Episode 770 Transcript

FLOSS-770

Jonathan Bennett: This is Floss Weekly, episode 770. Recorded Wednesday, February 14th. 10 percent more internet.

Hey, this week, Doc Searles joins me, and we talk with David Tot about the state of the internet, IPv4 exhaustion, 10 percent more IP addresses that are just sitting there waiting to be used, and more, you don't want to miss it. So stay tuned.

Hey, welcome. It is Wednesday. It is time for Floss Weekly. That's free, libre, and open source software. It's not just me. I've got Doc Searls with me and we've got a we've got a pretty special guest. We've got, we've got David Taut with us. This is going to be a little different. It's more like a meeting of the minds than a full on interview.

And that's mainly because everybody in the audience, I think, knows David Taut by now. He's the, he's the buffer bloke guy. He's the big internet guy. But I think, I think we have something a little different we're going to talk about today. Both Doc and David, welcome to the show.

David Taht: Both of us are actually named David, Doc.

So Mind if I call you, yeah.

Doc Searls: I know, I know, that's why you go by David, I go by Doc. And, I mean, the year I was born, the two most common names were Michael and David. And and I got called Doc because I started a business with somebody else named David. I was very possessive of it. And I found out years later when I saw his driver's license that his first name was Paul.

So, you know, names are weird. Names are weird. And you went by another name when I met you, too. Which I would Yeah, the most common name. You went to the most, to the second most common name.

David Taht: Well, back then my name was, Mike Taht was number one on Google for like 10 pages in and I I tried to retire. I didn't want to fix computers anymore.

And I changed my name to Dave to become a surfer musician dude. And it didn't last. Here I am again. I hear Sting isn't using his name much. Maybe I'll try that one. It's also my hope we end up with a mystery guest today. I tried to get him on the show. He's late to arrive.

Jonathan Bennett: Yeah, and I know there's there's sort of a legal issue that maybe is why he decided not to be here.

Let's go ahead and dive into that. David, why don't you set the stage? What, what's the deal, what's the deal with the internet and IPv4 addresses, to be precise?

David Taht: That's a really big question.

Doc Searls: Like a drug or fire.

Jonathan Bennett: I kinda realized as I said that, that that's way too big of a question for one episode.

So we'll, we'll narrow it in a little bit and talk about IPv4.

David Taht: Okay. So it's really remarkable. Fairly recently, I went around and I polled normal human beings. And I asked them, Do you know what a packet is? And I went O for 30. So by some miracle, people click on things and it comes here, but they've never really thought about it.

Most of those people knew what an atom was. It was like over 50 percent knew what an atom, and I actually explained it in atom. But if people don't know what an atom is, what's a packet? And And then you get into the fact that all packets need to have a home address and a destination address. And when we first laid out the internet back in the good old days we thought 32 bits was enough.

Ah, 4 billion addresses. We had a couple hundred computers in the world in the first place, so what the heck, why would you need 4 billion addresses? And Vint Cerf is sometimes called IPv4, the experiment that escaped the lab. Yeah. And we realized that we were going to run out of addresses in about 1990, yeah, 1992, 93, and started drafting up a new standard called IPv6.

Which again, you explain to someone that doesn't know what a packet is, or an atom, and then you talk about IPv4 versus IPv6. You've already fallen off a cliff. You cannot have a rational discussion anymore. And this includes multiple people in government. I was talking to a certain three letter agency, not the NSA, with two intern lawyers that are supposed to be doing legisla They had no idea what a packet was either.

Anyway so we screwed up in not visualizing how big the internet would get. And after a lot of reorganization and struggle, we invented a new technology called NAT, which is how most of us are talking today, which allows you to multiplex your home address on top of one of those four billion addresses to get to the internet.

Jonathan Bennett:You hide multiple machines behind the one address.

Doc Searls: And you use DHCP to assign an address, right? So, this machine has an address and the printer has an address in your house, but it's not on the internet.

David Taht: Yeah. Well, it would be cool to find out if you guys have IPv6 yet. But, you know, you're nerds. You might actually have it, but you probably didn't know you had it.

Jonathan Bennett: I've tried, I've tried to get IPv6 and my ISP doesn't support it yet.

David Taht: How about you, are you, are you typing ifconfig?

Doc Searls: Is Comcast supported? Because I'm talking to Comcast right now. Yes. Fiber, they do. Can I, what can I look at to see? I mean, is it a --

David Taht: You bring up a terminal window and you type in ifconfig, and you look for a big number separated by colons.

Doc Searls: Command not found. So, so F config and IF config. Oh, ifconfig. That's why I've used this so many times. Well, I could, I thought there was something else that I didn't. Okay.

David Taht: The majority of our audience probably hasn't. Well, this audience may be Alright,

Doc Searls: I've put EN which are the --

David Taht: EN zero is probably your device name.

Okay. You should have something that begins with A two N 21. There's so many. It has hex.

Doc Searls: Very long list of them longer than said. I haven't looked at this in years. So, EN4 5, app 0

Jonathan Bennett: One of the, one of the challenges that you'll get to, though, is most machines, depending upon your router, will have IPv6 addresses.

They're just not routable IPv6 addresses. 

David Taht: Yeah, they don't work. But anyway, Doc, you are most likely using IPv6 every day, and until this moment, you didn't know. 

Doc Searls: No, I didn't know. Here's what I know about IPv6. It's coming. That's, that, that's the whole thing. That's the whole thing.

Jonathan Bennett: It's one of those technologies, it's one of those technologies like fusion, that's always been five years out.

Doc Searls: It approaches asymptotically. It's always halfway here.

David Taht: So, so for the audience the tool I use to see how well it's working is called IPV4 and that will test to see if you put that in your browser as a plug in, it'll tell you what kind of connections you're actually using. Oh, okay. So IPV fu. Anyway, we're a little off track doc.

You're using IPV six, but because you're using IPV six, you can't talk directly to this gentleman over here because he's only on IPV four. So in order for you two guys to talk, both of you have had to had an address that you both knew running over IPV four for this conversation to be taking place just between the two of you.

Okay, Jonathan, are you hosting the server here in the cloud?

Jonathan Bennett: It is, it is cloud hosted, yeah. Yeah,

David Taht: so there's a fourth party involved that doesn't necessarily need to be there, that's actually multiplexing your IPv6 to his IPv4 and my IPv6, mixing it together for video, and bang! You've got a working network connection.

And all that machinery is mostly invisible to you. But the original conception of the internet was, would be that for a call between me and you directly, I would connect between me and you directly, with no intermediaries involved at all. And it would be lower latency, better security, and so on. And we've gotten quite, quite far away from that in the last 30 years.

Jonathan Bennett: Yeah, I, I think if possible, the way this platform works is it will eventually connect the streams directly, but it's got to do all sorts of, it's got to hop through things like NAT traversal and, and it's, it's a lot because of the way things are put together now. It is a lot of work to be able to make those connect directly.

We're using VDO Ninja, and I'm pretty sure it does manage the trick most of the time. But it's, it's a bit of magic, on top of magic, to be able to make that work.

David Taht: Yeah, that's pretty good magic, but it could be less crazy. There's a couple really cool peer to peer VPNs. Did you guys ever have Avery on here for Tailscale?

Jonathan Bennett: he's great. I think we may have once.

David Taht: I think so. Yeah. So, Tailscale and Zerotier are peer to peer VPNs. Make all that magic, just so you can connect two machines together more or less directly. It wasn't, the design goal was to make that be easy. And It isn't. Anyway, so I'm going to try to get back to the history of the internet.

Doc Searls: So we had Avery Penner, we definitely had him on. We definitely had him on.

David Taht: Yeah. There you go. Avery's great. He's a funny guy. And I love it. Really good. And I really, it's a, you know, product pitch. We use Tailskill all the time around here. It makes you finding a device anywhere. You left it in your closet, it's still there.

You know, no matter where you go. So that was the internet that we were trying to build where you could talk to anything all the time. Anyway we got away from, we added all this extra machinery, but we saw it coming that we needed to have more addresses in 1992. And we got together and said, Ah ha, we've evaluated a bunch of possibilities.

Let's Make them be 128 bits. We should be able to cover the universe with the internet if we do that. And 1997 rolled around and people started deploying. There's huge investments into it. We managed to get into Linux by No, I don't know. 2000, there was a huge project in Japan, and we all thought that the next big thing that would happen was that we would just abandon ancient decrepit IPv4 and go to IPv6.

It's 27 years later. And IPv6 is at a little over 45 percent penetration to the Googles of the world. There are whole countries that have no IPv6. There are some countries that are almost entirely IPv6 now. But the idea of a common communication substrate has been in flux. This entire time. So, and we ran out.

We ran out of IPv4 addresses back in 2010 basically. And the price, and the commercial market started, the price keeps going up. So, if you as a business or as a person want your own IP address, where you can put your own servers, you gotta buy it. Or you gotta rent it. And that kind of gets us to where there's this big controversy happening today happening in the past few weeks.

So, historically, IP addresses were given away to anyone that asked. And then this secondary market started up due to scarcity. Which is, you know, by the way, I'm appraised of it. It's effectively reallocating scarce resources to the highest bidder. And it's not that much money, 30 bucks a piece. But, we're still out and we're still adding devices. So those prices seem inevitably to go up over time, unless IPv6 replaces it. And Recently Amazon announced in their cloud they were going to start charging for an IP address. So you as a business, have to pay them rent on these IP addresses. And the estimates are that they will be earning an extra billion dollars a year on the artificial scarcity of the IPv4 address space.

Jonathan Bennett: Now, let's ask something here, because I think this will tie into where you're going. What do you mean by artificial scarcity? Why is it artificial?

David Taht: Well, I'm, that's a little premature for my discussion here.

Jonathan Bennett: Okay, so we'll just take that idea and we'll put it in the corners of our head.

You're going somewhere here.

Doc Searls: So, okay.

David Taht: If we'd all gotten together and agreed in a room, you know, in 1997, that we were going to go full tilt IPv6, this would not be happening, you know and if we were still working together hard with a common agreement that we should. make IPv6 work everywhere, then this wouldn't be happening.

And pretty much everyone in the internet community agrees that IPv6 is the way forward. Everybody should upgrade. You first. No, no, you first. No, no, you. How about you know, and it's just it's just taking a really really long time and we have all these Legacy gear 2g 3g 4g. It's all gear that cannot be upgraded to ipv6 There's cold countries have made billion and trillion dollar investment in infrastructure that cannot be Upgraded IPv6.

Doc Searls: So for example, that's like the, the, the data on your phone. Okay, the, your data connection on your phone is IPv4 by,

David Taht: In, in our country and in many, because of the late phase of phones, Most phones IPv6 better than anything else. Okay. In part because the cellular carriers couldn't get any IPv4 for it.

Doc Searls: Oh, I see. Okay. So, but, but there's still lots and lots of sunk cost and legacy computers of all kinds that are, that, you know, haven't changed. You know, your, your, your Windows based ATM machine.

David Taht: Windows 95.

Doc Searls: Windows 95 based ATM machine at your serious bank. I wish you were joking. I know, I know. When you see the error screen there, I think, wait a minute.

That's Windows 95. Or 98 or something.

Jonathan Bennett: I will say that it's just as bad when it's a Linux machine running a 2. 6 kernel. Which you also will see out in the wild.

Doc Searls: I have seen this on airplanes. Most of the screens on your airplanes are on the back of a chair. are Linux, and when they fail, you see the little --

David Taht: tux.

Doc Searls: Like 2. 6 or something, you know. There we are.

David Taht: Here's a story you don't possibly know. A great deal of those airline seatbacks were my fault. We did that work. Running X windows on these little things for a couple airlines back in the early 2000s. So I had actually campaigned that we change the Tux logo to something else.

And they didn't. It would have been cool branding for the company at the time. And most of those are replaced now. I have another rant on this show. Isn't it great that you have Wi Fi on all the airplanes now? Yeah. When was the last time you had a good conversation with your immediate neighbor?

Doc Searls: Yeah, I know, that's another thing. Well, everybody's looking at their rectangle, because now, they've taken them, they no longer have them. The newer planes, they don't even have a thing. On some of the United planes, there's a clamp, and you pull it really wide for your pad, and it's narrow for your phone, that's on the back of the seat in front of you.

Yeah.

David Taht: Yeah. Hilarious. I spent a plane flight recently, sitting next to a young lady working on VR for Meta. And she was clicking and texting and typing and interacting with more people as fast as thumbs I've ever seen. She must have had three or four hundred simultaneous conversations go over the entire airplane flight.

Yep. And I finally got a chance to get a few words in edgewise asking her what she did. And she told me about that and then I asked her what a packet was. And she didn't knock.

Doc Searls: No, she, she had some in her purse. I mean, you know, you need a Splenda? I've got a couple of those. You know.

Jonathan Bennett: Goodness.

David Taht: Anyway, so I'm going to keep going.

Unwind my story for connectivity. The deconnectivity story. So, everybody producing a service in the cloud needs an IPv4 address. They're getting increasingly scarce. They're costing more money. And if you're an ISP, or a new ISP, or a new provider, and you can't get any IP addresses at all, you You're out of business.

You can't even start your business. So as the scarcity gets worse, innovation is going, is already in the decline. The ability to expand the internet to more people is in decline unless you accept only IPv6. And we all do have to work together. Somehow, to make sure it deploys. And, you know, I've been working for years you talk about Linux 2.

6, there are people still shipping Linux 2. 6 into devices, home routers in the home. Because it's good enough. And it isn't. And they're not able to enable the engineering resources to go do that. And there's no standards body or government or anyone saying, Stop doing that. Give me a modern Linux. There's, there's, there's no clue bat coming out through the internet saying, Don't do this anymore.

You're holding everything back. And it's been I've been kind of working a background. This is another segue. Oh, well have you heard of bead?

Jonathan Bennett: Not necessarily.

David Taht: No. No? Oh, the NTIA I've seen beads, but I The broadband program at the NTIA put together at the beginning of COVID. They threw 70 billion at the states and said, Hey, go bring, make broadband work for everybody.

Get back to us when you're done. And after a lot of legal rigmarole, it's, the money was distributed to the states and they're trying to go and subsidize and build out better internet for everyone, mostly fiber. And your city, by the way, should get that. And it's a good plan, especially because they gave it to all the states to figure out how to spend it best, because I had zero hope the federal government could figure out how to spend it best.

Anyways, this part of the BEAD program I was going up to all the people going out and getting billions of dollars and I'm saying, so, what's the packet? And how are you going to get enough addresses to add internet to all these new people for it? And, they don't know either. They didn't even know it was a question.

You just plug in the wire, right? You got internet. Yeah, okay. And I'm hoping that the educational level at the States does continue to get better as to what kind of demands they need, not just for addressing an IPv6, but security,

training and so on. So we'll see a lot of good stuff coming up with that. The other program is called Internet for All by the Biden administration. And, I don't know, go call, call up your state, all of you on this show, call up the state broadband office, looking for that, and explain to them that Linux and open source software can save them money, provide better security.

Doc Searls: Is there such a thing as a state broadband office?

David Taht: Yeah, they were all set up as part of this program. There is a place to call. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I would like very much for the open source community to be jumping in to say, Oh, you know, you can reflash your old routers to open WRT.

You know, this is how you build out a Wi Fi router correctly and do it in your home. And by the way, use wires! Wi Fi can really suck. But honestly, if we as a community could reach out to the government in these cases we should possibly get a better internet out of it. So, big pieces --

Doc Searls: Indiana has something.

There it is. Indiana

David Taht: Broadband. Yeah, so who's your local representative for this?

Doc Searls: I don't know, but we're getting Fiber anyway, so

David Taht: It may well be subsidized by this program. But there'll be added IP addresses. Yeah, I don't

Doc Searls: know. I mean you know, our section of town is planned, you know, so But there's a public private thing that's going on here.

In addition to the private thing that was already here, and told me I had Fiber until we got here, and they said, no, you don't have it in your neighborhood. And then they got Comcast, so Thanks, guys.

David Taht: Well, it's a real thing. That's a real thing too. It's also as part of this program that everyone got together and provided much better broadband maps.

Doc Searls: And it's called Beed. There's a thing called Beed. Look at that. Yeah.

David Taht: Look at that. Who you gonna call? Yeah. Beedbusters! Internet for all. Yeah. But rollout and provided some technical advice and stuff, it would be a lot better for everybody. And the reason why you don't have fiber is the maps sucked. And they have done a great job of improving the maps and developing a thing called the challenge process.

So if they are still claiming you had fiber and you aren't getting it, you have a, you've got a place to call. So go for that.

Jonathan Bennett: So we could, we could go down this alleyway, we could go down this road, we could talk about how Starlink interacts with this, but let's get back on the IPv4 topic, because that's the one we haven't talked about before.

David Taht: It's really difficult, obviously, to get there, because you have to first understand all these preconception things. Sure. So we ran out. They cost money now. There's a monopolistic sorry, there is a large corporation. Currently providing internet services to much of the world, and they are now adding this additional billion dollar a year fee to everybody.

And other, and hopefully this will help, people will migrate to IPv6, they will leave Amazon, but they're still going to make a small fortune off of renting what was previously free. Where I get really mad, and upset, and angry. Again, you've seen me lose my temper on your previous show, and I'm going to try to keep this.

I've

Doc Searls: also seen you sing, so it's okay. Ow! Ow! Ow! And play. I've actually heard you sing.

David Taht: Yeah, anyway, so Your guitar is not

Doc Searls: far from you right now, am I correct?

David Taht: It's I've got one in Nicaragua currently, and one behind me. All I did today I don't

Doc Searls: mean to totally digress.

David Taht: I brought my sticker today. I actually changed this because I was feeling mellow.

I changed it to this machine cures Vogons. I was feeling happy at the time. But still, IPv4! Okay, where were we going to do that? Anyway, so, years and years ago, when we first laid this out, John Cerf and so many people, they say, well, we have this enormous address space, let's use it, let's delegate portions of it.

Zero was for configuration, because zero slash eight, sixteen million addresses. And then we'll allocate all these other addresses to all these other big organizations, you know, Apple and IBM and big companies at the time. And the federal government has 11 of these Slash 8s. They have about 70, I think it's 70 million addresses.

They're mostly not using today. And then we carved up another space. This thing called multicast was going to be the next big thing. And so they carved up 260 million addresses for multicast, figuring that that's how we were going to distribute voice and, and, and video. We were completely wrong.

What we, all we had understood at the time was classic broadcast television. So we thought we would use this multicast technology and reserve space for it to. Do broadcast television over the internet. Didn't work out that way. Do you know how many? Well, I'll tell you later. Anyway, and then at the very top of that range, because who could ever use up a billion addresses to connect the 300 computers that were on the internet was the experimental address range.

And that's another 260 million addresses that were reserved for future use. Okay. We didn't know what we would use them for, but we feel just set 'em aside and when we need 'em, we would use them. And then IPD six started developing. I say, ah, well we'll just keep going. And a bunch of agencies got put in charge ICAN for names, you know VO gons for names and what's called the r IRSs for the numbers.

And then we had, iANA, which is a separate agency also in charge of the merger of these three. I sometimes think that this was designed just like we designed the Houses of Congress and the Presidency, to make sure that they deadlock and can't accomplish anything good, or bad, or anything much at all.

So, you know, those in the show look at what an RIR, Regional Internet Registry, is. We divvy up the world in five different regions. And, And then we started running out of IP addresses and people looked at this other new range saying, well, 260 million more addresses, that's 6 percent more internet.

Let's do that. Now, the amount of code required to enable this address scheme is less than the code that is mounted. To, to not do it. Having the check to exclude this cost more CPU than just running it. Yeah. So in 2008, it mostly started working for everything Apple, Lenox, et cetera. We said, ah, screw up.

We'll just, we'll just make that work eventually. But it got caught up in this bureaucratic in fighting as to, oh wow, who was going to sell dispute tribute 260 million addresses, and it has been stuck there since 2008. I got involved in this around 2016, 17 mm-Hmm, when a friend of mine came to me, John Gilmore, and he said, you know, hey, you know, it looks like we might need to have IPV four running for like another 150 years.

Yeah, , yeah. And we're running out. What can we do about that? And I said, well, we can make this work. So I made it work. I also made zero slash eight work, 16 million addresses. This is my all time favorite and the most controversial passion I've ever done. Okay, I made 0 slash 8, 16 million addresses just work in Linux.

It involved deleting five lines of code from the entire operating system. I scanned all the other software in the world to see what else checked for it and deleted it from there. And I was, I had, I was naive. I, I thought that the world would say, yes, thank you. 16 million, 16 million more people can be online.

And oh boy, the pitchforks and the torches came out for me. You can't do that. I was holding back the IPv6 distribution. And I'm like, I'm saving nanoseconds. Ah. So we did that and then we went through the formal process. We put in the IATF drafts to try to broaden it. And they were kicked down in flames by the IPV6 crowd.

In the meantime, there's all these people that really need IPV4 addresses that can't do anything, getting really frustrated.

Jonathan Bennett: Well, CGNAT, carrier grade NAT, which is a pain and limits what you can actually do with the internet.

David Taht: And the way we're going, we're going to have carrier grade NAT behind carrier grade NAT.

And it, it hurts the connectivity. It means you're, you know, if you have a house, and we see this all the time now, if you have your house here, and you're on a CG NAT, and you have another house next door, and you're on a CG NAT, you have to go all the way back to their hosting provider, and then come back to go 15 feet.

And that's, You know, I used to throw wires over to my neighbor, you know, so we would play video games and stuff. The direct connectivity goes even further and further away to the middleman if you do CGNet. So we're going to see a lot more CGNet in the future and it just seems inevitable that we will end up with more and more disconnectivity between things that should be close by.

I mean, my cell phone Which does a IPv6. Should be able to talk to a tower there, come off that tower, and head a cable right back here, and it'd be much faster. Or it should easily connect via Wi Fi to here, which is what it does today. Imagine if we didn't have Wi Fi.

Jonathan Bennett: All of our, all of our cell phones would still have ethernet ports on them though, right?

David Taht: And you'd have to wind them up by hand. Yeah, yeah.

Doc Searls: So. That little, that little tiny RJ45 sticking out

David Taht: the side. So I've now managed to cover 30 years of history to finally get us to what's going on today, and my contribution to the nightmare.

So I made it work, and I tried to get it through the bureaucratic processes. And we made it work so universally. that Google and Amazon and a couple other big companies started using up these numbers internally. Now, as the author, I can't really claim copyright, I don't think. That was not my intent.

You know, I, I, I, my intent was to, to, to make more addresses available for the world, 10 percent more internet. And instead, these companies, instead of doing an IPv6 transition found a way of crudging grabbing these numbers, squatting is another word we can use, to, to help leverage, to make their operations easier and simpler and without telling anybody, hey buddy, got an IP address.

We're documenting how it works. I mean, some of their techniques could be used by everybody. And I'm okay with that. It's the failure to recognize reality and say, look, we have a civilization wide problem here in trying to get our devices to communicate. And so I wanted very much to see these These numbers get taken over by the regulatory authorities that are supposed to be doing them, distribute them to the newer small businesses, et cetera, that needed to get on the internet and keep, keep that part going.

And maybe if enough people talk about it, there's a great article in the register. Are you able to put a link in the chat? That came out recently with a new gang of folk that have discovered that, Oh, damn, we're out of, out of IP addresses. Here's 260 million. Let's go do that. And I'd hope Carl would make it to the show because they have a different perspective on this stuff than I do.

I just, as the original author of the patches, I'm like, okay, guys, come on, please put, you know, work together. We were responsible for this internet together.

Jonathan Bennett: Right. So there's a, there's a process. I've been through the process to request IPv4 addresses. So like back in the past, there was just blocks and blocks of them that were unused.

And I thankfully got into this game early enough that I could just fill out some paperwork and say, Hey, I'd like 16 IP addresses. And, you know, it went through my well, the ISP that I use at the data center. And they're like, sure, here's your addresses. And That's the, that's the way this is supposed to work.

You've got these blocks of unused addresses. They've now started pushing businesses and organizations, hey, if you're not using addresses, give them back to us so that we can give them to the next people. And so there's, there's this, there's this process that's supposed to work. And the 240, 240.

through the end of the internet, it's just, What? It's never been handed over to that process. So are they as far as Amazon and Google is concerned, are they considered non routable addresses?

David Taht: They are presently using it in their route and their virtual routers system. So yes, they're routable, but not to the internet.

But

Jonathan Bennett: not, not. Publicly routable. So these guys are using this like a really really big 192. 168. 0. 0

David Taht: Yeah, the rfc 1918 is the actual specification, right? They ran out of 10 space They had the amazon used up 16 million addresses And they said, ah, let's go do something else. So it's not quite on the cia's numbers.

Let's use these other numbers Because they work And you know, again, they were in a bind. They were growing like weeds and I, I don't, I, I, I'm okay that, that they, but not all 260 million, we reserve these things for future use. Okay. Not for Jim Bezos's use. This constitutes an enormous taking from the public sphere of what we could actually do to make the internet a little bit better as we crutch along to the IPv6 transition.

Right. And it's all, again, it's blowing up again at the RIR level and for all I know that the responsible organizations will step up and say, Hey Jim, can we , Jeff, I should say. Hey, Jeff. C Could we have a couple of those? Just a, I I got a buddy in Africa. Really needs some. Yeah, just a little bit, you know.

And and at the same, this,

Doc Searls: this is written up where? Right now, I

David Taht: mean it, oh, it's in the register. Okay.

Jonathan Bennett: I, I dropped a, a link to the show note you can just search for. I see. Oh, I see it. I see it. I give you four block activism is the name of the, the link. So, now I'm curious, is, is Amazon actively talking to the RIRs saying, Hey, it would be really great if those IP addresses didn't ever get turned on.

Is that a conversation that you think is happening?

David Taht: Again we're living in a world where 99 out of a hundred people don't know what a packet is,

Jonathan Bennett: right? But there are people, there are people that Amazon that do though, like the, the, the engineers at Amazon know what's going on. They know that they're using these IP addresses and they know how much work like, okay.

I cannot, I'm not sure that I can comprehend in my mind the amount of engineering work that the guys at Amazon would have to do if the RIRs suddenly said, hey, we're going to start using these IP addresses. Amazon would have to renumber their entire cloud. That is mind boggling.

David Taht: But imagine asking the rest of the world to have to upgrade to IPv6 instead.

Well,

Jonathan Bennett: it is also a mind boggling amount of work. It is ridiculous. But this gets back to this question, though. Do you think the people at Amazon, in the know, are then saying to, you know, your regional operators and to the big, DI for, I forget the acronyms. I, I can't remember all the acronyms exactly, but, you know, Anick and, and ripe and all of these guys, please don't start using two 40 slash four please.

David Taht: please. I, I don't think that conversation's happen. It's more like we're Amazon, we're gonna do whatever the hell we want. , , you know, the R IRS are really small. I mean for example, so for those of us

Doc Searls: who have friends at Amazon, I only have, I only have one, but I think he's been on the show. I'll leave that one nameless.

I'm not even specified gender, though it's not hard to guess. What do we say? I mean, as somebody who works for AWS,

David Taht: what do we say? So, I'm not even sure there's, again, I'm trying to raise awareness of this stuff. For example, I know several people at Amazon that are deeply bitter that they didn't make the investment in IPv6.

They had a good architecture for it, and they are working towards making IPv6 work. They have to, eventually. And they feel some of the same guilt. That I'd hope more people feel about the initial shared spirit of the internet. So if I didn't have People on the inside that didn't feel bad about it. I would be truly angry But I'm sure Jeff business doesn't know or you know

Doc Searls: So my involved anymore, so I you know, yeah a guy whose name it we all forget or did never

Jonathan Bennett: knew Yeah, so there's a there's a point here I can't remember if we were talking during the show or during the pre show but this idea about people in government Don't understand what a packet is and like Almost nobody at the upper levels of government in the United States at least like you talk senators and congressmen.

There's Maybe maybe a dozen of them all together And that is probably being very generous that have a clue about like how the internet works What a packet is what things like net neutrality actually means and I think at businesses I know this because I work with small businesses. You have the same thing.

The people at the top that tend to make the decisions don't actually understand the technology. And so there's this constant tension we'll say between your engineering people who have very strong opinions about. Things and your management and upper management that also have very strong opinions about things, but they're coming at these, these issues from two totally different perspectives.

And it's, it's fascinating to see how that conflict plays out in the way the business gets run and how that impacts things like.

David Taht: Yeah, well said. I got an analogy though I hope will work on more governments, more politicians. If you don't have a physical address for the voter, you can't send them campaign literature.

Ah. Every device needs a physical, a virtual address in order for you to be able to send it spam and campaign literature. Oh, great. It's a little cynical. It's just a little. It's horrifying. Go ahead, Doc.

Doc Searls: You know, that I just said it's horrifying. There's no place to go with that. So

Jonathan Bennett: Hmm. I saw something, I think it was on Reddit.

Somebody asked, Why don't we just use MAC addresses instead of IP addresses? That's a

David Taht: really profound question, actually. It almost

Jonathan Bennett: happened. It is an interesting question. I think it would be a routing nightmare. But it is an interesting question.

David Taht: Believe it or not, it wouldn't have been. Honestly, there

Doc Searls: was an actual I mean, I always saw an IP address as the abstract layer on top of a MAC address.

Yeah. And then domain name, you know, or another abstraction through another different administrative system, but a different set of conventions.

David Taht: But, so,

Doc Searls: what's Amazon I mean, so, they're just, they're squatting on these. They could give some of them to The African nick or what? Afro Nick or

David Taht: whatever it is.

The five r IRSs? No, they could give them back. It weren there isn't the first place . Okay. Well, I I would not have a problem with the transitional phase.

Doc Searls: I read here some ham radio operators sold it to them.

David Taht: Oh, okay. That, that's a different thing that happened. This is a, that's is a good counter example.

Doc Searls: Okay. Different I, okay. I made the mistake of trying to listen to you and read the thing

David Taht: at the . Okay. This is a good counter example. So John Postel was approached in 1988. or so, by some ham radio geeks, and they asked them, Hey, it would be really cool if ham radio could do the internet thing. And he said, sure, here's, here's 44 slash eight.

Go ahead, have at it. Kind of foolish in retrospect. So whoever ended up controlling that address was suddenly sitting on 50 per IP. Sixteen million times fifty dollars is? A lot of money. Okay. Nine hundred million dollars. A ridiculous amount of money. I can't do the math. It was cheaper than Anyway that group of people that ended up sort of accidentally on a handshake agreement with John decided finally that they weren't using most of that and they sold off a block of it to Amazon.

I forget what the numbers are. They're published somewhere, but they, they, they pocketed well over a hundred million dollars. They formed a nonprofit and as a RDC, they are going out and funding wonderful ham radio projects. If there's anyone that shows that wants to be a ham, go to a RDC and apply for a grant.

And they've managed to use that accidental allocation for good. And, I'm very happy with what happened in that case. And this could happen all over the world. Apple could say, Hey Africa, we're not using part of our allocation, we'll let you have that. You know, we can manage to squeeze more space out of the IPv4 internet if we figure out a way of cooperating.

And it would be awesome if Amazon could work that way too. Here's another example. I'd like IPv6 to take off. And you know how Apple has a you know, walled garden? All right. In that walled garden, they mandate IPv6 supporters on all their devices. So, an Amazon could do that, a Tencent could do that, and we would manage to get rid of this immediate.

Crisis of artificial scarcity. Now, is anyone there as enlightened as I am?

Doc Searls: There's a lot of idealists. Not any queer Dave, that's sorry. So,

Jonathan Bennett: okay, I'm curious if you have a feel for this. There's a lot of these blocks of IPv4 addresses that are dark. They've been assigned or they're not used for various reasons.

Do you have an idea of what percentage of IPv4 of the entire space is actually being used?

David Taht: That isn't a good number, and I don't have it on me. I'll argue that probably 20 percent of it is not being used today, and that is exclusive of the U. S. government holdings. It may be lower than that, closer to 12.

Don't quote me, somebody had research in on the show. For example Eric Raymond has been holding on to two address, two two slash 24s, 512 addresses for the last, 30 years because someday he wanted to use them for something and it's really hard to get them routed and this is funny, I guess we, we did a deal years ago.

I agreed to pay him two bucks a year to rent them from him, 2 bills and under the condition I give them back in 2038. Actually, they've accrued more value. I'm not sure if Doc will get the joke. It looks like you did, Jonathan.

Jonathan Bennett: No, I didn't. That's, that's when, that's when Unix time breaks. Oh,

Doc Searls: of course.

Okay,

David Taht: gotcha. John, and so the bet I made with Eric is that in order to keep him incentivized he works on NTP. And so if the time If that works, and we survive the holocaust of the time rolling over, he gets his IP addresses back.

Doc Searls: Okay, that's good.

David Taht: Two bucks a year is a great little bet. I hope to use those addresses up someday in some worthy cause, and that might include using something to route, like, 240, or portions of it.

I don't know. But it's one of the funnier investments I've made in the IP address market. That's fun. Thank you, Eric, for being on another joke.

Jonathan Bennett: That's great. So I, okay, I, I, I want to get back to this, this question because you, you kind of blew my mind by suggesting it was possible and that is just using MAC addresses instead of IPv4 and the reason I think, the reason I think this is so crazy is because I know on a local network, the way that you handle MAC addresses, this MAC address to IP is You've got a table in each of your switches that just has memorized, okay, this Mac address is down this port and your network kind of loses its mind when you run out of spaces in that table.

And when you do the math about how many possible Mac addresses there are, let's just say you need a really, really, really big table.

David Taht: Yeah, it's true. So I was going back in history, you know, I, let me get my walker so I can take you a trip back. But there was DECnet, there was IPX, there was a bunch of other potential standards.

And IP predated Ethernet. The MAC address idea blew people's minds. It was a brilliant idea, but it wasn't hierarchical. And in order to be able to route, you need to be able to say, You 200 boxes are here, you And, and route. So yes, if you were to use MAC addresses to route over the internet, you're screwed.

However, if you prefix, CLNA tried to prefix a whole bunch of bytes in front of that to provide the routing functionality back end. It was a competitor to IPv6. And and it would have worked, and it might have worked better than IPv6 and instead we ended up with this crazy, somewhat crazy scheme that became IPv6, which again is a hierarchical routing system.

We, we take that enormous MAC address, we hash it together, but the prefix you get is stable and hierarchical and that, and that's the scaling factor. So you know, the 2. 0, whatever you all are there, that's a Pretty small number that only requires, I think the current IPv6 routing table is less than 100, 000 entries.

It's doable and it runs, and it runs the whole internet. The IPv4 routing table is almost a mega, a million entries now. And that, yeah, it has to be searched really fast on every single package. There's a thing called a CAM memory. It's required, you have this incredibly weird circuit. And Okay, it worked, it scaled, and here we are today talking over it, over all these different things, and up until now, no one listening cared about all this machinery managing to make our cat videos fly.

You know, there's big, we have big things in the future ahead of us, and we need to get out into orbit, you know, beyond low Earth orbit. This is a little, again, I don't mind getting off this topic now, but have you seen the designs for the, for the communication systems between here and the moon in the last decade?

Jonathan Bennett: I have not looked, but I'm very curious about them, particularly, particularly when we go further than the moon. Something I've been curious about for a long time is how do you make the internet work between here and Mars? Like, everything we've ever done on the internet breaks down when you have a round trip time that's that long.

David Taht: And Yeah, it does.

Doc Searls: Was it two? It's just two seconds to the moon, but it's like 17 minutes to Mars, I think. Something like that. Well, it depends. The, the, the eccentric orbit, you know, I mean,

David Taht: so we don't know. We do know how to make it work between here and the moon. Thanks to all the buffer BLT research, for.

Oh, good. That makes sense. Yeah, but not between here and Mars. There was a lot of books, there was a couple books that came out in 1993 that predicted all this stuff. And Snow Crash gets way too much credit. And it was a dystopia. More people should read about it. Read it in that light. There was a wonderful book by Werner Wenge.

that leverage the concept of Usenet and broadcast transmissions to describe a intergalactic civilization. So what works better for communications between here and Mars is to just basically broadcast everything all the time and keep it around and index it. So conversations will be difficult, but emails will get there in 17 minutes, and a copy of Wikipedia will always be present.

Sure. And so on. So that book's called A Fire Upon the Deep. It's very influential on me because it describes a race of alien beings that communicated through sound to each other. In order to be smarter, they would gather together in clusters of four or five individuals and communicate via sound with their friends.

Here's together. And it was, they're cool, really cool characters. I hope someday they make a movie. And then they discovered radio. Instead of having to cluster together in groups of four and five, they could put on their radio headphones and still communicate hundreds of miles away from each other.

Hugely influential on me. And So, Fire Upon the Deep is my book recommendation. Maybe I should turn it over to you. Have you guys heard anything good lately? Besides tweeters? Anything good?

Doc Searls: Yeah, I can say something good. Sure, go ahead. You wanna hear it? Okay, so the IEEE standards It's an IEEE standard called P7012.

It's not a standard yet. We're working on it. I'm the chair of the of the working group. It's for machine readable personal privacy terms. It's completely reverse the way contracts work online now, which is where you're always assenting to somebody else's thing. They agree to ours and we can scale it.

We can make it fun. Dave David Reed was our first chair. Oh, cool.

David Taht: David Reed of Boulder, or David Reed of, of, of?

Doc Searls: David Reed of the End to End Argument in Systems Design who with Seltzer and Clark wrote that, which informed TCPIP, who helped write UDP as well, a great guy, he ran out of patience with it, and two, and two chairs later, I am the chair.

But we, we're drafting this and it's we're, we're fairly close. We have a number of different approaches, but we could frame it up. Pretty well. I think it's gonna be good.

David Taht: I would so love to be offer, be able to offer my contract to humanity or my contract to the corporation.

Doc Searls: Yeah, well it is gonna be like creative comments.

It's gonna, you know, it's gonna be, there's a set of contracts that are, you know, I mean, business friendly enough so that you know they could easily be agreed to like. We have one already that just has, doesn't have a machine readable format called No Stalking, which says, go ahead and show me ads.

Just make sure they're not based on tracking me. A variety of that would be, okay, track me on your site, but nowhere else. But

David Taht: nobody, I think, is really, well, I would think nobody here is willing to say, okay, track me. At least I'm not. By the way, I recently had my Luddite moment. I got a new phone.

Heh heh heh. And instead of reloading my Signal, Telegram, Matrix, IRC Zulip, I forget Facebook, how many other chat programs, no, 10 different chat applications, I said, screw it! And I went back to MMS. First benefit, my battery life went to 7 days. I also haven't had a bill for my bandwidth since I did this.

So I managed to cut my bills to something reasonable, and and the silence, wow, I'm outside walking around and I can think again.

Doc Searls: You're not just a rectangle anymore. Escaping

David Taht: the rectangle. Escape the rectangle. Maybe we should have an escape the rectangle day. Yeah. You know, leave your cell phones behind, go out and promise you'll meet someone new, make some music.

Read a book, do the things your parents used to do.

Jonathan Bennett: So it's funny, you asked for a book recommendation. What immediately came to my mind is, I don't, I don't read books anymore. I listen to them. That's just what has started to

Doc Searls: work. This is what people do. It cuts into your podcast consumption.

Jonathan Bennett: Watch out. You know, honestly, I don't, I don't do hardly any podcasts.

I don't listen to hardly any podcasts. I know I'm terrible for saying that. But it's, it's just, it's just the way it is. But my book reading, I tend to do with Audible anymore. And it's, it's fascinating because I used to, you know, take so many physical books and read them. And goodness, I've got a full wall here in the office that is physical books.

I don't think I've picked one of them up to read one for months. And it's just fascinating the way that things change.

David Taht: It's a good weight loss program. I mean, you can just keep doing that. I was going to bring this one up. I'm staying at my mom's place. Which one's that? My father passed years ago. The cool thing about what my parents did to me is they didn't let me watch television.

And they stuck me in his office library. So there I am reading books like this at the age of eight and asking my dad's questions. So I didn't tell you the work there. I am like, anyway so what was cool about that, he had a lot of controversial books and I read them when I was a kid. I did not necessarily understand them.

So I've been here for a few months and I've been rereading stuff that I thought I understood then. And I think it really pays to reflect and have that memory of what happened before and some substance that doesn't. isn't on the internet. So, I won't do a live reading today, but perhaps I thought about, I like the Audible idea a lot.

I would love to hear dramatizations and stuff. I've never really done that,

Jonathan Bennett: so. Yeah, there's a, there's an interesting little quirk with that. You know, Audible uses DRM. And so legally, you can't download. Now, there's ways to do it. I'm not going to tell you how on the show, but legally, you can't download and keep your Audible purchases offline.

And so there's this, there's this whole other question, and this is why I still have paper books. What happens when either A, Audible, Amazon decides they don't want to do Audible anymore, or Audible decides that this author that you like is no longer acceptable. Persona Non Grata, yeah. Is a Persona Non Grata and starts deleting their works.

And so, in fact, I was smiling just a moment ago because my son listens to the show and he says, you know what that means? He doesn't need all those books anymore. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. There's a reason that we have the books. You cannot, you cannot Persona Non Grata any of these authors. Because. I still have a copy of their book.

Whether I agree with what it says or not, whether I think it's a good person or not, their, their words are recorded forever in the form of that book. And I think it's a, I think it's a, I think it's a really dangerous thing that we've come to the point to where, for any reason at all, we, we think that, you know, people's thoughts should be inaccessible.

And that, that, that worries me, that, that we're coming to that point as a society where, you know, you disagree with someone, you think someone's a bad person, that's fine. But to say that their thoughts should be inaccessible I don't know, I think that's, that's a bridge

David Taht: way too far. Don't say, I don't know, defend, yeah, defend that.

No, we have a right to, you know, look what was the name of the guy that discovered gravity?

Jonathan Bennett: I think Isaac Newton is the one normally credited with that.

David Taht: Let me use a bad word, Newton was a dick. He was a reprehensible person, he really was. And if we cancelled him, we wouldn't know about gravity!

Yeah, it's there's a lot of people

Doc Searls: that I Pretty much everybody in history is now unacceptable. I mean, if they're around now.

David Taht: Yeah. I want us to dare to be, I want us to continue as we move forward to dare to be unacceptable and dare to be crotchety and dare to say what we thought.

Doc Searls: There's another show title.

Jonathan Bennett: Well the interesting thing about Newton, you bring him up, they tried to cancel him during his lifetime. Right? The powers that be at the time tried to cancel Newton because he dared to suggest that the sun did not revolve around the earth. Now some of the, some of the nuanced details of this. I was sc Leo, that was Galileo

David Taht: too.

Sorry. Sc Okay. Yeah, sc you can read that and about that in the book. I,

Jonathan Bennett: I . Yeah. But the, the, the point remains though that you have some of these scientific discoveries that people at the time tried to squash. And so there's, there's kind of a, a lesson there of be real careful about the ideas that you try to squash because you don't know what those ideals will turn into in the future.

David Taht: yeah. Kids, kids

Jonathan Bennett: today! Yeah, kids today. Get off my lawn. Alright, well, I think we have I think we've filled up about an hour. It was great

David Taht: to see you

Jonathan Bennett: guys again. It was good to have you. I enjoy, I enjoy shows like this. It's a little, little less structured and more just you and the fat. Is there anything, David, that we didn't cover that you wanted to make sure and let folks know about?

Heh.

David Taht: I have a question. Oh, get a one minute project pitch, product pitch, go ahead though, go ahead doc.

Doc Searls: Okay, here's a question. When, when will we have too many satellites doing what Starlink already does?

David Taht: Ha! The day we have a Kessler event. A

Doc Searls: Kessler event being

David Taht: That's, that's the day we'll

Jonathan Bennett: have when one, that's when one satellite blows up, sprays debris into orbit, and you have a chain reaction.

Doc Searls: Oh, okay, and then we can never pick out of orbit, like MilSat 3 blew up that's another one that's huge, millions of pieces of debris.

David Taht: It's serious, you know, a meteoroid or a Kessler event or an atomic war will render the low Earth orbit unusable for about, at least five years.

Jonathan Bennett: Yeah, that's the, that's the thing people kind of leave out of the conversation about Kessler event.

If you're talking about low Earth orbit, all of that debris will decay fairly quickly. Satellites only stay in orbit because they've got ion thrusters to keep them there. Yeah. When you're talking about low Earth

David Taht: orbit. But if it happens and humanity is critically dependent on that kind of technology.

That's true. That'll be a tough

Jonathan Bennett: five

David Taht: years. Well, I mean, all the kids today, you know, they don't know how to get home without GPS. You know I have given a lot of, you know, in my Luddite mode. I, I'll give talks to explain people how to find your way home when your battery dies and your cell phone and how to find the Southern Cross and the North Star and it's news to people as to how to get around anymore without that kind of stuff.

And it'd be a really dark day if we get so critically dependent on that technology and it suddenly goes away. Yeah. Anyway, you asked me for a one minute project plug. One, look to the stars. Oh, two, I wanted to recommend a wonderful movie I did see recently Twilight Zone, which I saw as a kid.

Had one called Bookworm to Rejoice, with Burgess Meredith in it. And it's about a bookworm that survives nuclear war and gets a chance to read. Just read.

Doc Searls: Remember what happened at the end? I'm not going to say it. It's a mystery for the audience to explore. It's important, and a weird thing about, and that's how old we are, man, I remember, I remember the first time I saw Twilight Zone, it was I forget the name of the famous actor, but he's, he was a prisoner who was on a prison planet.

He was the only occupant there, and they gave him a female robot as a companion. And then when he could leave, he could only take five pounds with him or something like that. And they had to leave the robot there. And And he was in love with the robot, and so they shot her in the face, and the, and she just, his name was Corey, and he went, Corey.

These are amazing short

David Taht: stories, though. It's still almost as fresh and as interesting and as intriguing as now as it is today. They predict the various futures, some of which have happened. I've been catching that recently, that's been my current addiction so. Anyway, he asked me for a one minute plug.

My day job these days is a thing called Libre QoS. And I'm known for the fixing the buffer problem with algorithms like FQ Coddle and Cake. And they're pretty ubiquitous now, but they require that you update your hardware, your router hardware, to the latest and greatest stuff. And the right place to do that was really in your router hardware.

You should be updating and get this thing called IPv6, too. But we developed a box for open source software that the ISP can do, and they just plug it into the switch, and overnight, if you have 10, 000 subscribers, their internet gets massively, massively better. And so for many years I've been encouraging the geek community to go out and fix your own bloody routers and do that, and now I want the geek community to go yell at your ISP, to go install this free software to make it better for your, Neighbors that don't even know what a packet is.

And that would make a much better internet for everybody. We're in our fourth release. And we've got well over a million people using it today. I'm very proud of the team. Herbert and Frank and Oh man, I'm forgetting the CEO's name. Forgive me, man. Anyway and Robert. Forgive me, Robert. And together we are going to make a much better internet for everybody.

On the cheap. If more people go out and ask their ISP to do it. So, that's my plug on the ad for the day. Thanks for

Jonathan Bennett: having me on. I've got to ask you before we go, and I know we've asked you this before, but I will get emails if I don't. Scripting language and text editor. Have they changed? What do you use?

David Taht: I could start making jokes on this one again. Now, Rust has become my scripting language. Ah, cool. I'm kidding. I can't understand Rust at all.

Jonathan Bennett: I had a conversation with somebody, one of our other Hackaday writers, just the other day. We were talking about languages. It's going to be a problem. I think we were talking about Rust and Linux kernel.

And it's going to be a problem because you have so many of these Linux developers that don't know how to read Rust. And I started to type. I'm like, Oh, you understand how to read one language. You gotta understand how to read them all. It can't be that bad. I better go check on this before I say this. And I went to the Rust Replacement Core Utils, which is a cool project, but I went to their source code and like, Rust can't be that hard.

And it's like, I have no idea what any of this code does. This is the hardest thing I've ever seen to try to read. I don't even, like, it was It was crazy. Like if let some equals, I'm like, why do you have a let in an if statement? I don't get this at all. So yes, Rust is hard to read.

David Taht: Yeah. Well, my, my project is being done in Rust.

Herbert is a trainer on that too. So let me plug him, Herbert Wolverson for Art in Labs. And he's been doing a great job with it. There are three really as an old. There are three really amazing things about Rust. For starters, it's upside down and backwards from what C is. So that's part of the unnatural thing.

And if you thought Perl line noise was bad, you got that problem too. But the beauty of it, and it took me two months of intensive study to get it, is this thing called the borrow checker. And With that, you're able to write highly concurrent and parallel programs that scale across multiple cores with utterly first rate algorithms.

It is the first thing that will let you think in parallel and code in parallel without crashing all the time. Oh, cool. So I've seen I've become a believer by osmosis at the kinds of incredibly fast code you can do in user space anyway by doing Rust and hanging out with the master. That said, in my, in my job, I, I do a little sequel and I, Herbert, help.

I've met my match in Rust. It's for the, it's for the, yes, Rust is for the younger generation. And similarly he, he relies on all kinds of great things like ChatGPT and stuff to do templating. And and I still live in Emacs, and I tried to add ChatGPT, et cetera, to Emacs. And, you know, pencil and paper is probably my favorite text editor now.

Sooner or later I'll be carving stuff on stone tablets or clay tablets. Because it'll last longer and these stupid books will. Glad I could re re re answer that question for you. I'm very, very impressed with the borrow checker. It really is a breakthrough.

Jonathan Bennett: Yeah, that's cool. Russ is definitely on my to do list to go and learn a little bit more about it and actually write some code.

Yeah,

David Taht: honestly, set aside two weeks, throw away everything you already knew. The hard part for me was, I, I grew up on stacks, you know, and registers, and assembly language, and heap, and you, those abstractions, you have to stop caring entirely about that, and think about sharing. And how your data interrelates with each other.

Stop caring about how this architecture works and share. And I'm pretty sure that if I had, if I was a little younger and I had more time, I would be embracing the language as fully as so many are today. We're seeing 10, 20, 30 levels of performance improvement by people rewriting Shed and Rust. Yeah.

Finally screwed up your

Jonathan Bennett: I'll bleep it out, it's fine. Alright. David, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for coming on last minute. We had our, our previous guest that was scheduled had a bit of a medical emergency come up and is somewhere in the process of trying to get surgery done right now, so.

We'll have him, we will have him again, hopefully in a few weeks. We've got him rescheduled, but David, it was great to have you.

David Taht: Thank you. Okay, one last thing though. Happy Valentine's Day, everybody. Yes. Get off the internet and spend some time with someone you love.

Jonathan Bennett: Unfortunately, the rest of my day is going to be spent doing the production on the rest of this show, but maybe, maybe a little bit of time tonight.

We'll see. Okay.

David Taht: Great to see you guys too. Miss you. Yep. Thank you, man. I miss you, Doc. Keep on rockin it. All right.

Jonathan Bennett: So, Doc, what do you think? It's always a lot of fun to talk to David.

Doc Searls: It's always great to talk to David. I'm glad I brought him up so you could bring him in. Yes. Because, as I said on our back channel, Dave is an artesian well of good information and advice and commitment and all kinds of other good things we need from the people we depend on to make the internet work.

I, I actually, you know, that, that, that, that, that famous cartoon that the XKCD, Randall Munroe cartoon of, you know, the whole internet is maintained by one guy in Nebraska, right? You know, Dave's the kind of that guy. He's one of those, he's one of those. people, I think it's more like, you know, the internet is this complicated thing that can be improved in lots of ways.

And he's all about improving it all the time. And we all depend on it. And it's a largely thankless thing for, for them, but they, but he has to do it. So he just, he doesn't have much choice about it. He can't help it. Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett: Yes, you know, that, that comic is funny because I think there's actually about a dozen, maybe two dozen of those one guys, right?

Because you've got projects like NTP, which for the longest time was literally just one guy. But there's even more obscure things that we all rely on than NTP, because NTP you can kind of see from time to time. But there's things like the term info file, like how many people know what that is? But if that suddenly breaks we are all in trouble.

And there's there's some of these really obscure things that everybody uses There's just there's one guy or sometimes with the really scary one is where it's still there and it's still being used But there's not a guy that's maintaining it. It's just kind of a zombie project. Those are the ones that really worry me Yeah Alright let me get this in.

Next week, we are talking with S. Falcon, and I do not remember what his first name is, and I just have it in there as S. But he is, I met him through the Fedora Matrix, and he does a lot of things. things, but one of the interesting ones Cloverleaf Linux a Linux maintainer does a bunch of different Linux distros and Linux fun things talking with him next week.

And then the week after that on February 28th, we're going to be two hours early. And we're going to talk with even Upton of Raspberry Pi, and that one is going to be a lot of fun. There's been some. Pretty big news about the Raspberry Pi, not the foundation, but the corporation. They're looking at going public and we're going to talk with them about that.

We're going to talk with him about the Raspberry Pi 5. Hopefully we're going to talk about an upcoming Raspberry Pi 500. I don't have any inside information about this, but I'm going to beg him to make the Pi 500 and put an NVMe slot in it. Ah, it would be amazing. Anyway, that's what's coming up for the show.

Doc, do you have anything you want to plug?

Doc Searls: Yeah, actually. So some people I'm sure listening are watching may be at scale next month in Pasadena. I will actually be there for the first time. Cool. And I will be there as to speak at something that the choir people are putting on. That's kw ai.ai.

Mm-Hmm. . They're a collective of. Characters that want us all to have our own damned AI, and I'm all for that, I've been for that, that's why they want me out there. So, I'm gonna, I'm gonna fly out there As cheaply as I can, meaning it's partly on Spirit. The airline, not the,

David Taht: Not the Yes. Yes.

Doc Searls: Not, not, not, not the ghost.

Anyway, so wish me luck on that. Yeah. If they succeed. Anyway, so but I'll be there. So if anybody, you know, wants to see me or just feels like seeing another old man somewhere, I'll probably be the oldest guy there, as I always am. But anyway, that's a scale next month. Yeah. So

Jonathan Bennett: I'll be there. Snag somebody while you're there from Kauai, because that looks cool to have on the show.

Yeah.

Doc Searls: I know. Yeah, I was, I am going to pitch him. I'm going on the show. Oh, just, yeah. Yeah. It sounds great. Yeah. All right. So they're cool people. There you go. And you can join it. I mean, it's just an open collective.

Jonathan Bennett: All right. Well, thank you, sir, for coming in. Kind of last minute. Both of our co hosts and our guests were both kind of last minute.

I should appreciate it. All right. If you want to follow my work, the best place to do it is Hackaday. Hackaday. com. We've got the security column goes live every Friday. And then there's also the untitled Linux show. That's still over at Twit. And we sure have a lot of fun doing that. That is for now a ClubTwit exclusive, and we record that Saturday afternoons over in the Twit Discord.

So anybody that wants to, you can join ClubTwit and come check us out there. Thank you everyone that caught it live. Thank you everyone on the download. We appreciate all of our listeners. If there's a project that you want to see on the show, let us know. Either drop us a note in Discord or you can email us floss at hackaday.

com. And that'll come right to me, and we will if we can get a hold of somebody, we'll get it scheduled and talk to whatever project it is you guys want to hear about. Thank you so much, and we will see you next time on Floss Weekly.