Every one of these only makes me say “wouldn’t it be great if we did everything with RPN”?

Have you ever chained three Cisco 2600 routers together and then successfully ping’d clients on each end? Do you know what BGP is? OSPF? Do you know the difference between routing and routed protocols?

I know you don’t, because people who do don’t make the claims you’re making.

No they fucking don’t, that’s not what routers do. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

And don’t fucking tell me NAT is for security, either.

Skype won’t be supporting anything at all very soon.

What happened with Vonage is something that could happen with any kind of instant messaging, including things like Discord.

With everything directly addressable (not just static addresses, but directly addressable), an IM/VoIP service can simply connect to the recipient. No servers are necessary in between, only routers. That doesn’t work with NAT (CG or otherwise), so what you have to do is create a server that everyone connects into, and then that forwards messages to the endpoint. This is:

• More expensive to operate
• Less reliable
• Slower
• A point for NSA eavesdropping (which almost certainly happened)

This is largely invisible to end users until free services get enshittified or something goes wrong.

Yes, it’s only tangentially related to static addresses, but it’s all part of the package. This is not the Internet we should have had.

And at least in the US (in single family homes) its crazy unlikely that your router is behind any NAT

Your router has NAT. That’s the problem. CGNAT is another problem. My C&C: Generals issues did not have CGNAT.

. . . nobody at home actually runs VOIP . . .

Plenty of people used Skype and Vonage. Both were subverted because they have to assume NAT is there.

. . . quick game servers don’t need static . . .

But they do work better without NAT. That’s somewhat separate from static addresses.

My old roommate and I had tons of problems back in the day when we tried to host an Internet game of C&C: Generals behind the same NAT. I couldn’t connect to him. He couldn’t connect to me. We could connect to each other but nobody outside could. It’s a real problem that’s only been “solved” because a lot of games have moved to publisher-hosted servers. Which has its own issues with longevity.

You can get IPv6 addresses. What you can’t get, in many cases, is a static IPv6 prefix assignment.

CGNAT is not fine. Its problems are simply hidden from most people. ISPs have to have more equipment that’s less reliable, increases latency, and is potentially a bandwidth bottleneck.

The reason they have no use for a static address is because applications haven’t evolved to work that way. Roll back the clock 30 years, do IPv6 seriously so that everyone has static assignments by the time the Y2k problem has come and gone, and you have a very different Internet.

In fact, many applications, like VoIP and game hosting, have to go through all sorts of hoops to work around NAT.

“Hashed emails”. Besides the fact that they can match up a hash from one source to a hash from another source to link them to the same person, emails often have enough predictability to break the hash. Assuming they all end in “@gmail.com”, “@outlook.com”, or “@yahoo.com” will get you the vast majority of emails out there. Unlike a good password scheme, people don’t shove a lot of random data into their email addresses.

It wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’ll probably do the job. Depends on what you want to do with it. There’s fewer people choosing this path, which means that when things go wrong, you’ll have fewer sources of information to help.

Some old Dell office PC with a good amount of RAM and an SSD would be just as well.

If it’s enough negative thoughts pile up, they’ll eventually breach a threshold where people avoid the company. I was looking forward to Metroid Prime 4, but I’m thinking of skipping it now.

I’m not so sure. It’s possible Nintendo opted for a carrot rather than a stick in this case.

This doesn’t seem to have been started with a public C&D letter like usual. Yuzu (the previous Switch emulator that was taken down) incorporated some proprietary Nintendo information, which is why Nintendo had a legal lever against them. They don’t have one in this case, yet it still came down. Plus, everything seems to be have been going on very quiet behind the scenes.

If you were an emulator writer and Nintendo came and offered you life changing money in exchange for ending the project, would you take it? I would have a very hard time turning that down. Nintendo also doesn’t want a flood of yokels trying to start the project up again hoping to receive the same offer; most would fail, but one or two might take off. Better to let the threat be implied.

This is just speculation, of course, but something about the way this has unfolded feels a little different.

There are only so many programmers who are good enough to create an emulator, and a lot of them are already doing other projects. The Switch is also a very complicated system, and it needs a small team to pull it off.

There’s a model that id used for open sourcing their engines. The source code is open, but the assets (textures, models, sounds, etc.) are still copyrighted and you still have to buy the game to get them legally. This means the company still sells copies on Steam or wherever, and games that replace all the assets can still sell them without any licensing costs, too.

I’m a little surprised this model never caught on. Even id only ever published the engine to the previous game–Quake 3 was open sourced a little after Doom 3 was released–and the practice seems to have stopped when John Carmack left.

Possibly because nobody has tested it in court, or some other subtle legal issue?

Just can’t get away from that Yahwist propaganda.

If it’s compsci, then it doesn’t need to be bare metal. It should be a language that’s good at demonstrating abstractions. Java wouldn’t be my choice, here. Elixir would be a good one.

You might want bare metal as a prereq to an operating system course.

If it’s software engineering, OTOH, then yes, a bare metal language has a bigger place.

On my Ubuntu system, I installed Steam. That was it, the things I want mostly work.

GNU HURD remains ignored.

Libertarian Socialism has little to do with US libertarians. The term was openly stolen for the Right. The intellectual history is completely separate.

Murray Rothbard: "One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . ‘Libertarians’ . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over… "

While it’s true that lots of libertarians prefer Linux, the first ancap I met in an online forum was a Romanian-born Christian living in the US, was so fundamentalist that he was actively looking for a church where men and women sat on different sides of the pews, loved Microsoft, and hated Linux. He also had a habit of changing the definition of words in the middle of debates. People found him completely infuriating.

Someday, Windows might be as good at gaming as Linux.