dan

The underlying protocol (RFB) is very simple to implement, and in fact some friends and I implemented both a VNC client and server as part of a project we worked on at university nearly 20 years ago.

Because of this, it's common to find it in various places, especially for interacting with systems that don't have an OS installed yet:

Most good VPS providers provide VNC access so you can set up your own OS from an ISO, use Clonezilla to clone the drive over the network, recover files if the drive gets corrupted somehow, etc. It's a built-in feature of KVM/libvirt that the providers usually expose using something like NoVNC in their control panel. The common off-the-shelf control panels (Virtualizor, SolusVM, Virtfusion, Proxmox, etc) all have it as a standard feature.

A lot of IPMI/BMC and KVM-over-IP systems use VNC too, for a similar purpose, just for physical hardware rather than VMs. The protocol being very simple makes it easy to build a simple version into an embedded system. This is also usually accessed via NoVNC in a web UI.

One of the ways it can happen is if a router doesn't have a proper IPv6 firewall.

The majority of internet users in the USA have IPv6 connectivity - something like 55-60% overall, and close to 100% on some networks. T-Mobile's network is 100% IPv6-only, using 464XLAT for connectivity to legacy IPv4-only servers. Most Comcast customers have IPv6 too, as they were the first major ISP to roll out IPv6, close to 15 years ago now.

Without an IPv6 firewall on the router, all devices on your network are directly accessible from the outside world (unless they're running their own firewall, of course). At least Windows ships with a firewall enabled by default, which reduces the impact for Windows users.

I've seen this in places you wouldn't expect it, too. TP-Link's prosumer/SMB 10Gbps router (Omada ER8411) didn't have an IPv6 firewall until about a year after launch. I had to disable IPv6 until then. They did add it, but I've since switched to a Unifi Cloud Gateway Fiber.

Thankfully I haven't seen it recently, so maybe it's not an issue any more on modern hardware.

NAT is a hack, not a security feature, and IPv6 removes the need for it. The firewall is the security feature. (edit: the firewall on the router)

I think people will eventually have to get used to paying for things though, if bots / AI / ad blockers kill off the feasibility of online advertising. Either that or everything becoming a freemium service with major limits for free users.

So I can install any software I want. I'm running my own Lemmy server. I host Odoo and n8n for my wife's business. I have servers running Borgbackup and Borgmatic for backups. And a bunch of other stuff.

It's the same way that taxes work. Rich people contribute more than poorer people, but everyone can use things funded by public money (parks, police, fire fighters, public transport, schools, health care outside the USA, etc).

I actually wonder if there should be more taxpayer-funded online services. Lemmy's development was partially funded by government money (NLNet Foundation via the European Commission) for example.

I've tried that before, but barely anyone donates. People expect the world for free.

I agree about the automated scaling, but with VPS hosting you can usually have several hot spares to handle traffic spikes, and still spend less than something like AWS. Most good VPS hosts will let you create a private network between your VPSes. 1000x spikes aren't very common.

CDNs are pretty easy in general, especially if they support origin pull.

I don't like keeping all my eggs in one basket, so I use a few different providers.

Yes, because a Linux server with root access is much more powerful than a platform like Cloudflare.

There seems to be two groups of people:

People that use services like AWS and pay hundreds (or more) per month: "Wow, hosting is so expensive now!"

People that host a bunch of stuff on a $40/year VPS: "Wow, hosting is so cheap now!"

I've got several VPSes with 40Gbps (shared) networking, 8 or 16GB RAM, decent amount of space on RAIDed enterprise NVMe SSDs, fast AMD EPYC CPUs, that cost less than $60/year. 20 years ago before VPS hosting became popular, you'd need to pay at least $100/month for a dedicated server with a consumer CPU, single IDE hard drive, tiny amount of RAM, on a 100Mb/s connection.

Not to mention being able to host a bunch of stuff at home for cheap with a low-power single-board or mini PC., and Hetzner making dedicated servers very cheap too.

every time I have an idea for some little quality of life tool that involves pulling data from a site I would normally have to browse to directly, I can't do it because everything is captcha'd to all hell.

On the flip side, a bunch of services / web apps (mostly paid ones) are adding APIs to become "AI native"... but you can use those APIs without having to use AI too.

A lot of sites wouldn't exist without ads, because they want their stuff to be freely-accessible and don't have any other revenue streams. It would also cut off lower income people that couldn't afford to pay.

The only business models that have really worked online have been:

1. Ad-supported.
2. You pay for the service yourself, like a monthly subscription.
3. Someone else pays for the service for you, for example freemium services (paid users subsidize the free users), a lot of Lemmy servers (admins cover the hosting costs), etc.

If ads go away, a lot of sites/services would have to become paid services, and smaller ones might just shut down entirely. We'd end up with even more consolidation of the market.

I generally respect this guy's opinion (I probably use the term "enshitification" multiple times a week

A lot of people don't use it the way he used it though. He used it specifically for two sided markets (eg a service that has both businesses/advertisers and personal users) where the focus shifts to the business customers, but people have started using it to mean anything that used to be good but isn't good any more.