3: 340 Trillion Trillion Trillion

00:00SPEAKERYeah, so my, I went to school, I was a freshman this the fall of 1993, and well which kind of

00:07SPEAKERfreshman? College. Oh wow, I'm old. I wasn't even in high school. Fuck, really? I'm sorry. Oh my god,

00:13SPEAKERI thought you were, I thought you were close. You are close now. I was a freshman in high school in

00:17SPEAKER'94. Okay, so I went to college that fall. It's not, it's not that big a difference,

00:23SPEAKERbut it sure sounds like one when you put it that way. Well, and like in the registration packet,

00:28SPEAKERthe thing they gave you during orientation, there was a login for the thing and a phone number. Wow.

00:33SPEAKERAnd you just put the phone number into your dialer. Okay. Into your, into your Archie or whatever,

00:38SPEAKERand I could, I went and got a floppy disk with the dialer that the VAX people gave me because

00:44SPEAKERI had a VAX account because I wasn't a computer science major. Was this for Windows 3.1?

00:48SPEAKERThat would have been, maybe Windows 3.0. Okay, but it was a Windows thing. It was a Windows.

00:52SPEAKERI think I pirated Windows 3.1 from somebody else on the floor. Anyway, I think the statute of

00:57SPEAKERlimitations is up. Yeah, Bill Gates don't come at me.

01:21SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. Yep. Period. It's a podcast. It's a podcast.

01:26SPEAKERWhere you disclose your history of software theft. I, I, I stole Shogo too. What? Yeah.

01:33SPEAKERI feel really bad about that. Shogo? Yeah. One of the guys down the hall from me in my

01:38SPEAKERdorm had it and I was like, Hey, can I borrow that? And I just copied it onto my computer and

01:42SPEAKERplayed it there. I copied that, that CD-ROM. I should, this is probably not the episode for

01:47SPEAKERit, but I should tell you about the weekend that I got to college. Oh boy. And the guy in the dorm,

01:52SPEAKERit wasn't even my dorm. I was just hanging out with friends, but a guy was downloading

01:55SPEAKERVRAR files from an FTP and unzipping them and burning them to a CD and then playing,

02:00SPEAKERplaying the just released Metal Gear Solid Japanese version. Did you have ethernet? On his

02:04SPEAKERchips? Oh yeah. This was 98. Oh my God. But like it was, it was, it was fast internet. It was,

02:09SPEAKERit was like broadband internet, uh, burning PlayStation games to a test. That's a lot of

02:14SPEAKERpiracy. It was, well, not just pirate. It was, it was fast internet. It was burning disks. It was

02:18SPEAKERshipped to play state. It was like this onslaught of unbelievable mind blowing future tech all at

02:23SPEAKERone time. So like dude, this came out in Japan hours ago. How are you playing this? So for me,

02:29SPEAKERit was literally walking down the hall and this guy's windows, I was playing Doom on his computer

02:34SPEAKERbecause he had a, he had a 486 and I had a 386. And I was like, Hey, your windows looks different

02:39SPEAKERthan mine. And he's like, Oh yeah, I just got windows 3.1 with this new computer. I was like,

02:43SPEAKERreally? And so I took five floppy disks or whatever it was down the hall. And then suddenly

02:47SPEAKERI had windows. Yeah. He was like, yeah, go for it, man. We didn't realize that. Like,

02:50SPEAKERlook, it's like, that would have been even more nefarious if you just quietly borrowed them for a

02:53SPEAKERfew minutes. We, we will probably took two hours. If I feel like it was the old times. Fair. I,

02:58SPEAKERI don't think we had a really good concept of non cartridge games costing things when I was a

03:05SPEAKERfreshman in college or, or, or just a good sense of propriety in general around digital ownership.

03:12SPEAKERWell, I mean, it's funny, this was the nascent days of Napster and it was even pre nap. It was

03:17SPEAKERway pre Napster for you. Yeah. I'm talking about more for me when I got there, we were getting

03:22SPEAKERinto music file sharing territory. So, so, okay. This is all going to come back to internet in a

03:27SPEAKERminute. Cause this is what we're talking about. Yeah. Cause I definitely want to tell you how I

03:30SPEAKERwas in that dorm hanging out with my friends because they had ethernet and I got stuck in

03:34SPEAKERone of the three dorms on campus that only had dial up. That's the worst dude. I was like, this

03:39SPEAKERis the reason I went to college. I never, why not have the fast internet? I never had broadband

03:44SPEAKERuntil I was, until I moved to San Francisco. Okay. Well, yeah, I think you were just in 2000,

03:49SPEAKERyou were just on the other side of that inflection point, right? Cause if you were there early to mid

03:52SPEAKERnineties, yeah, they wired the dorms for ethernet at UT. They started a year after I moved off

03:58SPEAKERcampus. So it was, um, I moved off campus in 95, I guess some spring, fall of 95. And yeah, the,

04:09SPEAKERthey started wiring the freshmen dorms that year, like the freshmen dorms got internet that year,

04:14SPEAKERsome of them. And it was, but also they had a fast pipe, but they had the students on a really slow,

04:22SPEAKERlike the dorms were on slow, slow, like it was faster than way faster than dial up,

04:26SPEAKERbut it wasn't like internet to, you know, it wasn't like my gigabit connection at home today.

04:31SPEAKERIf I keep commenting on everything I want to talk about, we'll never actually get to the point here,

04:34SPEAKERbut I would love to delve into like the nineties era, um, fat pipes T ones and T threes and that's

04:41SPEAKER1.5 megabits both ways. Yeah. Cause I used to fetishize that stuff from afar so much. Well,

04:47SPEAKERso when I moved to California, I was able to get a DSL, which was like maybe eight megabits down and

04:51SPEAKERlike 128 kilobits up. Sure. Or I could get SDSL, which was 1.5 megabits both ways. I went with SDS.

04:58SPEAKERI mean, I remember, you know, I was very envious of somebody I knew say 95, 96 ish 97 that had an

05:05SPEAKERISDN line. I had nice. What was that? 128. You could do it down or something like that.

05:10SPEAKERYou could do two, you could buy single channel or dual channel ISDN. Okay. Single channel was

05:15SPEAKEReither 56 kilobits per second or 64 kilobits a second. Okay. But it was like, unlike dial up

05:20SPEAKERmodem speech was for like theoretical maximums. Okay. This was actually a rock solid 64 kilobits.

05:26SPEAKERAnd was that synchronous up and down synchronous up and down. Okay. But the neat thing about that

05:30SPEAKERwas if you had two channel ISDN, it would seamlessly drop from 128 kilobits to 64 kilobits.

05:37SPEAKERIf somebody called you to use the other one as the phone line, you could still talk and it sounded

05:41SPEAKERreally good. Could you get that at any resonance or was it like you had to be in a metropolitan

05:45SPEAKERarea? Tennessee had weird rules about ISDN. So Tennessee had some specific thing that made them

05:50SPEAKERprice ISDN competitively with POTS lines, dial up lines. And it was maybe 20 bucks more a month for

05:56SPEAKERme to get 128 kilobit ISDN. And the school ISP, the one that was like built part of my activities fee

06:02SPEAKERand was $5 a month or something. You guys had school, you had municipal public internet.

06:06SPEAKERBack in the old days, there was a brief period of time when the school would offer dial up,

06:12SPEAKERlike you could dial up into the school's ISP. You had a way better school system than I did.

06:16SPEAKERWell, no, this was in college. This was the college one. We had to do this to shell into

06:21SPEAKERthe vaccine. This was before SLIP, before PPP. This was just straight up command line,

06:28SPEAKERbrother. We were Archie and then Gopher and all over the place. I was thinking still while we

06:32SPEAKERwere at our respective parents' house before you were in a college environment. We did not have a

06:35SPEAKERmodem in my parents. The BBS was a long distance call, so I was never allowed to do that. But yeah,

06:42SPEAKERso internet, the internet. Yeah. I guess, yeah, we kind of just decided to show up and talk about

06:47SPEAKERthe internet. Networking and IP and the host of other topics. I've got a bunch of them in front

06:54SPEAKERof me. I'm not really sure where we're going to go with this. Internet is fast now. I don't know if

07:00SPEAKERyou've heard. I've had fiber for more than a year now and it's ruined me. So I randomly just

07:07SPEAKERrealized right before you got here, I just hit the three year mark since I've been on Sonic.

07:11SPEAKERI remember when you got the Sonic and I was like, I need the Sonic. My eyes are still wide over this

07:16SPEAKERinternet connection three years later, not just because it's cheap and the company treats its

07:20SPEAKERcustomers really well, but like I just speed tested before you got here and I'm $9.50 up and

07:24SPEAKERdown for $60 bucks a month. The last night or the night before I was streaming and I was playing a

07:29SPEAKERgame. I wasn't streaming, I was watching a stream and I was like, oh, I'm going to download Saints

07:34SPEAKERWar of the Third because I want to show people the horrible character that I made in Saints War

07:36SPEAKERof the Third. I hit the download button and it was downloading so fast from Steam that it choked

07:41SPEAKERout all the other connections on the network because I had set it to go un-throttled. That's

07:46SPEAKERmagic. You can download a 60 gig game. I downloaded Destiny in like 25 minutes. I just did the same

07:54SPEAKERthing a few minutes ago. It's bananas. It feels good and I think it is an absolute travesty that

08:00SPEAKERthis type of speed is coming to the home just at the time that data caps are becoming ubiquitous.

08:06SPEAKERWell, except for on my, and I actually, I want to be clear really fast that I don't talk about my

08:11SPEAKERamazing internet all the time as a way of boasting about it, even if it comes off that way. I think

08:15SPEAKERit comes off that way. I know, and I don't, you're a real jerk. I hate that because I used to sit at

08:20SPEAKERhome thinking about your internet, just staring wistfully into space. I mean, yours is pretty

08:25SPEAKERgood too now. It's fine now. But I mean, in actuality, like I like to talk about it because

08:29SPEAKERit's the type of internet that everybody should have at this point. Yeah. And it should be, it's

08:33SPEAKERlike the thing that's... To be clear, like geographical challenges notwithstanding,

08:37SPEAKERobviously like laying fiber out in the sticks is a problem still, but like... It's not though. Well,

08:43SPEAKERmaybe not even, but what I mean is like, you know, the quality of your internet should not

08:47SPEAKERbe beholden to like shareholders demand for quarterly earnings at this point, which is

08:52SPEAKERthe problem that a lot of people... Like cheap, fast internet should be everywhere. I grew up in

08:57SPEAKERa small town, 50,000 people, like comparable to Asheville, where you grew up, you know,

09:01SPEAKERin that general area in the mountains. And they started running dark fiber with the power company,

09:06SPEAKERstarted running fiber alongside the power lines because it costs them practically nothing more

09:11SPEAKERwhen they're putting new power cables up to put the fiber on. And then once they had enough of

09:15SPEAKERthe city covered, they just flipped the switch and people could get hella fast internet for like

09:18SPEAKER$40 a month. That's how it should be everywhere. And like there were no... It was none of the

09:23SPEAKERbullshit with DSL where if you were too far from the thing, then it wouldn't work. And it was none

09:27SPEAKERof the problems with Comcast where if the kid next to you is really downloading a lot of porn

09:30SPEAKERfrom like BitTorrent, then your internet's going to get slow and shitty. It's just awesome. And

09:34SPEAKERmy parents have had that for 10 years now. Right. So like there's no reason that couldn't have

09:39SPEAKERhappened except a lot of the ISPs in different parts of the country enacted legislation to

09:46SPEAKERprevent municipalities from starting their own ISPs. It's just de facto monopolies almost everywhere.

09:50SPEAKERYeah. Like I believe Comcast instituted... Also they've been tracking your data usage for a very

09:57SPEAKERlong time. Yeah. For 15 years probably. But you used to be able to go into your account and just

10:00SPEAKERsee how much you had used. And it was almost like they were hanging the sword of Damocles over your

10:04SPEAKERhead. Well, you could... Because they didn't charge you for it at that time. Well, once they added the

10:07SPEAKERcaps, they could do it. But the problem was their tracker thing didn't ever line up with what your

10:10SPEAKERrouter said. Oh. It was always a little bit off. Sure. You know, it's not like the water meter...

10:15SPEAKERI'm sure it was. Yeah. Shocking, right? Anyway, what I was going to say is that I was able to get

10:20SPEAKERthe fiber that I'm on now literally the month before Comcast started actually enforcing the

10:24SPEAKERdata caps. I feel so fortunate, but I also feel terrible that so many people... At least in their

10:31SPEAKERcase, I don't know what it is with other ISPs, but I think it's like 50 bucks a month to remove

10:34SPEAKERthe data cap. It was $50 a month to get infinite downloads. That's insanity. I pay $80 a month for

10:39SPEAKERAT&T's fiber, which doesn't have a data cap at this point. I'm sure they'll institute them at

10:43SPEAKERsome point. Hopefully Sonic will be there by then. But you pay what? Like 50 or 55 bucks a month?

10:48SPEAKERWell, with taxes and various fees, it's about $60. But that is... I think for people who use the

10:56SPEAKERinternet... Brad, I think we're very online people at this point in our lives. You may be less so

11:01SPEAKERthan me. Tears of online-ness, let's say. Okay. I like to think of myself as somewhere in the

11:06SPEAKERmiddle. I don't hesitate. $60 a month, $80 a month was a no-hesitation purchase for me. Totally. For

11:12SPEAKERthat kind of speed and that kind of unlimited usage. Yeah. And I use it every day. It is an

11:18SPEAKERimportant part of my life. Absolutely. But the interesting thing about it is it's all based on

11:23SPEAKERtechnology that has changed very little in the last 30 or 40 years. The internet protocol, the

11:31SPEAKERtransmission control protocol and internet protocol, essentially... I mean, stuff has

11:35SPEAKERchanged. But the base bits of it... The fundament was laid, like what, late '70s, early '80s?

11:41SPEAKERAnd refined it into the '90s. Yeah. So if you... One of the things that's always interesting to

11:47SPEAKERme was when I was in... My first time out of college, I had to learn... I had to understand how

11:51SPEAKERnetwork addresses work because I had to maintain the network at the... Part of my job was to help

11:56SPEAKERwork on the network. And my boss at the time, a guy named Rod, who went on to do microscope sales

12:03SPEAKERand stuff, was like, "Look, do you understand how IP addresses work?" I was like, "Yeah,

12:06SPEAKERyou type them in and then the computer's connected." "No, no, no." He's like, "Look,

12:09SPEAKERdo you understand how it works?" And when he says IP addresses, he's talking about the four

12:15SPEAKERthree-digit numbers. It's a 32-bit address. So each of those three-digit numbers is one

12:20SPEAKER8-bit number, basically. And they range from zero to 255. The couple of them are zeros reserved for

12:27SPEAKERthe entirety of that part of the network. The 255 is a special broadcast address that goes out to

12:34SPEAKEReverything in that range on the network. Right. But the way to think about it is each of those

12:38SPEAKERfour numbers represent something. And if you start from the right side of the number with the... For

12:44SPEAKERthis right number, that number is telling you, "Hey, this is like your street address." That's

12:49SPEAKERthe unique idea of that device that has that IP. There's only one of those with that combination

12:55SPEAKERof four octets. Right. Maybe to put this in a little more real-world context for people that

13:00SPEAKERaren't as familiar, this is the 192.168.1.blank in your internal... Exactly. And we're talking

13:06SPEAKERabout the dot blank. IP range. Yeah. So that is like your home street address. That's saying,

13:11SPEAKER"I live at 123 Elm Street." That's the 123. The next one is one layer up. So in that point,

13:18SPEAKERthere's two 8-digit numbers. It's 256 times 256 potential... Well, no, it's 254 times 254

13:26SPEAKERpotential computers in that range, devices in that range. And that one is doing... That's your

13:33SPEAKERneighborhood. That's your street, maybe. Right? What are the actual terms? Is that the subnet?

13:37SPEAKEROr is it... No, so the subnet... Subnet the whole thing. The subnet is defined by the subnet mask.

13:41SPEAKEROkay. So... Yeah, which is the /24, for example, at the end. Yeah, or the 255.255.255.0. That's

13:50SPEAKERthe other thing, as I was gonna say, to make this even more goddamn confusing. There are multiple

13:53SPEAKERways of representing it. Well, but the thing... Because 255.255.255.0... Yeah, is the same as /24.

14:00SPEAKERAnd IP.0/24 are the same thing. Pretty much, yeah. Those are different ways of representing

14:04SPEAKERthe same subnet mask. I think so. I'm pretty sure. The /24 is... I think it's /32 if it's

14:09SPEAKERgonna be the same as 0. So the point is, all the subnet mask does is tells a computer that's on

14:15SPEAKERthat device, on that thing, where the router is. Okay. So it's saying, "Hey, everything..."

14:21SPEAKERLet's take a step further back. When a computer on a subnet, on a network, say, you have 20

14:28SPEAKERdifferent devices plugged into your machine at home here, right? And if you have one device that's

14:33SPEAKERusing a lot of bandwidth, say your computer's hooked up to Steam, and it's pulling a lot of

14:36SPEAKERstuff down from the internet, or you have a big video file and you wanna share it to another

14:40SPEAKERcomputer on the network, those packets, for the most part, for everything that's behind the same

14:45SPEAKERrouter, all of the machines on that network that are turned on are gonna see the packets

14:50SPEAKERfor that transmission. When you copy a file over, it's gonna blast it out to every computer on that

14:55SPEAKERnode, and then it's gonna say, "The one that's supposed to get it is the only one that's gonna

14:59SPEAKERpay attention to them." So if you have a network where there's like three people that are just

15:05SPEAKERdoing a little bit of email and three people that are doing a shitload of huge file transfers,

15:10SPEAKERyou maybe don't wanna have all those people on the same network 'cause they're gonna absorb all

15:13SPEAKERthe bandwidth between the router and that node of the network can provide. So what you do is you

15:20SPEAKERsay, "Okay, we're gonna put the three people that hardly use the internet on one router,

15:23SPEAKERand they're gonna have a different router than the computers." And the router, in this case,

15:27SPEAKERis like a traffic cop. Are we talking physical routers? We're talking physical routers. Or you

15:31SPEAKERcan do a virtualized. Look, you can do a virtualized with a high-end... Those are VLANs,

15:35SPEAKERright? Kind of, but then you have to run some special software on the computers and it gets

15:39SPEAKERa little more... That's complicated, Brad. Sorry, there's a lot. No, no, no. It's a lot.

15:47SPEAKERLook, we're talking about a thing that is connected literally billions of devices around

15:50SPEAKERthe world all to each other. I have spent an insane, embarrassing amount of time tinkering

15:55SPEAKERwith computers in the last 25 years, and I will still say that networking in all its various

15:59SPEAKERincarnations is still the most... It's complicated. Mystical, arcane... Sometimes it just works.

16:05SPEAKERInsanity of all of it. Like, I have a FreeNAS server at home, and on some of my computers,

16:10SPEAKERit shows up in the network browser. Some of them it doesn't. I'm in the same situation. No idea why.

16:15SPEAKERI've got a couple of ideas why that might be. Yeah, I've read a lot of man pages. I have some

16:20SPEAKERthings to do with what version of SMB you've got installed. Oh, interesting. Okay. There's

16:24SPEAKERsome network discovery stuff. We can... Yeah, let's take that one offline. But yeah, so then...

16:31SPEAKEROkay, subnet mask is saying, hey, all the computers that are in this IP range, and by

16:35SPEAKERrange, I mean, if it's 255, 255, 2550, what it's saying is all of the computers that are the same

16:42SPEAKERthree, first three numbers and different blast numbers are on the same node. Okay. They're all

16:48SPEAKERconnected to each other. They're all going to see each other's traffic. They're buddies. They're

16:51SPEAKERcool, right? If you want to increase that from 255 computers to 512 computers or 254 computers to

16:59SPEAKER510 computers or 508 computers, then you make it 255, 255, 2540. So that's saying, hey, we're

17:08SPEAKERadding one more range to the... We're adding another group of 254 numbers to this particular

17:16SPEAKERnode and all of those computers on that same node share one router. Okay. So they're going to all

17:21SPEAKERconnect to the same router, which will typically be like 192.168.1.1 versus 192.168.1.55 for your

17:30SPEAKERpersonal computer on that device. Is this making sense? Oh yeah, yeah, no. I pretty much got all

17:34SPEAKERthat stuff down. Yeah. But can devices where... I guess the background that I'm lacking here is

17:41SPEAKERknowing exactly what each of those four numbers means. So they don't need anything. Well, the

17:45SPEAKERthird number... I'm trying to think how to put this. I had been under the impression that devices

17:50SPEAKERwhere the first two numbers were the same but the third differs can still talk to each other on the

17:55SPEAKERsame physical land. Is that correct? They all can. If theoretically we only had one router on the

18:00SPEAKERwhole internet and it was at 1.1.1.1, then every other device would be able to speak to that thing

18:06SPEAKERand they'd all see each other. It wouldn't work for obvious reasons because a billion computers

18:10SPEAKERwould be talking to each other. But probably at some point in 1972, that's the way the internet

18:14SPEAKERworked. So the thing that determines whether computers can talk directly to each other is

18:19SPEAKERwhether they're on the same node, same subnet of a network. And the size of the subnet is variable

18:25SPEAKERbased on your use cases. If you're talking about a bunch of just text terminals, you could probably

18:32SPEAKERput 10,000 machines on one node and it's not going to be a problem. I think part of why I'm getting

18:36SPEAKERconfused is that I have a fairly high-end router that's got two discrete LAN ports on it that can

18:42SPEAKERbe mapped to different subnets. And they can talk to each other, but I think there's some

18:46SPEAKERkind of bridging going on at that point. So that means your router is serving either as a bridge

18:50SPEAKERor it's partitioning off and it's basically serving as two separate routers that just have

18:55SPEAKERa defined routing path to each other. I think that's kind of the case. So that's sort of

18:57SPEAKERconfusing the issue for me because I have a box that can do that. Well, we should talk about

19:02SPEAKERrouters. So most people probably think of routers as that blue and gray Linksys box that's been the

19:07SPEAKERtop of your closet for the last 10 years. Well, that was the case. I feel like mostly now when

19:12SPEAKERpeople think of routers, they think of like the crown of Sauron. You think so? Yeah, this god

19:16SPEAKERawful ugly that's like... Oh, it's got like weird horns and stuff on it? Onyx, Obelisk, with

19:22SPEAKERterrifying horns coming out of every side. Don't buy gaming routers! That seems to be the bulk of

19:27SPEAKERthe expensive consumer routers that are being sold these days. I think the mesh routers are actually

19:32SPEAKERwhere the money is. Yeah, that seems to be the case. It seems like everybody is getting into the

19:36SPEAKERlike sleek sort of Apple-esque looking... Like having bought those? Featureless white boxes with

19:42SPEAKERpretty blue glowing lights. They work really well. Yeah, especially if you don't have wired

19:46SPEAKEREthernet in your house. They work... Like what are some of the popular... There's Google Home makes

19:53SPEAKERWi-Fi routers. You can buy like a three-pack for a couple hundred bucks. Yeah, Eero is owned by

20:00SPEAKERAmazon. They were a startup in San Francisco and got bought a couple years ago. And then Netgear

20:05SPEAKERmakes one called OB or something like that. Orbi. I've seen that one. And then Ubiquiti. I've got an

20:10SPEAKERedge router for, but Ubiquiti is getting into that space now. They were more consumer. I mean...

20:14SPEAKERThey're like pro. They're more enterprise level, but they've got a whole line of the kind of

20:19SPEAKERfriendly, rounded, nice-looking mesh stuff. And those things work. This is an aside,

20:25SPEAKERbut those things work because Wi-Fi radios got cheap enough that they're able to put...

20:28SPEAKERLike it used to be when you had a mesh, like a non-wired range extender, it would have one

20:33SPEAKERWi-Fi radio and would just time slice it. So it would automatically start out at half the

20:37SPEAKERperformance of a wired-in router. Because it would like take half of the radio time to connect to the

20:43SPEAKERmain router and half of the radio time to connect to the clients. So like the more stuff you

20:47SPEAKERconnected, the slower it got. Because everything is waiting its turn? Yeah, because everything has

20:51SPEAKERto wait its turn. Now they just put two or three radios in those things. Okay, so you can kind of

20:55SPEAKERleapfrog the traffic? One is always connected to the router and one is connected to the other

21:00SPEAKERdevices. But yeah, so the router is the key to this whole thing. The router is what makes the

21:05SPEAKERinternet work. The router is basically a traffic cop, and each time you connect to a different

21:10SPEAKERnetwork, all the way up to like the main backbone chains of the internet that are massive, huge

21:17SPEAKERbundles of fiber that just go all around the world, your router knows how to talk to each of

21:23SPEAKERthem. And it's kind of encoded in the IP address. Right, that's the whole point of CCP/IP, right?

21:27SPEAKERYeah exactly, is that like... So is it, well not to derail this further, but I mean the whole point

21:32SPEAKERis it's kind of a self-propagating decentralized thing, because my understanding is that it was

21:37SPEAKERconceived as a style of network that could withstand nuclear attack. Well and... Like isn't

21:42SPEAKERthat where the ARPA or the DARPA origins began? It's unclear to me whether that's actually a true

21:49SPEAKERstatement. That's what I always heard, was like it needs to be so decentralized that no one location

21:53SPEAKERor node being knocked out can take the whole thing down. Well but even more important, like they need

21:58SPEAKERto be backhoe proof. Like the thing we've learned over the years about the internet is that backhoes...

22:02SPEAKERThat's maybe a little more of a likely scenario. Yeah backhoes, some jackass with a backhoe can

22:06SPEAKERkill way more internet than all the nukes that we've ever seen. And yeah, the point is that the

22:12SPEAKERrouter says okay, I know you have a packet, and your packet starts at 192.168.1.1, which is a

22:19SPEAKERprivate address inside your network, and your public IP address is 212.69.420, well not 420,

22:27SPEAKERbut 42.10, right? And it's like okay, I'm at .10, to get to the router I need to go to .1 on this

22:34SPEAKERsubnet. And then that router says okay, let's see, you want to send this to 1.2.3.4, let's see,

22:40SPEAKERthe route to 1.1 is up through here. And if it'll send the packet out, and if it doesn't get a

22:47SPEAKERresponse that says hey the packet made it, then it'll say oh well we should try the other route,

22:51SPEAKERbecause that one something's broken with that one, and it'll send it. Instead of going through

22:54SPEAKERCleveland, it'll go through Cincinnati, and then it gets there just the same. And so kind of the

22:59SPEAKERway it works is that it cascades up that IP address until it gets to the biggest number that's in

23:03SPEAKERcommon, right? And then it goes back down the other side. It's kind of like walking upstairs

23:11SPEAKERto the top of a hill, and then you get to the top of the hill, and there's 254 other staircases that

23:16SPEAKERgo down, and it goes down the one that it wants, and then there's 254 staircases in the next one,

23:20SPEAKERit goes down to the next one, and so on and so forth. And that's a gross oversimplification,

23:24SPEAKERjust to be clear, but in theory that's what happens on the moment. And if you haven't ever

23:30SPEAKERseen this in action before and you want to, you can pull up a command line on just about any

23:34SPEAKERmachine in existence at this point. It doesn't, no Windows doesn't have it anymore. Does Windows

23:37SPEAKERnot have traceroute anymore? Are you serious? No. What? I don't think so. It doesn't have

23:41SPEAKERNSLookup, it might still have traceroute. I think it does have NSLookup. It does, you have to

23:45SPEAKERinstall it from the optional stuff now. It has to be a POSIX. Some extra, like the Sigwin stuff from

23:52SPEAKERway back in the days. A POSIX compliancy. God, I could have sworn it. Windows 10. You can definitely

23:57SPEAKERping stuff, but that's not the same thing. Ping is always there. I could have sworn, okay, well,

24:01SPEAKERfind a MacBook or a Unix machine. Yeah, or just shell into your VAX account. Yeah, anything that

24:05SPEAKERhas traceroute on it, you can just traceroute to like... There's a web tool. Yeah, you can do that

24:10SPEAKERtoo. That's not as cool as watching an actual terminal window. Well, but what it does is it

24:13SPEAKERshows you all those, each of those stops is a router. You'll watch every hop that it goes

24:17SPEAKERthrough to get to its destination. Exactly, and in the old days... And you can eyeball some of the

24:22SPEAKERnamed IPs to kind of get a sense of like who owns them or where they are or, you know,

24:27SPEAKERa bunch of fun stuff like that. Well, and that stuff comes into play, like remember a few years

24:31SPEAKERago when Netflix got bad on Comcast? Like your Netflix connection, your videos look bad all of a

24:35SPEAKERsudden? Well, it's because they stopped having a peering relationship with whoever... Comcast and

24:40SPEAKERNetflix's host, which I guess is Amazon, stopped having a peering relationship with each other. So

24:44SPEAKERthat meant that they were no longer... They did not want to give free access to their networks.

24:50SPEAKERThere was a point in between those two places where free access to the networks was

24:54SPEAKERdelayed. So instead of going on the fast route, they had to go all the way around.

24:59SPEAKERWas that because of like, say, business politics, not because of... It was because

25:03SPEAKERComcast wanted to gouge Netflix for money. Right, like it was intentional. Yeah,

25:06SPEAKERthat was an intentional... Routing can be political, it turns out.

25:11SPEAKERNow, there's other things. When we talk about like edge of network and center of network,

25:17SPEAKERlike center of network are like the big backbones run by AT&T and like giant telecoms, right? And

25:22SPEAKERthey're huge, huge pipes that go all over the world. There's cables that run from like

25:26SPEAKERPerth to Singapore and New York to London and all over the place.

25:32SPEAKERWell, go ahead. I finished your thought. I just wanted to talk about undersea cables.

25:34SPEAKERWell, I was also going to say, one of the things that makes downloads really fast are edge networks.

25:41SPEAKERSo like Akamai is the famous one. They did this before anybody else did.

25:45SPEAKERBut everybody has... Amazon has them now. They put data centers around the world. And what that is,

25:49SPEAKERis literally a device that's connected into the like the ISP, the local ISP endpoints for your

25:55SPEAKERregion. And so you can get really, really high speeds because they're not actually going across

26:00SPEAKERthe main... Right. They're kind of mirroring or replicating things that you need quickly in multiple

26:05SPEAKERlocations. Yeah. And like when we were at Tested, we use those for podcasts and stuff like that.

26:10SPEAKERIf you watch YouTube, those videos are very early on stored locally, but really go out to the CDN

26:16SPEAKERstuff at the edges of the network really quickly. You see a lot of that stuff now with like the

26:20SPEAKERGoogle Stadia and Microsoft XCloud stuff ramping up. Like they've got to have a lot of like

26:25SPEAKERhardware close to you physically for that stuff to make sense. And the interesting thing that's

26:29SPEAKERhappened in the last few years is that has moved from just storage, which is what it used to be,

26:34SPEAKERto now it's storage and compute. So that's why Stadia works. And that's why Microsoft's upcoming

26:40SPEAKERgame streaming service and all those things. That's why they all work. Where are all these

26:43SPEAKERdata centers? All over the place. Are they just buying up like old like rural like farmland that's

26:48SPEAKERnot being used and building gigantic warehouses full of air conditioning? So there's two things

26:52SPEAKERyou need for a data center. You need space, you need cheap power, and you need a temperate climate

26:57SPEAKERor access to cool water. Because you need a ton of cooling. So a lot of them are like on the

27:02SPEAKERColumbia River in Oregon. A lot of them are places where there's cheap solar power or cheap wind power

27:08SPEAKERor cheap hydro power. A lot of them are in like old office buildings. I feel like using natural

27:16SPEAKERbodies of water for cooling is a little questionable. Oh, it's probably going to be fine. I wouldn't

27:19SPEAKERworry about it. Look, there's just a little bit of heat going into those rivers. It's not going

27:23SPEAKERto be immediate. Well, if it's a river, it's probably less of a problem. But like I don't know if any lakes are in use.

27:27SPEAKERThose ecosystems are probably really robust. They're going to be... But look, the

27:31SPEAKERwater is going to be a couple degrees warmer in a few years anyway. The image that came to mind

27:34SPEAKERis a gigantic data center next to a lake with a bunch of dead fish floating in it. Look, what's

27:38SPEAKERgoing to happen to power everybody's cloud-based gaming? And that's maybe the most like dystopian

27:42SPEAKERcyberpunk vision. I think it could be good for the salmon. Think that maybe if the water is a little

27:46SPEAKERbit warmer, they'll be extra horny when they get to the end. And there's going to be a lot more salmon

27:51SPEAKERat the end. It could be a real boon for the environment. It's probably fine. I'm sure

27:55SPEAKERsomebody's thought about this, Brad. Real fast undersea cables? Yeah. You ever seen one? I saw

28:00SPEAKERthat bit in Iron Man where he is under the water and he's lasering the cable. Is it big? It was thick.

28:05SPEAKERI just want to know like... Two Cs. Thick. Oh, two Cs. Thick. Oh, that kind of thick. See, I told you I'm not

28:12SPEAKERthat online. This was an extremely online podcast. No, not if I can help it. Yeah, I don't know.

28:18SPEAKERWhatever. That's just a little side topic, but I've always been curious about like what hardiness,

28:24SPEAKERwhat level of robustness you need in a cable that literally spans the ocean. They're armored.

28:28SPEAKERLike they have Kevlar armor around the edges of them and stuff like. If you want to go down a

28:34SPEAKERWikipedia hole sometime, look up undersea cable laying ships. It's fascinating. Wow. Yes, okay.

28:40SPEAKERLike special ships. I will do that right after. That sounds... Yes. Yeah. We should, if anybody's

28:44SPEAKERlistening and knows about this, we would love to have you on to guess. I would like to talk about

28:48SPEAKERthis. Or if you can get us out on the, on the water to... I'm okay not doing that. It's a long

28:53SPEAKERtrip. Or even, I'm even just curious like kind of what the capacity is in terms of data, but also

28:58SPEAKERwhat the size of the actual, like are they fiber? I assume they're fiber at this point. Yeah. I can't

29:02SPEAKERthink of a cable, like how much... They're big. They're thousands and thousands and thousands of

29:07SPEAKERfibers. Like, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that's a side topic, but it blows my mind that you can

29:14SPEAKERlike run a piece of glass. Yeah. We can introduce a, like a data vessel into an environment that

29:20SPEAKERinhospitable and have it work. Yeah. Consistently. Yeah. Because I mean... Until the Russians tap in.

29:26SPEAKERThose, you know, that's miles underneath the water. Like imagine the pressures, the depth

29:29SPEAKERand stuff. Yeah, but the glass doesn't compress. It's fine. It's a Glomar Explorer is what you need

29:34SPEAKERto pull that thing. Yeah. We, we should, I seriously would, I'd love to talk about that if we, but I

29:38SPEAKERdon't know anything about that stuff and it's always been fascinating to me. Yeah. So yeah,

29:42SPEAKERthat's, that's how the internet works. It's really straightforward. I think we're about wrapped up

29:46SPEAKERhere. It's everything there is to know. All your questions answered. God, I could sit here asking

29:51SPEAKERquestions for hours probably. What is there? Like I almost brought up Nat at one point because I know

29:58SPEAKERthat's kind of the thing. Oh, so Nat's easy to explain. I know what it is, but it's more...

30:05SPEAKERI guess the problem with all of this is that in any one case, the basic concept is easy to explain,

30:11SPEAKERbut there are so many details and esoteric behaviors around it that actually understand,

30:15SPEAKERlike for instance, like explaining like it's network address translation. Yeah. It's basically

30:20SPEAKERthe thing that takes the traffic from outside the router and translates it to which device it needs

30:25SPEAKERto go to behind the router. Remember when you had a, like you had your Discman and like you were

30:30SPEAKERgoing on a field trip with a girl and you would, you would take your splitter, your headphone splitter

30:35SPEAKERand plug that into the Discman so you both listen to the same music on the long bus ride? No. Yeah,

30:40SPEAKERit's just like that. That's all Nat does. Okay. It's that simple. Well, the reason I bring it up

30:43SPEAKERis that like then there are type A and type B Nats. There's like open, you know, open Nats,

30:49SPEAKERmoderate Nats. Promiscuous Nats. You want a promiscuous Nat. That's what I mean. There are

30:53SPEAKERso many, there are so many variations on every single one of these things that actually having

30:57SPEAKERa good understanding is a lot to take on. So the Nat situation, Nats are really important.

31:05SPEAKERNats are good. They help us secure our local networks because like, I don't know about you,

31:09SPEAKERI'm bad about updating all of the stuff in my personal network. Yeah. Well, even, even if you're

31:13SPEAKERgood about updating it, you just don't want all that stuff exposed. Yeah. Like having a raw,

31:17SPEAKERraw dog internet address for all your devices is ill-advised. After, after we come back from the

31:22SPEAKERbreak, ask me about the time that I set up Nginx. Oh boy. On, on my server and opened a port to it

31:29SPEAKERfor like a week or so. My COVID. I should show you the access log and all of the terrifying IPs

31:35SPEAKERthat we're probing it constantly. My, my, when I had the COVID SDSL, I ran in a windows NT server

31:42SPEAKERthat I just raw dogged out on the internet. And about two weeks after I did that, I got an email

31:47SPEAKERfrom the ISP that was like, Hey, we're turning off your internet until you take the server offline,

31:51SPEAKERbecause it's, it's bad. Don't do that. It's all infected and shit. And I just had to wipe it. I

31:56SPEAKERlike, I was like, I was like, take the hard drives out in the backyard and ax them. It was bad.

32:01SPEAKERWell, mistakes were made now. It's rough out there. It's scary. Yeah. Should we talk? We

32:05SPEAKERhaven't talked about IPv6 at all. No, I was kind of putting that off. Yeah. It's a big number.

32:11SPEAKERIt's scary. I think we should, I think we should definitely take a break before that. Okay. I need

32:15SPEAKERa drink of water before we get into that. Those addresses are gigantic. So many digits.

32:27SPEAKERI have questions about your router. Okay. I will do my best to answer you.

32:33SPEAKERIt's a, it is a, it's a complicated piece of kit. Okay. Why didn't you just buy a net gear?

32:39SPEAKERUm, well, I was on a crappy old ACES for a while. Well, it was the, it was the N66U.

32:46SPEAKERIt was actually at the time when it came out, it was great. It was like the, that was a workhorse.

32:51SPEAKERWere you running like DDWRT on? Yeah. I ran tomato USB on it for a while. And then I actually

32:56SPEAKERwent to, I went to Merlin. Oh, it's bold, bold choice. What's based on the, it's like a lot of

33:01SPEAKERthe DDWRT features, but with the core of the ACES stuff, do you really want to get into this? Well,

33:08SPEAKERI guess this, we created this podcast to get into this. Yeah. Like I, so the reason that I stopped

33:13SPEAKERusing tomato on that router was because, um, tomato did not expose the hardware accelerated NAT on

33:19SPEAKERthat router. So when I got fiber, yeah, it wasn't enough. Ran a speed test. I was like, why am I

33:25SPEAKERgetting like 160 megabit on this fiber connection? Okay. So this is, I dug into it and I was like,

33:29SPEAKERoh God, my custom firmware on this router is not allowing me to get the full speed on the WAN port

33:33SPEAKERon this router that I can now enjoy with my fiber. This is funny because you and I had the exact same

33:37SPEAKERproblem. We went completely different directions with it. So, cause I, I got, um, I had a DDWRT

33:44SPEAKERrouter running when I got the fiber and I did the speed test and I was like 800 megabits. I was like,

33:49SPEAKERwhy the fuck is it the same? Where's my gigabit? So they came out and they tested it, did the line

33:53SPEAKERtest the whole thing. Oh, you actually got people out? Oh yeah. I'm a real ass. See, I'm proud

33:57SPEAKERbecause I at least managed to. Well, my, mine, if mine had been 160, I would have known, but at 800

34:02SPEAKERI was like, this is close enough. When you're that high, it's just like, okay, there's something on

34:06SPEAKERthere. What the hell? Yeah. So I did the test and I was like, oh shit. He came out, he tested the

34:13SPEAKERline. It was fine. I plugged into the router directly. The AT&T provided a router directly.

34:18SPEAKERIt was fine. To be fair, 800 is still pretty good. I was fine. I would have been fine. Yeah.

34:22SPEAKERLike most, most services are not, well, actually I'm starting to see more.

34:26SPEAKERPeople are starting to advertise the actual number. More, more heavy download services like game,

34:29SPEAKERgame clients are actually starting to just about max out that connection now. Origin will max it

34:34SPEAKERout. Epic will match it out, max it out. Steam has gotten, just in the last two, three months has

34:39SPEAKERgotten way faster for me. Like steam would top out about 60 megosecond before, and it's pushing 80,

34:44SPEAKER90. I had 110 the other day, which I didn't think my connection was capable of. That's about the

34:49SPEAKERmax. Near theoretical maximum. That's just about the actual gigabit. Well, so anyway,

34:52SPEAKERI went to the store. I went to Best Buy that afternoon and just bought a Google home router,

34:56SPEAKERlike the, whatever's there. I was like, this is what they give to the Google fiber people,

35:00SPEAKERright? This'll work. And it did. And it was great. To be, to be clear that Merlin firmware,

35:06SPEAKERwhich is based on the actual ACES. So they're using the ACES kernel and core putting UI on

35:11SPEAKERtop of it. Even though most of that stuff is closed source, I think they're still able to

35:14SPEAKERbuild on it. Anyway, that, that got me the majority of the gigabit. Okay. But I was having

35:19SPEAKERother issues with network performance and with a whole other rabbit hole to go down, but I was,

35:25SPEAKERI was trying to get about some, some multicast stuff working, some discovery, if you're familiar

35:29SPEAKERwith that stuff, like MDNS. Yeah. So you can, so you can, I basically got a bunch of weird shit

35:34SPEAKERrunning on my FreeNAS box. Okay. Yeah. This is, we'll talk about NASA's FreeNAS later. That's

35:40SPEAKERlike probably a whole separate, separate thing. I basically, because I am old and want to keep a

35:47SPEAKERlocal music collection. So you're so much older than I am. I want to, I want to have all of the

35:51SPEAKERlocal Apple-esque kind of airplane stuff, but, but without having to run subsonic without having

35:57SPEAKERto run a Mac mini or, or a Mac book plugged in somewhere all the time. So you got that subsonic.

36:02SPEAKERNo, actually I'm using, there's a little open source. I don't even know what the protocol is.

36:08SPEAKERIt's whatever, it's whatever like an iTunes home server is. It's, I believe the audio protocol is

36:15SPEAKERD-A-A-P. Yeah, that sounds right. So it's that, it's, it's, there's, it's just a guy. It's what

36:21SPEAKERbecame AirPlay eventually, right? AirPlay is built on it. Yeah. Anyway, it's, it's just an open

36:25SPEAKERsource server. It's on GitHub. It's the, it has the, you have to, you have to package that up,

36:31SPEAKERyou get a package. It has the incredibly catchy name of forked D-A-A-P-D. Oh yeah. Sounds good.

36:36SPEAKERYeah. Like I had to like get it compiled and running on my machine. It's mostly developed

36:42SPEAKERfor Linux, but, and this is free BSD we're talking about, but anyway, why am I rambling

36:45SPEAKERabout this again? Oh, I was trying to like, basically I was having a bunch of issues with

36:49SPEAKERlike devices, not being able to discover each other on the network. One of the things that's

36:52SPEAKERreally frustrating is that like, if your router doesn't support the right stuff, then there's no

36:57SPEAKERamount of you fixing it on the PCs. So that's exactly, that is, you just like nailed exactly

37:01SPEAKERwhy I ended up going out and getting this kind of prosumer, almost enterprise grade router was,

37:06SPEAKERbut I started looking into it because like multicast like zero conf Bonjour or whatever

37:11SPEAKERyou call it, like it's supposed to be a way to just get devices to see each other that support

37:14SPEAKERthat protocol. Yeah. So, so, um, the idea is that they can send out a packet that says, Hey, here's

37:20SPEAKERwhat I'm able to do. And then everybody else listens to that packet and they send back, Hey,

37:23SPEAKERwhat I'm able to do. It's how, it's how automatic, uh, network printer discovery works now. Yeah. So

37:29SPEAKERit's exactly what you said. I started looking into like the various idiosyncrasies of different

37:33SPEAKERconsumer routers and it was exactly that it was like, Oh, this manufacturer didn't quite implement

37:38SPEAKERthe protocol properly. So like, there's just nothing you can do to make it work right on

37:42SPEAKERyour network. If you're using, well, if you're using their router and I was just like, I'm just

37:46SPEAKERgoing to get the most ITS like hardcore real router with a command line that I can. It's like,

37:52SPEAKERthere's something to be said for that because like, if you look at consumer router space,

37:56SPEAKERthose are designed to be good for like two years and then a new version of the spec will be out

37:59SPEAKERand people are supposed to just upgrade and throw the old one out. Right. And wifi has slowed way

38:04SPEAKERdown in the last 10 years. So instead of having new wifi's every two years, we can about every

38:07SPEAKERfour or five now. And, and like the, the access point router you bought is basically the thing

38:14SPEAKERthat would be in like a conference center where 300, like you could connect 300 people to your

38:18SPEAKERwifi here. I saw like reading, researching this thing. I saw somebody who runs a small local ISP

38:23SPEAKERsaid that they tried just on a lark. They tried using it to route their entire ISP and that it

38:29SPEAKERworked fine. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. It's like a small town. Yeah. But yeah,

38:35SPEAKERlike I just wanted something as extensible and flexible and powerful as I could get one.

38:39SPEAKERThey probably continue to support and add new stuff to it. Totally. They will, they will,

38:42SPEAKERwhich it runs Linux. Like it just runs a stripped down network. Can you log into it and like

38:48SPEAKERdownload stuff from totally. I, I spent a shitload of time at the command line. I got set up a VPN

38:52SPEAKERon it. Like I can VPN to it from anywhere now. That's bonkers. I, it has multiple DHCP servers

38:58SPEAKERon it. I'd, I'd SSH into it and changed which TSC DHCP server it was running. Do you have

39:04SPEAKERdynamic DNS clients? Yeah. It's also got multiple dynamic DNS. So I've got all that stuff. Yeah.

39:10SPEAKERIt's funny. I run a free NAS server to do that. A lot of that stuff. So a lot of that is just built

39:14SPEAKERinto my router. That's funny. So like I changed to a, it's got DNS mask on it. Okay. So I changed

39:20SPEAKERto that as my DHCP server because, um, the, the, the bonus there is that anytime it assigns an IP

39:28SPEAKERto anything, cause it's also the DHCP server. It also maps the host name of that device to you.

39:35SPEAKEROkay. Yeah. Let's see. That's the thing that most routers are really bad at. Right. So like I said,

39:40SPEAKERI just set a domain of dot land on my router and now any device on my network, if I need to like

39:45SPEAKERping it or SSH to it or whatever, I just type whatever the host name is dot land to get to it.

39:50SPEAKERSo I don't have to memorize IP or look up IPs for devices on my network anymore. Like it's amazing.

39:54SPEAKERSee, I do. If you're, if you're like me and you're plugging like random raspberry pies headless into

39:59SPEAKERyour network. Yeah. Who doesn't do that? Like perfectly normal thing. You know, like if you

40:03SPEAKERwant to be able to get to devices on your network and do things with them, it's really helpful to

40:07SPEAKERnot have to like know what the IPs are. I'm picturing you with a much bigger neck beer.

40:10SPEAKERTotally. Like I, fuck my destiny is to become a, like I I've been reading up on like history of

40:17SPEAKERUnix stuff a lot lately. I'm just fascinated with, I want to be a gray beard. All I've ever

40:22SPEAKERwanted. All I've ever wanted in my entire life is to be a great beard, but not the bad kind.

40:28SPEAKERNo, no, no. The good. Yeah. With not no stallman. Yes. No. Yeah. So, so I went the complete opposite

40:35SPEAKERway and I have an app that configures mine and it just works. Yeah. I can, I can totally save you.

40:41SPEAKERBut again, like the thing that you said is exactly it. When I hit something that it can't do. Yeah.

40:45SPEAKERI'm just boned. There's nothing I can do about it. So this is the like absolute one 80 reverse

40:50SPEAKERphilosophical approach, which is this thing does absolutely nothing that you don't tell it to do

40:55SPEAKERout of the box. Like it doesn't even have a DHCP server enabled by default. That's bananas. So to

41:00SPEAKERuse it at all, you have to plug it directly into your PC and then manually configure an IP address

41:04SPEAKERto even access it. How did you have to, you have to use a Sierra cup so you can use just an ethernet

41:08SPEAKERcable to do that. Okay. Um, and then you have to go into it to do it on a manually. Um, but I did

41:15SPEAKERbuy a serial to USB cable just in the event I had it. I had it become completely joking. No, no,

41:21SPEAKERI'm serious. I still don't know why, but like a month into having it, it's something on it crashed.

41:26SPEAKERI think, well, that is your insurance. Like if something goes real bad sideways, it may have been,

41:31SPEAKERI don't know what crashed on it, but it became completely inaccessible. Um, and all I could do

41:36SPEAKERwas factory reset it. Yeah. Uh, because I couldn't get to it from my PC. And then I was like, wait a

41:42SPEAKERminute. If I, it has a serial port on it. Yeah. So I was like, wait a minute. If I had a serial port,

41:46SPEAKERI could have just at least gotten into the router and fixed it without having to reset it.

41:50SPEAKERSo I have a serial jealous now. I know like it's, it's a nightmare rabbit hole to go down. If you

41:57SPEAKERdon't want to deal with it, but if you do, it's like the most fun thing ever. Can I borrow your

42:00SPEAKERUSB to serial cable, man? Um, it's pretty good. So we were talking about wifi a little bit during

42:07SPEAKERthe break. Yeah. Yeah. That's another thing I was, I flagged to, uh, it's about the things

42:14SPEAKERspecifically that I mentioned at some point. Well, at some point we should talk about wifi as a,

42:17SPEAKERlike it's worth a whole episode. It's completely like there's wifi six is coming soon. I think you

42:22SPEAKERcan even buy hardware now that's like hardware compliant, but probably the software is not ready

42:26SPEAKERyet. Um, I haven't, I haven't, I haven't looked at that at all, but that seems like where we're at.

42:31SPEAKERUm, it's, it's, uh, wifi is fascinating. Cause I grew up with like, I started why

42:38SPEAKERwireless internet was a thing that I, when I was at Ars Technica in 99, I reviewed a diamond

42:46SPEAKERkit that had basically a PCMCIA card that worked in a laptop and a PCI probably card,

42:55SPEAKERmaybe an ISA card, but probably a PCI card that plugged into a desktop. And that would let you

42:59SPEAKERconnect those two things wirelessly and use kind of standard. It wasn't a standard. It was just

43:03SPEAKERsome bullshit that they'd licensed from somebody in China. And because that's what I'm like,

43:08SPEAKERjust to be real, that's what diamond did. They would like license, they licensed 3d

43:12SPEAKERFX card chips and then built cards on them. They licensed Arielle sound accelerator, DSP software,

43:19SPEAKERbuilt sound cards on that. And then they did a bunch of other weird stuff like, you know,

43:23SPEAKERpackage up a MP3 player with a, yeah, I've got it. I've got an old diamond Rio and a PNP 300,

43:30SPEAKERthe classic black one. I got it at a yard sale. It was given to me at a yard sale for free.

43:34SPEAKERAnd I don't think I've ever actually used it. When I cleaned the garage and got rid of all

43:37SPEAKERthe tech stuff, that one is the one, one of the things that I kept. Cause I was like, this is,

43:40SPEAKERthis was the first MP3 player. It's a piece of history. He used a smart media card. You could

43:43SPEAKERhold a whole CD on there and you could run and it didn't skip. It didn't scratch the anyway. So, so

43:48SPEAKERlate nineties, late nineties, 99. When did, when did you see the actual first wifi like the stamp,

43:54SPEAKERlike 802.11 stuff? One of the very first things I wrote when I came on staff at max PC in 2000 and

43:59SPEAKERlike June or July of 2000, the October 2000 cover story, which is what we were working on when I

44:05SPEAKERstarted in the summertime was about wireless. And for that, we got an Orinoco, which was a

44:11SPEAKERsubdivision of loosened, which was one of the people that did the standard. Yeah. They got

44:16SPEAKERbought by somebody at some point along the way. I can't remember three comm or somebody probably

44:18SPEAKERCisco. Yeah. Um, they had sent us an 802.11 B the first, you know, the first wifi standard

44:26SPEAKERrouter, uh, or maybe, maybe even just been an access point. It may not have been, it was a

44:30SPEAKERrouter, but it didn't have any ethernet ports. And then we had a couple of PCMCIA cards so we could

44:34SPEAKERtest it out. And like at that point, it's funny, it's hard to say whether laptops took off because

44:41SPEAKERof wifi or wifi took off because laptops got big because they both happened at the same time.

44:46SPEAKERTo step back real fast. The thing we talked about during the break, the reason I wanted to discuss

44:50SPEAKERthis is that the way I would put it is I obviously I remember the time before wifi and obviously I'm

44:57SPEAKERfamiliar with the time after it because it's ubiquitous now, but I don't have any memory of

45:01SPEAKERthat transition because wifi still even to this day feels a little bit like magic or it, it feels

45:08SPEAKERlike it's just always there. Well, I guess what I actually mean is it feels like one of those things

45:12SPEAKERwhere I stop and say, I can't believe how good we have it now. So I would think, Oh, grampy Brad.

45:18SPEAKERRight. So I would think that when it first came on the scene, I would have been like, my, my hair

45:22SPEAKERwould have blown back when I saw it for the first time, but I just have no memory of like seeing

45:26SPEAKERwifi for the first time, like having it become part of your, your daily tech existence. Like,

45:30SPEAKERI don't remember that transition, that inflection point at all. So for me, um, we had wifi stuff

45:36SPEAKERaround, but if you were using, it wasn't, it wasn't really fast enough. Like if you were playing

45:41SPEAKERgames, if you're downloading stuff, if you had a good internet connection at home, maybe it wasn't

45:45SPEAKEReight or 12 and B wasn't probably fast enough for like your data. Like it was maybe, I think,

45:50SPEAKERI think I see what you're getting at with the laptop stuff. I think it was maybe because I

45:53SPEAKERdidn't lead an existence where it was necessary. Yeah. You didn't have a laptop. Everything,

45:57SPEAKEReverything was on a PC at that time. You didn't have a laptop. You didn't have a phone. So your

46:00SPEAKERdevices were all plugged in. And then all of a sudden you got an iPhone or you got your first

46:04SPEAKERlaptop. And, and it was like Intel when Intel built baked wifi into the laptop chipsets with

46:12SPEAKERwhat was, what are they called? Centrino. Is that it? That sounds right. I'm going to look that up.

46:16SPEAKERIt's definitely a brand. That's definitely an Intel brand. Yeah. I think Centrino. I think,

46:20SPEAKERI think Centrino was basically kind of their, their mobile platform or their laptop. Well

46:25SPEAKERfeatured rich platform. Yeah. So it is, it's, it's the Y it's, I can't believe I couldn't remember

46:30SPEAKERthis. Cause it was such a ubiquitous piece of branding. For 10 years for me, it was when I

46:37SPEAKERgot a windows XP laptop. So that would have been like 2001, probably 2004. XP came out of three.

46:43SPEAKERYeah. It was early 2000s. And I had gotten Microsoft when they, so when they sent,

46:50SPEAKERwhen Microsoft sent out new versions of windows to tech plop to tech magazines,

46:54SPEAKERthey would send discs, but they usually also would send like their stock laptop. The one that was

46:58SPEAKERlike the dev, the one that, that all the developers were working before that it was a PC, but I'm

47:04SPEAKERsorry. You're right. XP was 2001. It was the SP two was what you're thinking about, which is 2003,

47:10SPEAKERprobably. So, so they, um, they sent me this compact laptop that had wifi built in

47:18SPEAKERand that early. And I was just like, Oh shit, this changes everything. Cause it like,

47:23SPEAKERit was one thing to have the laptop that had the card dangling out of the side and like,

47:27SPEAKERit wouldn't fit in your bag. It takes the card out and you only plugged it in when you needed it.

47:30SPEAKERBut when it was just always there and you could sit on the couch and watch TV and browse the

47:34SPEAKERinternet at the same time, like I hang out on Shaq news or whatever I was doing at that period

47:39SPEAKERin my life, big shout out to Shaq news for getting me started with ubiquity stuff. So much of my

47:45SPEAKERnetworking information came from Shaq news early in the day. Um, but yeah, it was, it was, it was

47:51SPEAKERthe thing that like, Oh, this is going to be a really big deal, but man, laptops still really

47:53SPEAKERsuck. And yes, absolutely. And then, and then I got a laptop that didn't have the card built in.

47:59SPEAKERI got one of those Dell XPSs. That was like the one that my office assigned me. Um, the,

48:04SPEAKERa big gaming laptop and I had to put the card back and I was like, Oh, this is, this, this is like,

48:08SPEAKERI got to get one of those Centrinos that that's the business. Right. And then sometime like 2007,

48:15SPEAKERaround the time the iPhone came out, just everything started having wifi. You were a

48:18SPEAKERhundred percent. I'm realizing this as you were explaining all this because that's,

48:22SPEAKERthat's what made it ubiquitous was like, I didn't even know or care what wifi was until I got an

48:26SPEAKERiPhone. Did, did, um, did the Xbox 360 have wifi built in or did you have to get an adapter for

48:31SPEAKERthat? I don't think the first model did. I think it had, I think you bought it like a USB adapter

48:36SPEAKERfor it. Right. The 360 S has it. Yeah. The second, the gray one, the first full redesign,

48:42SPEAKERthe black one, like the full, the shiny. Yeah. Um, I'm pretty sure that model launched within

48:47SPEAKERPS3 had wifi though. Didn't it? Yes. Yes it did. Yeah. And the, we definitely had wifi cause it

48:51SPEAKERdidn't have an ethernet port. Right. So, so yeah. Okay. You're right. It was, so it was probably

48:56SPEAKER'05, '06 to '08 ish is when it really, wifi really like blew up as a daily. Well, and at the same

49:02SPEAKERtime like netbooks were starting. So like laptops went from being like an expensive thing for

49:06SPEAKERbusiness to a thing that you could spend $300 and get a shitty laptop that had wifi built in. Right.

49:12SPEAKERAnd, and between that and the phones and the consoles and like then all the set top boxes

49:17SPEAKERhit and Roku and Apple TV and all that, everything started going from ethernet first to wifi first

49:22SPEAKERaround the time and hit because 802.11, 802.11g was okay. It was 54 megabits. And it was,

49:28SPEAKERwhich meant you got like faster than your, it was faster than your, your internet connection

49:32SPEAKERfor the first time. Cause I mean, internet connections back then were probably like what,

49:36SPEAKER10, 20, 10 or 25 megabits. Yeah. At best for a good, for a fast Comcast. Yeah. You'd,

49:42SPEAKERyou'd get 25 megabits back then. Yeah. So they would, they would get, they would get,

49:47SPEAKERyou had something that was faster than your, than your outbound internet connection. Most people

49:52SPEAKERdon't share files between computers on their home network. So it didn't matter how fast it was.

49:56SPEAKERAnd the range was enough that you could put one of those things in the middle of your house and

49:59SPEAKERcover pretty much everywhere but the edges. And then N hit and that changed the whole thing.

50:04SPEAKERLike N, N opened up, like you're talking about multiple hundred megabit speeds. It could make

50:09SPEAKERit faster if you put antennas in and, and then AC built on that. And at this point, like my wireless

50:16SPEAKERnetwork is 800 megabits a second at home or something like that. So wow. Six is going to

50:21SPEAKERdo even more than that. That's pretty good. Yeah. You should, well, what are the downsides of the

50:26SPEAKERubiquity of wifi now? I mean, I can use my phone on the toilet. Well, yeah, that's, that stuff's

50:31SPEAKERgood. But what I was going to say is that I live in an apartment here. Yeah. Like there are,

50:35SPEAKERcan I open up? I'm going to look, who knows? Are you able to do that? I can see my phone. Yeah.

50:40SPEAKERUm, Oh, I didn't know you could do that on a phone, but if I run, if I run the site scan on

50:44SPEAKERmy access point here, I can probably pick up. I don't know how many, I bet there's 200. I was

50:51SPEAKERgoing to say, I was going to say, I started to say, is it in the dozens or is it in the hundreds

50:55SPEAKERI'm of other, of other 2.4 gigahertz networks that I can pick up here? So just using my,

50:59SPEAKERit's a problem. I'm seeing probably 50. Yeah. So I would, I would guess it is probably

51:04SPEAKERat least a hundred other people's residential wifi networks that was overlapping with my apartment.

51:10SPEAKERThat was one of the things early on with wifi, when the wifi standards, people used to come out

51:14SPEAKERand talk to us when new standards were coming out and they didn't expect B to take off like it did.

51:20SPEAKERIf you think about, remember when Linksys was selling that blue router, the famous one,

51:24SPEAKERthe WRT 54G, the WRT 54G, um, that was the G one. There was a B one as well. Um, they sold that B

51:31SPEAKERone and they sold it for like a hundred bucks by the end of B and everybody fucking bought them.

51:37SPEAKERAnd, uh, and they didn't expect B to have to, like, I think when they built those standards,

51:42SPEAKERthey didn't expect those to share space with multiple access points. They didn't, you know,

51:46SPEAKERthey're only 13 channels. They couldn't like, they couldn't channel hop. They couldn't spend

51:50SPEAKERspread spectrum. They were bad at sharing time on the channels. So you could actually clog up

51:55SPEAKERthe radio waves. Um, G got a little bit better, but it was still just incremental improvement.

51:59SPEAKERIt wasn't until end hit that they were able to actually share space. Cause now like you have

52:04SPEAKER200 access points in range here probably, but shit still works. It does. Yours is your router

52:09SPEAKERis probably a little more robust than the others. Yeah. Well, so, I mean, that's not to go back to

52:13SPEAKERthat stuff too much, but that's another advantage of the high end stuff is that my, my router is a

52:17SPEAKERseparate device from my access point. So that enjoys me. Oh, I love it. Cause I can put the

52:22SPEAKERaccess point wherever I need it to be to get the best signal coverage in the house. I should do

52:27SPEAKERthat with the mesh network. Well, yeah, that's the same principle, but, um, um, you, the other

52:33SPEAKERbenefit to that is that you don't have to upgrade your router to get the new Wi-Fi standard. Like I

52:37SPEAKERcould just sell this access point on Craigslist and get a better one later. But, um, there's still

52:42SPEAKERso many devices using G. Well, mostly G from what I've seen. I think three, the 3DS was maybe the

52:48SPEAKERlast thing that I had was a G device. Well, I'm thinking more like, like we've got a, we've got

52:53SPEAKERa robot vacuum. It's not a Roomba, but it's a D-bot. Like that's, that's a, that's a G device.

52:58SPEAKERLike all of our... Does it have to stay on the internet? Uh, yeah, for, for scheduling and stuff.

53:03SPEAKERUm, well, I mean, it doesn't have to be connected 24/7, but like all, like our smart plugs do,

53:09SPEAKERlike we've got a number of like cheapo smart plugs for lamps and stuff around here. And those all

53:15SPEAKERhave to be connected pretty much all the time. And they certainly don't stay that way.

53:20SPEAKERWhether that's like bad device, firmware, like poorly implemented stuff. You should get rid of

53:25SPEAKERall the G devices because the other thing is, I mean, that's just what, I mean, these are still

53:29SPEAKERlike new products coming onto the market that are still G. God, really? Yeah. That's shameful.

53:33SPEAKERYeah, totally. They, they, so you know, that when you run G stuff on it, your router probably

53:38SPEAKERdoesn't do this, but on consumer routers, often if you're running like G devices on an NRAC router,

53:43SPEAKERit'll slow down the AC router to G. I think mine has... Yours probably partitions it. Multiple,

53:48SPEAKERmultiple radios. Yeah. Yeah. Judging by the settings. I think, I mean, it's funny how quickly

53:56SPEAKERwifi went from a neat but unreliable thing to a hyper reliable, really useful, like incredibly

54:04SPEAKERimportant to my day-to-day activities, technology. But the range of things, behaviors, activities,

54:10SPEAKERwhatever that it has enabled around the home and the office is like kind of mind blowing. I still

54:15SPEAKERrun wires. You run wires to your like desktop. Do your console or your console's wired? Yes. I

54:20SPEAKERquietly have ethernet run the entire perimeter of my apartment, basically like from one, literally

54:24SPEAKERone into the other. It's like a Faraday cage. But it's very, I don't know. You tell me, I hope it's

54:28SPEAKERvery subtle. I didn't notice. Yeah. It's run the entire... I see it now that I'm looking. It's run

54:32SPEAKERthe entire length of the apartment around door jams. You did a nice job tacking it up above the

54:36SPEAKERdoor jams. It's pretty, I hope that it's pretty inconspicuous, but like, like as good as wifi is,

54:42SPEAKERI still like, I want consoles plugged into a hard line. I want anything, anything that,

54:46SPEAKERthat where latency and or throughput are a concern. I want, I want a wire player. Yeah. Well, and, and

54:53SPEAKERyeah, there's, there's reasons that you want that. We don't, we're not going to get into that today.

54:56SPEAKERIt's too much. I didn't read about it. I don't want to make an ass of myself in public. Yeah.

54:59SPEAKERUm, we, I feel like we should talk about IPv6. Yeah, we should. I've been putting it off because

55:04SPEAKERit is incredibly technical. It's not. Well, I guess not. So anything, anything where you're

55:08SPEAKERtalking about bit depth though, is, uh, look kind of inherently technical. So I'm going to multiply

55:14SPEAKERsome numbers here. I'm gonna get the calculator. An IPv6 address is 32, 32 digits. So don't even

55:20SPEAKERworry about that. An IP, an IPV4 address. I, what I want to know is what the fuck happened to IPV5.

55:28SPEAKERI've never been able to get an answer to that. Same thing as direct X4. Yeah. And, and iPhone,

55:34SPEAKERthe iPhone nine, the iPhone nine. Yeah. It's just a sexy number. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, IPV4 addresses

55:42SPEAKERare for eight bit numbers, right? So that's one to two 56, uh, in, in binary, right? Eight bits

55:49SPEAKERis one or zero to two 55, whatever. Uh, that's, that's really where the stuff becomes hard for

55:56SPEAKERthe layman to deal with is when you start getting into non base 10, well, uh, numbering schemes and

56:01SPEAKERso forth. You don't have to worry about that. You have to worry about it being like when you start

56:04SPEAKERgetting to hexadecimal and binary and stuff like that. Like it gets to be a real pain in the ass

56:08SPEAKERif you're not. No, no, no, no. Okay. So here's the thing. Each IPV4, you know, it's IPV4 quartet,

56:15SPEAKERright? So there's four numbers and they're, um, eight bits each. Right. Right. So that's 32 bits

56:21SPEAKERtotal. I mean, like you can look at an IP address at an IPV4 address and know how it's constructed.

56:26SPEAKERWhat I, what I mean is on a philosophical level, when you were explaining to somebody, Oh, it's,

56:30SPEAKERit's four eight bit numbers. Like the average person is not going to be able to tell you when

56:33SPEAKERan eight bit number looks like an eight bit number is one is, is a range from zero to 255. Okay. So

56:39SPEAKERif you take 255 or 256, cause really we can't multiple zero, we'll start with one for math

56:45SPEAKERpurposes. So multiply 256 by 256 by 256 by 256 is the theoretical maximum address space for IPV4.

56:53SPEAKERRight. That's 16 million, 770,000, uh, 777,216 numbers. That's it. That's it. Did you say

57:00SPEAKERmillion? Million. Did I do that math wrong? I can't be right. 256 times 256. They're half there.

57:06SPEAKERThere is no way there are only 16 million. Yeah. You're right. Devices on the internet.

57:11SPEAKERI might've done it has to be in the billions. Oh, here we go. Here we go. I only did it three times.

57:16SPEAKEROkay. Yeah. I need to multiply 256 one more time. Okay. That's a 4.29 billion. There you go. That's

57:22SPEAKERthe right number I've heard before. Yeah. Um, but even that I would guess is, you know, that's,

57:26SPEAKERthere are more people than that on the planet. Like I would guess even that is nowhere near

57:30SPEAKERadequate. So here's the interesting con thing. IPV6, each, each octet, each of those numbers,

57:37SPEAKEReach of those quartets is 32 bits instead of eight bits. So it's this 4.29 billion number

57:45SPEAKERtimes 4.29 billion times 4.29 billion times 4.29 billion. I'm going to do that. So there,

57:51SPEAKERthere will very likely never be an IPV7. I'm going to tell you is that this is the number

57:58SPEAKERof addressable. If my math is right, it probably isn't. So please let us know. I can fact check

58:02SPEAKERyou because everybody loves 3.4 times 10 to the 38th. Say again, 3.4 times 10 to the 38th. That's

58:10SPEAKERa lot of zeros. Yeah. That's a lot of zeros. That might be too many, but anyway, the upshot is

58:15SPEAKERthere's a shitload of those addresses. And even if every toaster on the planet has one of these

58:19SPEAKERaddresses, we're probably still okay. I typed IPV6 address space into Google. And the first

58:25SPEAKERrecommendation is IPV6 address space atoms in the universe. So yeah, if that tells you,

58:33SPEAKERit's like, it's like, yeah, you're right. 3.4 times 10 to the 38th. That's that is correct.

58:37SPEAKERThis is one of those interesting, this is one of those interesting things that like the,

58:41SPEAKERyou know, you know, the relationship between, uh, our lifespan and the start of the universe

58:47SPEAKERversus the heat death of the universe. Like the, the start of the universe to now is a rounding

58:51SPEAKERerror. It is not even a blink of an eye in the hundreds of trillions of years. Numerically a

58:57SPEAKERhuman lifespan and the time from now to the big bang, exactly the same when compared to the heat

59:02SPEAKERdeath of the universe. We're okay on the IPV6 numbers. They really over engineered the shit

59:07SPEAKERout of this one. If, uh, if techtarget.com is to be believed, uh, the, the size of the,

59:13SPEAKERthe range of the, the number of IPV6 addresses is equivalent to, there are two to the 52nd addresses

59:21SPEAKERfor every observable star in the known universe. I don't think that's enough. So I think we're okay.

59:27SPEAKERSo anyway, but anyway, the reason they look different though is because instead of being

59:30SPEAKERnotated in just decimal numbers, like they're hexadecimal, they're hexadecimal. Um, the,

59:35SPEAKERthe means, which means letters, uh, uh, zero through nine, A through F. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

59:44SPEAKERBut I just mean like in a practical sense, when somebody looks at those, like it's,

59:47SPEAKERit's way less legible than maybe G2. Okay. But that is far less legible from a practical

59:53SPEAKERstandpoint. It's a pain in the ass. Even an IPV4. Yeah. Well, and it's also further complimented,

59:57SPEAKERcomplicated by the fact that IPV6 addresses don't have to be, um, like if you have a,

1:00:03SPEAKERif you have a quartet that's zeros, you can, you can shortcut it. You just put two colons,

1:00:07SPEAKERjust leave them empty and it knows what to do. Extra colon implies that it's all zeros. Yeah,

1:00:11SPEAKERexactly. I read that. Yeah. Um, so, and also fundamentally, it's a lot easier for me to

1:00:16SPEAKERremember a number from zero to 255 than it is for me to remember hexadecimal. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway,

1:00:23SPEAKERit's, it's complicated. It's far less just sensible or comprehensible to the average person.

1:00:28SPEAKERThe nice thing is that like, um, the rollout for IPV6 took a long time. They think the standard

1:00:33SPEAKERwas ratified in 98. So it's now 21 years old. My phone, when I, when I typed in what's my IP,

1:00:39SPEAKERI was really surprised because my, my Verizon iPhone gets an IPV6 address. Yeah. Huh. Um,

1:00:45SPEAKERyour local, uh, I don't know. You're probably on your wifi. It's funny if you type IP into Google,

1:00:51SPEAKERit just gives you your local IP address now, which used to be a hard thing to find.

1:00:54SPEAKERYou just have to go to a site. Yeah. Um, but yeah, my public IP address also, it doesn't render

1:00:59SPEAKERon the page because it's too long to fit without scrolling. So nice job Google. Yeah. It's useful

1:01:05SPEAKERinformation. Great system. Do you have any sense of where we're at with the remaining stock? Well,

1:01:10SPEAKERso it can't even, it can't even be a remaining stock. We have to be using pretty much all of

1:01:13SPEAKERthe IPV4 addresses, right? Um, so there's a, the IATA, I-A-T-A, and if you ask me what it stands

1:01:20SPEAKERfor, I'm not going to remember, um, is the organization that is in charge of doling out

1:01:24SPEAKERIP addresses. And there's some regional, uh, telcos that are regional organizations that work

1:01:29SPEAKERwith the telcos to do that as well. Five of them, I think if I remember right. Um, there are always

1:01:34SPEAKERIP addresses coming up free cause like companies go out of business and they bought, they've leased

1:01:38SPEAKERa range or bought a range or whatever and it's suddenly available. Um, it seems like it's not as

1:01:44SPEAKERpressing as it once was because if you think about it, like the vast number of PCs and stuff are

1:01:51SPEAKERprobably behind a net. Oh, I didn't even think about that. Yeah. It's actually the number of

1:01:55SPEAKERexternal IPs has probably dropped quite a bit, right? I think there's a lot of devices still on,

1:02:00SPEAKERbut, but it seems like places where this is going to be a problem have like the fact that Verizon

1:02:05SPEAKERis installing out IPv6 addresses instead of IPv4 addresses makes me think we're probably okay. Is

1:02:11SPEAKERthat telling? Yeah. I mean, look, if you think about every, there's 230 million people in the

1:02:15SPEAKERcountry and everybody has a phone and 30 or 40% of them are probably on Verizon, then yeah, I think

1:02:20SPEAKERthat's, I think that's, I think, I think, I think that's where we're at with that. I think the

1:02:24SPEAKERlarger problem is if like you're Google and you need a bunch of IPv4 addresses for servers and

1:02:29SPEAKERstuff, because people are still on IPv4, then, then you probably have a larger concern. But for

1:02:35SPEAKERnormal consumers, I don't think we have to worry too much about running out of IPv4 addresses.

1:02:39SPEAKERAlthough I did see a thing a couple of weeks ago about, about considering changing the IP spec

1:02:46SPEAKERto remove some of the reserves. There's four or five, there's more than that,

1:02:50SPEAKERbut there's a bunch of blocks of IP addresses that are reserved for special things like

1:02:54SPEAKER192.168.blank.blank are basically for private IP addresses that aren't addressable by the

1:03:02SPEAKERinternet at large. What that means is there's a router with NAT running behind, between those

1:03:07SPEAKERaddresses and the, and the real world. I got, I, not to derail, I became curious why that

1:03:12SPEAKERspecific range was in use. Did you find anything? I found the white paper where that was defined,

1:03:17SPEAKERbut it was not defined as like, this is what consumer routers should be using because that

1:03:21SPEAKERstuff came like a decade later. This was like 95. Yeah. I should have pulled the paper up in front

1:03:27SPEAKERof me, but like some of it is kind of over my head because this is my understanding is this is

1:03:32SPEAKERstill in the classful networking days. If you know what that means before networking became classless.

1:03:37SPEAKEROh, does that make sense? I've always done networking to be classless. I agree with you.

1:03:41SPEAKERLike, I don't know what that distinction means other than, other than I think the classes are

1:03:46SPEAKERdenoted by letter. I think it's like class A, class B, C networks. If that rings a bell.

1:03:53SPEAKERIs that, is that the top? I don't know. Like I'm talking about my ass here. I just,

1:03:57SPEAKERI read about this stuff in a white paper. If you know, email us. Yeah. Like I'm sure,

1:04:01SPEAKERI'm sure some of the gray, like legitimate gray beards that have been on shell accounts

1:04:05SPEAKERsince the seventies may have some idea of what we're talking about. I'm very interested in this

1:04:09SPEAKERnow. I looked, I looked a little bit too, to see if I could find anything and I couldn't find any,

1:04:13SPEAKERlike everybody, it seems like Google uses 10.15 for their hardware.

1:04:17SPEAKEROkay. Which it's not mandated. Well, so the only thing you can't do is have a NAT,

1:04:22SPEAKERyou can't double NAT where both NATs have the same sub, same private subnet. So like, if like for me,

1:04:27SPEAKERmy AT&T router has won't, I can't turn off the NAT on the AT&T router. So I just have, it's running

1:04:34SPEAKER192.168.1 dot something. And then my, my Google home stuff runs 10.15.0 dot whatever. Yeah. I

1:04:41SPEAKERthink I mentioned last week that I ran into that when I set up this VPN. Yeah. I had to change my

1:04:46SPEAKERsubnet here because I knew I was going to be on the same subnet on anybody else's LAN and they

1:04:50SPEAKERcan't both be the same. Exactly. Or they can't intermix because that causes all kinds of problems.

1:04:54SPEAKERUm, here it is. Let me see. Oh gosh. There's two white papers. Do you care? I know, hit me.

1:05:00SPEAKERIs this actually worth talking about? I think it's fascinating. Uh, here it is. RFC 1918, I believe.

1:05:05SPEAKEROh yeah. And that's a great one. It's a classic. Everybody knows from, uh, I was there on a date

1:05:11SPEAKERon this. It's February, 1996. Some of the undersigned companies, Silicon Graphics,

1:05:19SPEAKERCisco. Wow. And Chrysler. Huh. Um. Maker of fine automobiles. Yeah. It's basically, uh, gosh,

1:05:29SPEAKERthis is, I don't know. Do you really want me to go through all this? I mean, why does there,

1:05:34SPEAKERis it just them saying, Hey, these need to be private ranges. Yeah. That's, that's underwhelming.

1:05:39SPEAKERKinda. I was hoping for something really sexy and fun. Um, a large airport, which has its arrival

1:05:44SPEAKERand departure displays individually addressable via TCP/IP. Sorry. I, okay, here it is. I found it.

1:05:50SPEAKERPrivate address space. Number item, item three in this. Okay. In this memo. Best current practice

1:05:57SPEAKERfor private address space allocation. The internet assigned numbers authority has reserved the

1:06:03SPEAKERfollowing three blocks. That's IANA. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so yeah, it's, it's 10.0.0.0. So

1:06:10SPEAKERthis only started in 96. Yeah. Wow. So it's 10.0.0.0, 172.16.0.0 and 192.168. Nobody uses

1:06:19SPEAKERthe 172.16 one. Right. So I believe, I guess that's where it trickled down to consumer routers

1:06:24SPEAKERfrom. Um, the interesting thing here is they also define the auto-assigned addresses too that you

1:06:29SPEAKERget if you're, if you're, if you're a computer kid, the 169 ones that your computer do, if you

1:06:35SPEAKERcan't, the computer does if it can't find a DHCP server. Right. So anyway, I mean, that's just a

1:06:40SPEAKERkind of a, so that's where it came from, but we don't know why, why those addresses. It doesn't,

1:06:45SPEAKERit doesn't really, I didn't read the entire white paper or the entire memo. It might actually,

1:06:50SPEAKERit may have just been a big block that they hadn't, um, uh, that they hadn't, uh,

1:06:58SPEAKERassigned to anybody yet. Like it may have been, it could be just something as simple as,

1:07:02SPEAKERHey, these, these three ranges don't have any assigned IP addresses in them yet. So we can

1:07:06SPEAKERpull them out safely. That may be the, the very simple explanation. But anyway, I'll also scroll

1:07:12SPEAKERdown to the author, the list of authors at the bottom, just because I'm fascinated by internet

1:07:15SPEAKERhistory stuff and was very curious. Cisco, Chrysler. Yeah. Like Cisco, Cisco and SGI,

1:07:22SPEAKERand those are fine. But then I became very fascinated that Robert Moskowitz from Chrysler

1:07:28SPEAKERwas on this list. Uh, I dug into it a little bit. As far as I could tell, he was like,

1:07:34SPEAKERhe was the head of essentially like their IT department or CTO or something. Right. I don't

1:07:39SPEAKERknow if he was quite a CTO, but it seemed like he had a little more authority than just head of IT.

1:07:43SPEAKERBut like, it seemed like he was very forward looking in creating a corporate network and

1:07:48SPEAKERgetting it integrated with the internet. That would have been pretty, that would have been

1:07:51SPEAKERright about, about the time that people started getting really interested in that. Right. To,

1:07:54SPEAKERto the extent that even though he was just working for Chrysler, he became part of like

1:07:58SPEAKERdefining these standards at some point, probably just one of the first people doing it at a

1:08:03SPEAKERcorporation, even though it happened to be a car maker, probably that wasn't a tech company,

1:08:06SPEAKERprobably that was an IBM or Microsoft or somebody. Yeah. Yeah. Cause like, if you think about it

1:08:10SPEAKERbefore that Microsoft would have had networks earlier on and IBM would have, Cisco would have,

1:08:15SPEAKERand those companies would have, but like, why would it, why does a computer, why does a car

1:08:19SPEAKERcompany need a computer network? That's madness. Sure. Just carry that floppy. Yeah. So if you

1:08:25SPEAKERhappen to be, if you happen to be Robert Moskowitz and you want to get in touch to talk to us about

1:08:29SPEAKERdefining address spaces on the early internet, we would love to talk to you. I think that's as

1:08:34SPEAKERgood a place as any to wrap it up. Is that self-indulgent? No, I like, this is why I'm here.

1:08:38SPEAKERI want to learn weird shit about the internet. I want to learn weird shit about everything. Yeah.

1:08:42SPEAKERI hope that's why everybody's listening too. Totally. By the way, thanks. Everybody's,

1:08:45SPEAKERwe had a lot of really great reviews this week. I had a lot of great comments on Twitter. Yeah. We,

1:08:50SPEAKERI, we set up an email address finally. Oh. Yes. It is bradandwilltechpod@gmail.com.

1:08:58SPEAKERThat's bradandwill spelled out tech pod, all one word at gmail.com. Much like IP addresses,

1:09:04SPEAKERGmail addresses are hard to come by. Somebody had tech pod. I don't know what the hell they,

1:09:09SPEAKERyou know. Yes. But yeah, you can send us emails. Yeah. We should read some emails.

1:09:14SPEAKERYeah. We love, well, I don't know if that may be an infringement, but emails is universal, man.

1:09:21SPEAKERWe'll call them electronic mails here. Electronic missives. Yes. Your letters from the,

1:09:25SPEAKERfrom the void. Yes. Twitter is still good. I'm Will Smith. You're Brad Shoemaker. Yes.

1:09:31SPEAKERWe're we're we have forestalled the doom on the podcast hosting front, at least for the short

1:09:38SPEAKERterm and are working on some alternatives and other ways to fund that, which we'll hopefully

1:09:44SPEAKERhave stuff to talk about soon. Keep an eye on Twitter and yeah. Thanks. Thanks for reviews.

1:09:51SPEAKERReviews on iTunes are great. Yes. And thanks for listening. We love them. Yeah. Thanks

1:09:54SPEAKERfor listening. Thanks for coming back. We were excited. I'm stoked. I'm still surprised that

1:09:58SPEAKERpeople want to listen to that. Yeah. I I'm amazingly internally grateful that anybody

1:10:03SPEAKERwants to listen to us jabber. Plus I get to come over and hang out in your living room.

1:10:08SPEAKERI like to think we make a decent home here. Yeah, no, it's lovely. This is one of my favorite

1:10:15SPEAKERtopics in the world. I would sit here for another two hours and talk about this stuff if we could,

1:10:19SPEAKERbut well, I mean, if people like it, send questions and we'll do more. If we could focus

1:10:23SPEAKERmore on this particular subject and like drill down on any one of these things. This can be the

1:10:28SPEAKER100. This is like the survey class and then we'll hammer it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If people,

1:10:33SPEAKERif people are into it, I think next week we should do something that's not tech,

1:10:36SPEAKERlike not computer tech. You're probably right. Yeah. Space planes. Oh man. It's scary. National

1:10:40SPEAKERaerospace plane. Scary to get out of your wheelhouse. Underwater cable laying ships.

1:10:44SPEAKERYou like space? Space is cool. I'm talking about space. Uh, did you see that they made it the

1:10:49SPEAKERStarlifter? The Starship, the Elon Starship. Oh no. It's really shiny. I did see the director

1:10:55SPEAKERof NASA talking some, some mess toward, toward SpaceX though. Well, I mean,

1:11:04SPEAKERman, I don't want to talk about SLS, but we should get an expert on to talk about SLS and

1:11:07SPEAKERall the experts I know work at NASA. So they probably can't talk about SLS in the way that

1:11:11SPEAKERSLS is a boondoggle. It's a bad idea. What does SLS do? Space launch system. Okay. It's the,

1:11:16SPEAKERit's the, the spaceship is supposed to take us to the moon. It's too big. Is that a private

1:11:22SPEAKERenterprise? Like I know that's public. That's the one we're paying for. You and I pay for it

1:11:25SPEAKERright now. Like I have basically find space, everything a chore to follow now because it's

1:11:31SPEAKERtoo much. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. It's too, it's too much of a chore to, um,

1:11:37SPEAKERdistinguish between what is private enterprise and what is, is, uh, you know, a public effort.

1:11:41SPEAKERIt's like, uh, it's like when, you know, we went from, you just bought a 3DFX card in 1995,

1:11:46SPEAKER96. We weren't doing computers anymore. And then three, a year later there were 12 companies making

1:11:51SPEAKER3d accelerators and then there were two companies making 3d accelerators. I don't know what happened.

1:11:55SPEAKERYeah. Like I basically like what is pure exploration and discovery and what is, is kind

1:12:00SPEAKERof what is commercial in nature. It's all how they intermingle has made that whole subject a

1:12:08SPEAKERlittle bit more annoying to pay attention to than I would. Yeah. Maybe we should talk about space

1:12:13SPEAKERsometime. Well, send us, send us, if you have stuff you want us to talk about, send it in. Brad

1:12:17SPEAKERand Will made a tech pod. Made a tech pod. That's Brad and Will. bradandwilltechpod@gmail.com.

1:12:24SPEAKEROkay. I'll get it right by the sixth or seventh episode. That's fair. Um,

1:12:28SPEAKERI guess we'll see you all next week. All right. Yeah. We'll stop rambling.