On Tuesday, 1 July 2025 18:03:05 CEST Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > When I first used the Internet in the late 80s, the only way to reach it > was through a University with a connection. There was something of a two > tier effect in place because the machines of the era were regulated by a > priesthood of system administrators. > > Part of the reason the Web won and competing network hypertext systems lost > was that anyone with access to a machine could run the HTTP service, albeit > maybe not on port 80. > > Fast forward to 1995 and we start to see a split between the ultra-fast > (T1!) connection at the university and dialup access. Dialup isn't just > slower, it is temporary. Nobody is going to want to be running a service > that matters over dialup (some did of course but nobody wanted to). > > Since then, broadband has replaced dialup. But that is all broadband has > done. I have 1Gb/s into the house but I don't have a full Internet > connection I can run services until Verizon's truck rolls to upgrade me to > a full business line with static IP addresses in the fall. > > Where we have ended up is with a two speed Internet in which residential > users have a greatly curtailed Internet experience over what someone with a > static IP address, a DNS name registration and (most important) some > serious network administration skills can achieve. For the time being, it's quite late at night and my brain is admittedly starting to shut down. I have so far read until here, will try to do my best to read more into it tomorrow. I have a bad habit of taking on more projects than time allows though.. so no promises. In terms of dial-up / residential connections in general, wholeheartedly agreed. Pretty much all of my services are reverse proxied by a pair of servers hosted by Hetzner, that just run NGINX' TCP streams into my home, over WireGuard. The mail servers that will be handling this mail, are among them. So is my website, so are most of my DNS servers, so is my Gitea instance, ... At home because while I love working with Hetzner, I do not want to entrust them with anything I clawed back from predatory services like Google, Microsoft, and so on. My services are mine, not yours. I don't care who that you is, you are not me. I would love to be able to run these things directly off my home networks.. however, that comes with its own slew of issues. Let's assume that I don't live in a pathetically flat croissant of a country called Belgium, and that our Internet infrastructure is somewhat decent i.e. not copper throughout. Let's assume that we have static IPs for everything, say IPv6 took over despite BNIX statistics saying.. eh, IPv4 still going pretty strong. Incumbents are one hell of a force to be reckoned with. And let's say that everyone got their first.last.name awarded as a birthright domain. Okay, we've got the basis of a residential hosting platform. But now we stumble into the same issues that businesses face too -- do you want to register your business on your home address? Do you want that information to be public? The choice should be there, absolutely, but is that something you want? I'll be honest with you... I don't want you to know where I live. I don't know whether you have good or bad intent with it. I don't know who you are. That brings us into the primal concept of predatory trust. You may well be able and/or willing to eat me alive. Do I really want you to know details about me? For better or worse, those servers at Hetzner tell you nothing about me, other than what I voluntarily share here and on my other public resources. I think that is a noteworthy benefit that they provided, though I do agree that it should be a choice that should not be gatekept by IT experience and monetary funds. This was meant to be everyone's Internet. Having all this said, I do quite like this conversation. Will try my best to look further into it, and will try to be remotely present at the 123 hackathon. Looking forward to what code you have! -- Met vriendelijke groet, Michael De Roover Mail: ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx Web: michael.de.roover.eu.org
