Well said, great analogy. Sometimes the level of abstraction feels arbitrary - you have to understand the circumstances that led there to see why it's not.
Because I’m saying the threat vector you used to justify it is not an issue for me at all, so it’s a baseless justification for “security”, ergo, theatre.
That's still not theater though. Annoying? Yes, quite! But according to the definition:
> Security theater is the practice of implementing security measures that are considered to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to achieve it.[1][2]
Adding additional security to something that doesn’t need security is basically doing this by definition. It’s adding nothing because nothing was needed. So yes, theatre.
If there’s one thing I learnt from HN it’s how many people can’t comprehend this. Is it a byproduct of growing up in a very transactional or selfish environment?
Yes. First being a YouTube creator became a business, then twitch, tiktok, twitter. GenZ basically grew up with everything being/becoming a business "opportunity". Making money is the goal for "creators", to the point where ads have become normalized and not having a sponsor is leaving money on the table.
Whataboutism is just fascinating. How myopic must your world view be that when you see one bad thing, you immediately try to justify it by pointing out another bad thing?
I used to think along these lines. But now I think the truth is - does it matter if the economy grinds to a halt? Perhaps the ruling class can still keep enough Americans comfortable enough, and fearful of losing more, doing largely pointless jobs, to stay passive - and that’s all they need to do to completely bifurcate the society such that they face no threat to their own position.
It’s got to the point where I turn off my WiFi now to do performance-sensitive work, because of the boost that killing all this background rubbish gives. Anything I need online I can just offload to my phone while my computer is offline.
If the computer doesn't have any online network connection, shouldn't it outright error? I understand that the timeout sucks when your network is not connected to the internet but still alive, then that's an issue, but if there is no connection at all, why would the timeouts matter?
It wouldn't be able to open a TCP connection without knowing what IP address / interface to use.
You're right--it should outright error. You should only see timeouts like that if you were dropping the packets from some middleware or middlebox, but your client still had a valid IP address.
It was a badly-written comment. I meant some apps (and background tasks) on my computer hang. Most deal with it, but a surprising number don’t. I gave up on sniffing with Terminal and other tools, trying to figure out which ones. I have a number of dev tools installed on my computer, and a lot of those have a … casual … approach to quality.
I have no issue admitting fault (I do it way too often), but I don’t really dig rewarding boorish behavior, so I just figured I’d leave it alone.
The problem with this is some apps do incredibly stupid things. Now I'm not saying the operating system itself, but I had some ide screw off and go into long pause mode when my laptop was in airplane mode.
So are you willing to admit now that "the standard TCP timeout" was a misdiagnosis of your problem?
You appeared to be projecting a personal problem with some unnamed badly coded apps onto everyone, as if it were inevitable, but the original commenter who said they turned off WiFi obviously does not experience this problem, and neither do I for that matter.
It can cause problems to flip off the internet when you already have open connections, though there are also API to detect changes in network availability. But I don't see that as a significant problem for "I turn off my WiFi now to do performance-sensitive work". First turn off WiFi, then launch the app you need, in that order. Problem solved.
You're not thinking like a systemd developer. The right thing to do is to ignore all anecdotes and direct evidence that a problem exists. I am talking about systemd renaming your network interfaces because you added or removed hardware.
systemd should add and remove interfaces connected in the exact same hardware path with the same name they had before.
Default literally insane legacy behaviour is just vomiting eth${RAND} where RAND depends on racing conditions.
My educated guess is that people that insist on using the legacy eth${RAND} never had a surprise random firewall and routing rules suddenly apply to different interfaces at a inconvenient time, making production halt and catch on fire, yet.
hardware paths change when you add or remove hardware. systemd developers deny this despite it affecting half of all desktop computers in existence. Your one network jack used to be eth0, systemd now changes it each time you add or remove hardware and insist they're making it more stable instead of more variable whilst they are making it more variable.
Yep. I've experienced on several computers that the systemd-approved "predictable" network device name changes when adding or removing a SSD. The solution is to turn off the network device renaming and allow the single ethernet interface in the machine to always be known as eth0.
systemd developers like to come up with clever solutions to the problems they care about, and ignore the side effects for any use cases they don't care about. And quite often those afflicted use cases are the ones most people would consider to be the more typical use cases.
Because of systemd I often have to add udev rules to rename my devices to something consistent, which has the advantage I can use even more sensible names, like "upper" and "lower", or "eth" and "wifi", but the disadvantage I have to learn udev.
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