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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 28th, 2023

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  • The metric standard is to measure information in bits.

    Bytes are a non-metric unit. Not a power-of-ten multiple of the metric base unit for information, the bit.

    If you’re writing “1 million bytes” and not “8 million bits” then you’re not using metric.

    If you aren’t using metric then the metric prefix definitions don’t apply.

    There is plenty of precedent for the prefixes used in metric to refer to something other than an exact power of 1000 when not combined with a metric base unit. A microcomputer is not one one-thousandth of a computer. One thousand microscopes do not add up to one scope. Megastructures are not exactly one million times the size of ordinary structures. Etc.

    Finally: This isn’t primarily about bit shifting, it’s about computers being based on binary representation and the fact that memory addresses are stored and communicated using whole numbers of bits, which naturally leads to memory sizes (for entire memory devices or smaller structures) which are powers of two. Though the fact that no one is going to do something as idiotic as introducing an expensive and completely unnecessary division by a power of ten for every memory access just so you can have 1000-byte MMU pages rather than 4096 also plays a part.


  • Sure, they don’t rule the world. They only have the power to ban you (either the company per se or its individual owners, officers, and/or employees) from ever again doing any business in the EU. Which naturally includes business with any individuals or companies either based in the EU (as a seller or a buyer) or wanting to do business in the EU. Or from traveling to the EU, whether for business or personal reasons. Little things like that. Nothing too inconvenient. (/s)

    They haven’t taken things quite that far—yet. But they could. It’s dangerous to assume that you can ignore them without consequences just because your company doesn’t currently depend on revenue from EU customers. The world is more interconnected than that, and the consequences may not be limited to your company.


  • Geoblocking in such cases would not be sufficient. For one thing your geo-IP database will never be perfectly accurate, even without considering that “data subjects who are in the Union” can connect to your site via proxies or VPNs with non-EU IP addresses. For another you still need to respond to GDPR requests e.g. to remove data collected on a data subject currently residing in the EU, even if the data was collected while they were outside the EU, and you can’t do that if you’re blocking their access to the site. For a newspaper in particular the same would apply to any EU data subject they happened to report on, whether they had previously visited the site or not.


  • They never should have made opt-in an option in the first place. All the legitimate reasons to store data are already permitted without asking permission (required for the site to function, or storing data the user specifically asked the site to store such as settings). All that’s left is things no one would reasonably choose to consent to if they fully understood the question, so they should have just legislated that the answer is always “no”. That plus a bit more skepticism about what sites really “need” to perform their function properly. (As that function is understood by the user—advertising is not a primary function of most sites, or desired by their users, so “needed for advertising to work” does not make a cookie “functional” in nature. Likewise for “we need this ad revenue to offer the site for free”; you could use that line to justify any kind of monetization of private user data.)


  • So you’re not remapping the source ports to be unique? There’s no mechanism to avoid collisions when multiple clients use the same source port? Full Cone NAT implies that you have to remember the mapping (potentially indefinitely—if you ever reassign a given external IP:port combination to a different internal IP or port after it’s been used you’re not implementing Full Cone NAT), but not that the internal and external ports need to be identical. It would generally only be used when you have a large enough pool of external IP addresses available to assign a unique external IP:port for every internal IP:port. Which usually implies a unique external IP for each internal IP, as you can’t restrict the number of unique ports used by each client. This is why most routers only implement Symmetric NAT.

    (If you do have sufficient external IPs the Linux kernel can do Full Cone NAT by translating only the IP addresses and not the ports, via SNAT/DNAT prefix mapping. The part it lacks, for very practical reasons, is support for attempting to create permanent unique mappings from a larger number of unconstrained internal IP:port combinations to a smaller number of external ones.)


  • Examples of local commands I might run in tmux could include anything long-running which is started from the command line. A virtual machine (qemu), perhaps, or a video encode (ffmpeg). Then if I need to log out or restart my GUI session for any reason—or something goes wrong with the session manager—it won’t take the long-running process with it. While the same could be done with nohup or systemd-run, using tmux allows me to interact with the process after it’s started.

    I also have systems which are accessed both locally and remotely, so sometimes (not often) I’ll start a program on a local terminal through tmux so I can later interact with it through SSH without resorting to x11vnc.


  • Not the GP but I also use tmux (or screen in a pinch) for almost any SSH session, if only as insurance against dropped connections. I occasionally use it for local terminals if there is a chance I might want a command to outlive the current graphical session or migrate to SSH later.

    Occasionally it’s nice to be able to control the session from the command line, e.g. splitting a window from a script. I’ve also noticed that wrapping a program in tmux can avoid slowdowns when a command generates a lot of output, depending on the terminal emulator. Some emulators will try to render every update even if it means blocking the output from the program for the GUI to catch up, rather than just updating the state of the terminal in memory and rendering the latest version.