lemmyng

Stupid sexy ~~Flanders~~ Patrick.

When you consider how much traffic goes towards the larger sites, it's actually believable. Even before the great migration Reddit was infested with reposter bots whose sole purpose was to farm karma in order to later sell the accounts. Those bots have gotten more sophisticated now, replicating not only original posts but entire comment threads. That's not new content, but it's content nevertheless, especially in the context of the dead Internet theory. Yes, it's engagement farming, but that engagement is getting more sophisticated, both to trick the user (to drive engagement) as well as to trick the server (to prevent getting blocked).

This is a very insidious problem, because it means that such bots can and will be abused by threat actors (both internal and external) to drive popular sentiment in certain directions. We know how susceptible a generation that only watched cable news became, imagine what such campaigns can do to internet generations - if you can generate content that supports your rhetoric faster than humans but without appearing fake, then you can drown out dissident speech. Brigading is bad already, and it will get worse.

It has implications on the effectiveness of VPNs on public networks.

Counter argument: sometimes our memory of shows is rosier than reality. Take Looney Tunes, for example. Some of those original episodes made fun of mental illness, PTSD, even suicide.

In other cases a rebooted show is absolutely stellar, like BSG.

It's time for a ReBoot... reboot.

1. A static IP is actually not necessary, but what you need is a consistent identifier. For the server, that's typically a DNS address, but for clients and peer to peer networks there's other ways to identify devices, usually tied to an account or some other key kept on the device.
2. For centralised communications yes, you would need an always online server. For decentralised networks, you just need a sufficient amount of online peers, but each individual peer does not need to be always online.
3. Pretty much, yes. Even push notifications on cell phones work this way.
4. Route, yes. Manually. VPN is usually not necessary. In modern web-based services this is typically done with websockets, which are client-initiated (so the client address can change), and which allow two-way communication and typically only require a keepalive packet from the client every minute or so.

There's other reasons why universal addressing is not done - privacy, network segmentation, resiliency, security, etc. And while IPv6 proponents do like to claim that local networks wouldn't be strictly necessary (which is technically true), local networks will still be wanted by many. Tying this back to phone numbers - phone numbers work because there's an implicit trust in the telcos, and conversely there's built in central control. It also helps that it's only a very domain specific implementation - phone communication specifications don't change very often. On computer networks, a lot of work has been done to reduce the reliance on a central trust authority. Nowadays, DNS and SSL registries are pretty much the last bastion of such an authority, with a lot of research and work having gone into being able to safely communicate through untrusted layers: GPG, TOR, IPFS, TLS, etc.

28 Days Later, Cockneys vs Zombies

missing a link?

Whoa, that's a sizeable edit to the post! Regardless the answer is pretty straightforward: your VOIP client (either the device if you have one or the software) is connected to a VOIP service which acts like a gateway for your client. Since the client initiated the connection to the gateway and is keeping it alive, you don't need to make any network changes. Once the connection is established, standard SIP call flows (you can Google that for flow diagrams) are followed.

So no, you router is not part of the cell service. The VOIP provider is part of a phone service that receives calls and routes them for you, just like the cell towers are part of a telephony provider that routes calls through the appropriate tower.

Ah, I see we are resorting to ad hominem attacks now.

Laptops don't get a new IP address every time they switch from one AP to another in the same network either. Your cell phone will get a new IP address if it switches to a different cell network.

A phone number does not uniquely identify a phone either.