Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)

I like coffee, Philly, Pittsburgh, Arabic language, anything on two wheels, music, linux, theology, cats, computers, pacifism, art, unity, equity, etymology, the power of words, and getting high off airplane glue. Will use Adobe Illustrator for food.

  • 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 16 days ago
cake
Cake day: July 30th, 2025

help-circle


  • My unpopular opinion is that Flash was perhaps one of the greatest media standards of all time. Think about it — in 2002, people were packaging entire 15 minute animations with full audio and imagery, all encapsulated in a single file that could play in any browser, for under 10mb each. Not to mention, it was one of the earliest formats to support streaming. It used vectors for art, which meant that a SWF file would look just as good today on a 4k screen as it did in 2002.

    It only became awful once we started forcing it to be stuff it didn’t need to be, like a Web design platform, or a common platform for applets. This introduced more and more advanced versions of scripting that continually introduced new vulnerabilities.

    It was a beautiful way to spread culture back when the fastest Internet anyone could get was 1 MB/sec.












  • I worked with one of the inventors of IPv6 for a bit of time, and I think knowing Carl really gave me an insight into who IPv6 was invented for, and that’s the big, big, big networks — peering groups that connect large swaths of the Internet with other nations’ municipal or public infrastructure.

    These groups are pushing petabytes of data every hour, and as a result, I think it makes their strategists think VERY big picture. From what I’ve seen, IPv6 addresses very real logistical problems you only see with IPv4 when you’re already dealing with it on a galactic scale. So, I personally have no doubt that IPv6 is necessary and that the theory is sound.

    However, this fuckin’ half-in/half-out state has become the engine of a manifold of security issues, primarily bc nobody but nerds or industry specialists knows that much about it yet. That has led to rushed, busy, or just plain lazy devs and engineers to either keep IPv6 sockets listening, unguarded, or to just block them outright and redirect traffic to IPv4 anyway.

    Imo there’s not much to be done besides go forward with IPv6. It’s there, it’s tested, it’s basically ready for primetime in terms of NIC chip support… I just wish it weren’t so obtuse to learn. :/