• 1 Post
  • 734 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 9th, 2023

help-circle



  • Gmail and other big providers tend to consider new domains to be spam until they’ve proven otherwise. Can’t prove otherwise until you’ve been up and running for a while. Catch-22. The way out of that is to host with an existing provider for a few years.

    Does it cut down on spam? Perhaps. Does it favor existing providers like Gmail? Yes, definitely.

    Honestly, hosting email has long been difficult to setup, and all the more so if you don’t want your box to be a spam host within three seconds of plugging it in.








  • Hardly a stretch. The comparison isn’t to the power density of gas, but overall curb weight. EVs are roughly 10% heavier than an ICE equivalent. Batteries are the main reason for that (electric motors and the electronics to support them aren’t that much). Batteries have also been improving Wh/kg by 5-8% per year. It only takes a few years of improvements to get there.

    In fact, since the 10% number has been the case since around 2020 or so, the battery tech might already be there and we just need to get them into new models.

    Edit: another way to think about it is what’s been taken out of an ICE and replaced with something else. It’s not just the engine, but an entire engine life support system. Coolant radiator, oil, transmission, gas tank, and ignition system. Possibly differentials, as well, depending on the electric drive train. It’s replaced with motors (which don’t weigh much for the power they output compared to ICEs), some electronics (which do need to be beefy to handle the current involved, but also don’t weigh that much, relatively speaking), the battery (major source of weight), and the battery does usually need a cooling system, as well. So you don’t need to compare it to the energy density of gas, but of all the stuff you replaced.




  • It could be true. Catalytic converters do a pretty good job of filtering out most pollutants. They also increase CO2 emissions in a variety of direct and indirect ways. Everything else is lower, though.

    The way to make EV tires pollute less is to not chase 600+ mile range. Keep them around 300-400 miles, and use further battery improvements to reduce weight. There’s no reason EVs have to be heavier forever. With better charging infrastructure, 400 miles is more than enough.

    The way to fix everything else wrong with them is to not make cars the default mode of transportation.






  • You can get exactly the same benefit by blocking non-established/non-related connections on your firewall. NAT does nothing to help security.

    Edit: BTW–every time I see this response of “NAT can prevent external access”, I severely question the poster’s networking knowledge. Like to the level where I wonder how you manage to config a home router correctly. Or maybe it’s the way home routers present the interface that leads people to believe the two functions are intertwined when they aren’t.


  • Governments are not anyone’s issue other than other governments. If your threat model is state actors, you’re SOL either way.

    That’s a silly way to look at it. Governments can be spying on a block of people at once, or just the one person they actually care about. One is clearly preferable.

    Again, the obscurity benefit of NAT is so small that literally any cost outweighs it.

    I don’t see where you get a cost from it.

    • Firewall rules are more complicated
    • Firewall code is more complicated
    • Firewall hardware has to be beefier to handle it
    • NAT introduces more latency
    • CGNAT introduces even more latency
    • It introduces extra surface area for bugs in the firewall code. Some security related, some not. (I have one NAT firewall that doesn’t want to setup the hairpin correctly for some reason, meaning we have to do a bunch of workarounds using DNS).
    • Lots of applications have to jump through hoops to make it through NAT, such as VoIP services
    • Those hoops sometimes make things more susceptible to snooping; Vonage VoIP, for example, has to use a central server cluster to keep connections open to end users, which is the perfect point to install snooping (and this has happened)
    • . . . and that centralization makes the whole system more expensive and less reliable
    • A bunch of apps just never get built or deployed en masse because they would require direct addressing to work; stuff like a P2P instant messenger
    • Running hosted games with two people behind NAT and two people on the external network gets really complicated
    • . . . something the industry has “fixed” by having “live service” games. In other words, centralized servers.
    • TLS has a field for “Server Name Indication” (SNI) that sends the server name in plaintext. Without going far into the details, this makes it easier for the ISP to know what server you’re asking for, and it exists for reasons directly related to IPv4 sticking around because of NAT. Widespread TLS use would never have been feasible without this compromise as long as we’re stuck with IPv4.

    We forced decisions into a more centralized, less private Internet for reasons that can be traced directly to NAT.

    If you want to hide your hosts, just block non-established, non-related incoming connections at your firewall. NAT does not help anything besides extending IPv4’s life.