alibarber

Destabilising.

We can’t get food in the supermarket. People get scared. Better not poke the bear. This government sucks, let’s get the populist one that will fix all this overnight somehow.

You're absolutely correct - it's an incredibly valuable asset.

It's a really interesting piece of internet history. The whole 44.0.0.0/8 was assigned for loose 'amateur radio use' back in the 80s. For the most part it was used for building mesh networks over RF in different locations.

Then IP addresses became quite valuable. Now, I feel that what was really going to happen is that, with no real organisation around it, and not that much use of a very valuable asset, it would have been not unthinkable for the whole lot to have been taken away [by ARIN/ICANN/whoever] and assigned for general use. Certainly easier than taking it away from the US military. So, about a third of this space was sold to AWS and the money used to fund an actual organisation with staff - but mainly to issue grants to amateur radio projects around the world.

They therefore really do have [tens of thousands - sorry I don't remember how to calculate it right now] of /24s available. Internally - they allocate it how they want, some are only used on mesh networks, some are used for infra, some only private networks, but plenty for people to announce.

When they assign it to you, they're only giving you a Letter of Authorisation, and creating a route in a routing DB saying that your ASN is allowed to announce that allocation. They can withdraw that at any time which means the routes will be ignored by others.

Having the ham radio licence requirement is a reasonably accessible, yet robust entry barrier. The catch is you can't use the addresses for commercial purposes. They have staff and volunteers pretty much full time so if they find that they just cut you off.

An interesting parallel is the ham radio frequencies themselves. I love messing around with building equipment and transmitting, but actually getting an exclusive licence for a chunk of spectrum would cost me an impractical amount.

No that would only be if you were to use actual packet radio across the amateur bands with these. Some of them are used for that purpose indeed.

But the ones I’m referring too are just internet addresses you use on the public internet. Eg, ssh-ing to a raspberry pi, setting up an SDR, or just leaning BGP and suchlike.

I wrote this as a European (British) who is living in another European country (Finland). People happily write ‘in Europe’ whilst being quite selective in their definition of Europe - usually their very close neighbourhood, and it usually means North and Central Europe. If that.

I’ve seen some truly unhinged takes here, my favourite ever being something along the lines of European cars not having cup holders because we don’t have drive-throughs in Europe… I have driven my Volkswagen across this continent and enjoyed many a hot beverage on the move.

I’ve come to learn that discussions on a lot of things, in English, usually end up as a comparison to the States, especially if it involves the healthcare sacred cow.

Annoyingly, this will not work over CGNAT as far as I know - the tunnel needs 'both ends' to be accessible directly from each other I think.

On HN, 'In Europe' means in one person's particular locale based on their experience and generalised across a continent of about 30 countries. But it's always better than in the US of course.

PSA that if you have a ham radio licence, anywhere in the world, there are IPv4 addresses available for you for the taking at ARDC (AMPR)[1].

You can either get a block of /24 to announce yourself (you've got to cover all the technical setup and costs of this) or use their free 44net.connect service and just organise a wireguard tunnel.

You cannot use it for anything commercial.

[1] https://wiki.ampr.org/wiki/Main_Page

I can't remember where I read it (I'm sure it was BBC, maybe IEEE?) but it was super interesting to read an article about these giant flywheels that are popping up to combat exactly this - one example https://www.statkraft.co.uk/newsroom/2023/lister-drive/.

The _rioters_ aren't concerned with anything other than looting.

KLM have been doing so in Europe for a couple of years now from my memory.

I read this as:

'[the] actual telecommunications agencies [under defined circumstances have] .. legislative authority to enter premises and what have you to resolve issues'

No, OFCOM in the UK or Traficom in Finland (the two I'm familiar with) don't have armed units going door to door but if circumstances & the law deem it so then they can show up with the police and the necessary warrants/orders and do so.

People say 'Europe', speak as if their experience is the same across the continent, and anyone with a different experience is somehow not in the Europe they mean. It's very annoying.

European healthcare is run very differently across the continent. 'Insurance' can mean a [state] social insurance institute that the doctor must bill. Some countries would employ the doctor directly as part of a nationalised health system. Some places it might be the municipality or city that would then get some subsidy from central government. Some it is a mix of all of this. 'Free' healthcare might actually mean a few hundred Euros, or literally nothing.

The irony of these documents being (allegedly) backdated, and this response, is not lost on me.

Any IP address could one day change where it is being announced from, or become anycast, or change the number of hops between you and it.

I don't think people are using `ping 1.1.1.1` as a stable API, rather as a yes/no test of the network segment that they control.

For some reason, I sneak 'Magical Trevor' into code as an easter egg / test string when I can (instead of things like 'Foo'/'Bar')

And I am saddened to this day that no one I've worked with professionally has gotten the reference. One day.

Yes - unfortunately this looks to be completely irrelevant to consumer protection.

"A contractor of my employer asked me to contact another member of my organisation to persuade them to do something commercially advantageous for them" - at no point is anyone here a consumer.

Business emails are subject to fairly different rules by the looks of it: https://tietosuoja.fi/en/faq-direct-marketing ("Can a person working in a company be sent direct electronic marketing") - it appears there's a fair bit of an exception that doesn't require consent.

Raspberry pi never sold them this product. Some random person is the vendor selling some unknown modification and isn’t providing support.

Sure - if that vendor was proposing a solution, a modified EEPROM perhaps, then all is dandy. But they aren’t.

Very fair point.

Yes.

Except linked in this exact discussion is a thread where the person is asking RPi for remedy instead because the seller has been unable to assist (i.e. has run off with their money).

I dunno - I think the victims in a lot of these cases aren't stupid. They can't contact the seller because they bought it from 'some guy' who's disappeared into the night. They know they've been had and are trying to get a knock-off board working at the expense of [the time of] someone completely unrelated to this.

It's pretty normal for the first port of call / warranty claim for a busted item to be the dealer that sold it to you.

It's tough but I'd still wager that more hobbyists and tinkers will complain when their 8GB Pi that they bought from Amazon, or anywhere really, won't actually run their project that they wanted to use 8GB for properly because that 8GB is little more than a fiction.

Absolutely agree.

It's unfortunate, but given that there are so many ways you could end up with a poor quality knock-off (i.e. Amazon, sorry, 'third party marketplaces') it's probably something that skews the tradeoff quite significantly.

I guess there are more individuals who will be upset when they can't run something on their equipment as it was advertised to them than will be upset that they can't re-solder the RAM.

There are probably even fewer individuals who'll do due diligence in their own supply chain. Whilst those that suffer are technically suffering from some kind of crime / civil wrong - the chance of them getting a remedy for this is going to be non-existent.

The memory that they are placing in it has to be cheap enough to be worth their while. Which in this climate is highly probably faulty memory, or memory that runs at a different speed/spec to the one advertised to come with the RPi. That is fraud.

In the GitHub issue posted as another comment it's clear that what has happened is:

- 8GB Pi is out of stock / too expensive - due to RAM shortage

- Someone bought a load of non-8GB Pis

- Replaced the RAM with whatever they could get their hands on (cheap enough to be worth the hassle, cheap because no one else wants it even given the ongoing shortage - so probably pretty suspicious / of dubious quality)

- The end user buys it and has no idea it has been modified and the warranty is void

- RPi probably don't want to spend their time supporting it. Probably can't if the memory is a load of crap, even if they wanted to. It gets bricked.

The point here is someone bought something else (a fake pi) than they thought they were getting. Not that someone willingly wanted to go hacking.

From having worked extensively in it, the VFX industry, apart from being near to Hollywood in terms of time zone, is surely just a tax rebate competition. Which is actually very non-EU philosophy; member states cannot simply subsidise local industries from tax revenue - it is a single market, other members have to have equal access to your market as your local companies.

Of course there's plenty of ways around it. In the case of film production, if the script calls for the characters to be in a specific location - then it's now a cultural asset that the government can fund with rebates. The person writing the script is of course aware of this and the incentives available.

Note that these are interchange fees charged by the networks. Unless you're operating at massive scale, merchant account suppliers still charge the shop whatever they want. The shop is paying far more than 0.2 / 0.3%.

2.5% for credit and 25c fixed for debit is the usual ballpark.

The assets are still there and frozen for the most part (in Euroclear).

Some people would like to see them put to use in guaranteeing reconstruction and defence for Ukraine.

But a public restroom that has effectively been destroyed isn't really any better than no public restroom.