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jeffhykin

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jeffhykin OP , (edited )

I’m shocked this answer has so many upvotes. No, a MAC address is not close to a phone number. No two people have the same phone number, and I can’t just edit my phone number to be someone else’s number.

  • “two network interfaces connected to two different networks can share the same MAC address”
  • “Many network interfaces, however, support changing their MAC addresses”

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address

jeffhykin OP , (edited )

Cell phones don’t get a new phone number every time they switch cell towers, so why do laptops.

Its not like I can write down the IP address of my friends laptop so I can send it a message once he gets to a new city. Right?

jeffhykin OP , (edited )
  1. Yeah I was lazy with saying ipv32 just to mean something excessively long. I didnt want to say ipv6, since I kinda think it needs to at least be 64bits (edit: ipv6 is actually 128bits), and really for a public-private key pair it should be larger, so more like 512 to avoid anything like the v4 v6 cacatestrophe again in 20 years with post quantum forms of asymetric key challenges. But I didnt feel like writing all that out.
  2. I’m with you. I knew I’d get people not reading and say “that’s the ip address”, but MAC address? 🤦‍♂️
jeffhykin OP ,

This is the kind of answer I was looking for, thank you!

jeffhykin OP , (edited )

Every phone number has one owner, but MAC addresses can have many owners. They’re categorically different.

How would the internet know how to find your phone?

The same way phone calls try to find a phone when its powered off. Attempt, and then fail under a timeout.

Where would the registery be?

Same place as the phone number registry. Or the domain name registry.

That would be one giant database

Yep the domain name registry and cell phone registry very much are AFAIK

jeffhykin OP ,

I meant “in the same way that phone numbers are unique to phones (not perfectly unique, some phones have dual Sim, some have no sim, sometimes a Sim changes numbers after contacting the provider, etc)”

Its just typing all that^ in a title is kinda long.

EUI-64 IPv6 (and why its not a reality) though is kinda what I’m curious about. But not really because, even under that spec, its still not static like a phone number. I want to know why networks were not created in a way where I can send a message to a laptop regardless of what WiFi its connected to (assuming it is connected and online).

jeffhykin OP ,

Solid answer, thanks! You deserve all the upvotes that were, instead, for some reason, given to the guy that just said “I think its a MAC address”

jeffhykin OP ,

Same people who decide phone numbers and domain names. We already have central registries, why does it being a computer make it harder to have a central authority?

jeffhykin OP ,

no need for an endpoint to be directly exposed

If I were an engineer in the past, trying to send a message back to an endpoint (e.g. a server response) I would’ve reached for everything having a static IP, same as the EID system with phones, instead of the DHCP multi-tier NAT type system with temp addresses.

I’m all but certain they didnt do it for privacy reasons at the time.

jeffhykin OP , (edited )

Sure, I’ll change the title to say “phones have unique phone number (b/c sim cards), why don’t computers have an equivalent?” I didnt mean one phone == one phone number.

With VOIP I can get phone calls even without cell service, even behind a NAT. My question is why is the network designed in such a way where that is possible, but I can’t buy a static address that will persist across networks endpoint changes (e.g. new wifi connection) such that I can initiate a connection to my laptop while it is behind a NAT.

jeffhykin OP , (edited )

Yes I’m sure. Try changing the number to 911. Phone numbers only have one owner, MAC addresses may have many owners.

jeffhykin OP ,

Even paying for a static IP its not like a phone number which is discoverable behind a NAT without extra router configuration.

jeffhykin OP , (edited )

The IP doesn’t persist across network hops (cell tower to cell tower) and the MAC address doesnt have one verified owner. A phone number is both verified having one owner and persists across network hops.

jeffhykin OP ,

Yep, and I can verify my phone number didnt change when roaming, people could still call me.

jeffhykin OP ,

I can get VOIP calls behind a NAT without cell service. I’m asking how is that possible. Is the router somehow part of the same AP as cell service?

jeffhykin OP ,

Cool, I’ll have to look that up!

jeffhykin OP ,

AFAIK static public-facing IP addresses are limited to a physical location. It would work if my laptop never left my house but as soon as I take it to the airport its no longer accessible. People who try to connect to the static ip would just get a message saying the address timed out.

jeffhykin OP ,

Fair, I could have said fully qualified number, including country code.

And also fair, instead of saying a MAC could be edited, I should’ve said each phone number has one global owner, while each MAC address could have many owners.

Corrections have been made 👍

jeffhykin OP ,

This I’m interested in, because its at the edge/limits of my knowledge when it comes to domains and cellular networking.

Are you saying if cell phones had a larger address space, let’s say 32 digits base 10, and every device was given a cell phone number, it would overwhelm the existing infrastructure?

jeffhykin OP ,

Thats a valid solution, thanks for saying it!

I think it is good to note this requires either having another system at home or in the cloud to host the VPN right?

jeffhykin OP ,

You’re right it depends on the definition of phone number, and I edited the original post to try and be more clear that I meant the phone number including the country code and area code.

If you’re talking about something other than country/area code though, then that’s news to me.

jeffhykin OP , (edited )

Finally :D thank you so much!

So basically VOIP is “cheating” because its not actually handled by the network directly, the phone company pays for always-online servers, and phone(s) reach out to those server every time they change networks, in order for servers to be able to route calls to them.

Which also means! it is possible to do the same thing for computers, but it requires having

  1. A static IP
  2. An always online server
  3. The device needs a daemon that tries to connect to an always online server, and authenticates itself
  4. That server needs to manually reroute traffic (through a VPN or some other means) from the static IP address to the device, wherever it might be

Which also explains why general network providers wouldn’t want to create the infrastructure. Even if universal addresses were given to each device, which simplifies DHCP and address-leasing, and shortens time it takes to handshake with the network, all of that is less of a cost than the infrastructure needed track of devices as they change networks. (And that’s on top of ISP’s being slow to change from the legacy approach of local networks and desktops).

^ which is more the conversation I wanted to have but didnt really get with this post.

Thats a sizable edit!

Yeah 😅 I didnt want it to be this complicated of a question, but I didnt see how else to explain that current addressing systems don’t meet the same need as a phone number.

jeffhykin OP ,

If I’m understanding correctly, you’re saying that right now the network doesn’t have an exhaustive table of IP addresses to physical locations. It has a cache, and a hierarchy, and the path to a location of the IP is fluid.

But a system where every device could be directly contacted/identified like a Sim card, would effectively require a complete table of “what network is device ABC at”. A table that is updated every time the device changes network connections. It would be like trying to change domain name to point to a different IP address.

The problem is, updating a domain to point to a new IP takes hours or days not seconds, so doing that every time a phone changes WiFi is not practical.

Is that a good summary?

jeffhykin OP ,

Thank you for such a long and detailed post! I indeed did not know about things beyond the SIM, and I didn’t know about the extra details about the country codes either. That is extremely interesting to me.

With the phone spoofing though, does that mean two factor with a phone number is basically useless? If I had authentication based on a MAC address, it would take seconds to break it. But I think, and sure hope, that auth based on phone numbers is more secure.

I think your domain name answer – that for the most part computers didnt need them – is a very satisfying answer.

jeffhykin OP ,

Wow that’s super interesting to know. So its still got some resistance, but a lot less than I thought. Thanks again for sharing!

jeffhykin ,

Sadly no AFAIK, even ignoring the licensing issues.

jeffhykin ,

You should learn the nix lang, flakes, zero to nix, etc and try not to get bogged down in the Nix/Aux stuff. Be prepared to wait for things to settle down on that side.

jeffhykin ,

Agreed, I made a thread for it. You’ve got some good names!

forum.aux.computer/t/aux-name-enhancement/179

jeffhykin ,

I read it as “a pin nix” like appendix with a lisp

jeffhykin ,

He got convinced, its now Auxolotl!

github.com/auxolotl/

Theres going to be an official reevaluation once the governance has finished bootstrapping.

jeffhykin , (edited )

The “front page” of most instances are not interesting to average people or to professionals (e.g. local gov that wants to go open source, like those switching to Mastodon).

Part is lemmy’s hot-sort is basically broken as a ranking, another part is bad language filters, another part is that major communities here (fediverse, Linux memes, star trek memes, science memes, etc) are off-putting to out-of-group people because of so many in-group jokes. Its a hard fix.

jeffhykin ,

This is why my field (reinforcement learning) is unfortunately not science.

(Can’t really publish “hey I tried this algorithm and it didn’t work”)

jeffhykin ,

I guess I should’ve clarified; in reforcement learning “I was wrong in numerous ways” almost always translates to “unpublishable, try to not be wrong next time”. Nobody cares if a reinforcement learning hypothesis didn’t work, its only worth publishing if it worked well.

jeffhykin ,

I know a good bit of micro biology, psychology, and medical trial fields can. But thats about the limit of my “other fields” knowledge.

jeffhykin ,

I think we can agree “Good reseach” is in the how-its-done. I wish journals would chose/require/verify the how-its-done (time frame, resources, hypothesis, method etc) but after that be contractually required publish whatever conclusion is discovered by the team/project they picked and verified.

NixOS for gamedev

Hiya! I’m following a gamedev degree in university. It’s been a major challenge doing it from Linux, as everything is Windows stuff (.sln Visual Studio projects, DirectX API, excel graphs…). However I’ve gotten by by making my own tools and dipping into WINE when it gets too difficult. I’m replacing my laptop due to...

jeffhykin , (edited )

Yeah, university is almost certainly going to expect you to be able to install Unreal or Unity, which just isn’t possible AFAIK on NixOS. NixOS is very all or nothing. You can’t just remove the restrictions for one project and hack something together to hit an assignment deadline. Theres still lots of pain points with LD_PATH and 3rd party binaries.

That said, you can use nixpkgs on non-nixos and still get reliability for Godot and other open source tools. For your case, I highly recommend dual booting, and then using nixpkgs without going full blown nixOS.

jeffhykin ,

Temple OS

jeffhykin ,

A mattress with per-side heat controls. Unplug it, set your side to super hot, then use a timer socket to make it turn on when you want to wake up.

jeffhykin ,

For standard notes, its got an auto-export plaintext file option on desktop. Were you wanting two-way editing of plaintext? (e.g. Auto export and import)

jeffhykin ,

I work in the field of AI.

“humans are excellent at ignoring” is something I like to tell students, because its computationally impossible for any intelligence (human or AI) to remember and process 24k-resolution-esk information every millisecond. Data must be thrown away, and humans are actually exceptional at it.

If AI could ignore the correct things, we would already have AGI.

Also search “invisible gorilla” on youtube if you haven’t already heard of the phrase.

jeffhykin ,

You’ll basically have timezones either way, there’s just two ways of doing it.

If we all used UTC, then businesses would need to change what time they opened depending on their location. Ex: Best Buy opening at 12 noon on the US west coast, and 3pm on the east coast. Locations inbetween would have different opening times. So we would get the noon zone, 1pm zone, 2pm zone, and 3pm zone. All nation wide businesses with standard open/close times would effectively follow the same pattern, and it would be best if they all coordinated on where those zones occured. So then we would get new timezones, they’d just be slightly different in how they functioned.

jeffhykin ,

Yeah, sorry if I’m not great at communicating. That’s exactly what I’m trying to point out when I said:

Even if we don’t federate with them, Meta can still harvest the data so we should add these protections regardless.

jeffhykin ,

It’s not fair game for for-profit bussinesses training LLM’s. That’s part of why Reddit made the move; so that companies would need to pay Reddit for access to the data for legally training models

jeffhykin ,

Sure, but it’s still true that there are legal protections we can add that make it not fair game for Lemmy. At best it would be unfair-game (illegal scraping of Lemmy)

jeffhykin , (edited )

it can apply across all of them, for example that’s how copy-left works

jeffhykin ,

What? I’m saying every federated copy must legally must have the usage restrictions. Just cause it’s copied doesn’t mean it can go into a for-profit LLM.

jeffhykin ,

If we serve licensed content over ssh or HTTPS it’s still licensed. Protocols don’t change the legal requirements of the data. Warner Bros will still sue if one of their movies is hosted on a server using the activity pub protocol.

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