like how your router can handle NAT, it should be able to handle stateful firewall too.

Mine blocks all incoming connections by default. I can add (IP, port range) entries to the whitelist if I need to host a service, it’s not really different to NAT port forwarding rules.

I use a pi for servers because of the assumption that it uses very little power to run (compared to say, an old unused laptop), is that not the case?