You are not wrong, except at scale it gets complicated quickly. For starters, to support large user numbers, you’re going to have to process your own grib2 data for radar and turn them into tiles at zoom levels.
It takes about 24 cores with a GPU to do CONUS, Canada, Alaska, Pacific and Caribbean data. This should be 2x for redundancy. Even being cheap with main processing in my basement (gen power, backup internet) the cloud costs to serve it are $200 month plus data transfer. The standby grib machine spins up should it not see the cheap primary or the NOAAPort receiver is offline.
There is no money to be made without whoring out your user’s privacy. People just won’t pay for a privacy focused weather app. I keep this going as a hobby.
Fair enough. Things are always more complicated at scale.
But then again, we don't know whether this company is maintaining this infra themselves, or if they're paying for API access. Besides, if anything, running their own servers is often the more cost-effective option, so the details you mention might not matter in practice.
My incredulity has more to do with the profitability of this type of software, considering that the free options are good enough for the average person, and that the features promoted in the article are hardly innovative.
> There is no money to be made without whoring out your user’s privacy.
Well, I do object to that. It's certainly possible to sustain a profitable business without selling out your users' data. It may not be as profitable as the advertising model, which is often too enticing for companies to ignore. This company explicitly says that their income comes directly from customers, so apparently I'm underestimating the amount of people who find these features valuable enough to pay for them.
In my experience, most people with cancer that I know simply oscillate between having life-threatening active cancer/tumors and remission.
I don't know any case where people have detectable cancer and it's just being managed, I think that's more the exception than the rule.
For my girlfriend, when she was in her last stages they had to do that (try to slow down/manage the cancer instead of remove it), but that was already palliative care and she died soon after. Also, the only reason they didn't try removing the tumor is because the specific location in the brain (pons) is inoperable.
So both consent to sex and now one thinks they're entitled to marriage. That's where this inevitably leads, user/customer lock-in and control.
While the bank use case makes a compelling argument, device attestation won't be used for just banks. It's going to be every god damned thing on the internet. Why? Because why the hell not, it further pushes the costs of doing business of banks/MSPs/email providers/cloud services onto the customer and assigns more of the liabilities.
It will also further the digital divide as there will be zero support for devices that fail attestation at any service requiring it. I used to think that the friction against this technology was overblown, but over the last eighteen months I've come to the conclusion that it is going to be a horrible privacy sucking nightmare wrapped in the gold foil of security.
I've been involved in tech a long, long time. The first thing I'm going to do when I retire is start chucking devices. I'm checking-out, none of this is proving to be worth the financial and privacy costs.
"It's going to be every god damned thing on the internet. Why? Because why the hell not"
This is not a persuasive argument.
You are also ignoring the fact that YOU can use remote attestation to verify remote computers are running what they say they are.
"I've been involved in tech a long, long time. The first thing I'm going to do when I retire is start chucking devices. I'm checking-out, none of this is proving to be worth the financial and privacy costs."
You actually sound like you are having a nervous breakdown. Perhaps you should take a vacation.
Less maintenance on my own kit after spending a day maintaining some else’s kit.
Linux userspace is utter chaos. When I’m pricing out lumber or other personal projects, I don’t want that held up by any number of fresh in memory Linux what-the-fresh-hell-is-this moments.
That is it. Will pay nearly whatever Apple commands to avoid having my personal (desktop) time invaded by Linux and the never ending reinventing solved problems and discovering new ones.
Upside though, Linux by now may actually have an even dozen of methods to configure a wired ethernet device. I quit counting.
I would imagine most large-scale data center construction projects will include electrical engineers to design the electrical subsystem. A rack's floor footprint is a few square feet. You can put several million dollars of hardware into that rack. A data center will have at least a few racks. It's a very reasonable investment to bring someone in to do electrical design.
The goop is generally considered to be unnecessary. What you need is a termination that is rated for aluminum wire, and these are very, very common as long as the wire in question is fairly large (8AWG or so and larger).
I only put it in the comment since the commenters here seemed uninformed.
It's better to be safe and follow specs; it's more when you're doing some compound splice where it makes sense. I figure it'll make more people feel easy about it if there's a preventative measure
It's bizarre to me that there is still so much effort spent on resisting IPv6 implementations, we were converting some industrial control networks to it almost 10 years ago and those organizations are basically defined by ancient equipment. Rather than byzantine v4 NAT coordination we mapped entire plants and substations to V6 addresses and put in 6to4 for the PLCs that were old enough to vote, so that multiple sites that all used the same 10.x.y.z blocks because of course they did could be routed together. Had V6 available from my house to pretty much anywhere I cared about in 2017.
As a business, especially a small business, there is no financial reason to do so in the United States for the vast majority of businesses. This gets talked about on NANOG all the time.
It doubles the workload and knowledge required, doubles the security attack surface, and because of the 2nd part, doubles the security risk.
Right or wrong that's the calculation for most spots.
re: the attack surface, I will say that I see such a tiny fraction of probe attempts and common exploit scripts hitting V6 spaces that I open some services on V6 only.
At my house I've had SSH open to the V6 internet for 8 years and have the logger set up to email me for any connections, and I have never once seen an attempt that wasn't me. For popular sites with well known DNS names that's obviously different, but I keep DNS current and can SSH by name to that V6 listener from anywhere so it's not my ISP trying to save me from myself either. And that's not even a host with the normal automatic temporary addresses, it's been a fixed interface id portion with an effectively static V6 prefix for years.
For a while I had several other services open as well, at one point we even played around with using NFS and iSCSI over IPv6 on the internet just for giggles, no actual important data. I can imagine some sysadmin's face twisting in horror just reading that knowing the carnage that would have ensued doing that with V4, where we commonly drop entire geo-blocks just to curtail the log spam of all the various automatic admin portal and VPN login scans.
There are of course techniques to gather live V6 addresses but between the vast space and temporary addresses on most end-user devices it really has been a night and day difference.
It's the same bullshit everywhere it seems. There goes the CGNAT with their router where the "advanced" options are basically defining DHCP settings - through a shitty phone app. There is also the stupid TV that no one asked for but it's part of the package.
And when they do give you v6 its a /64.
I wish there might be a category of prosumer friendly ISP of sorts. Those exist but they are hard to find.
It takes about 24 cores with a GPU to do CONUS, Canada, Alaska, Pacific and Caribbean data. This should be 2x for redundancy. Even being cheap with main processing in my basement (gen power, backup internet) the cloud costs to serve it are $200 month plus data transfer. The standby grib machine spins up should it not see the cheap primary or the NOAAPort receiver is offline.
There is no money to be made without whoring out your user’s privacy. People just won’t pay for a privacy focused weather app. I keep this going as a hobby.