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by listening 5279 days ago
With the widespread use of anycast, does "first class addressing for machines" even matter any more?

In situations where anycast is used, how do you even know what machine a given address to connecting to?

RON was a step in the right direction, imo. With small overlays, MAC addressing comes into play and it becomes a little easier to know what machines (not simply what "addresses") you are really connected to.
1 comments
tptacek 5279 days ago
Yes, because conceptually you're still talking to a computer (it just happens to be a globally load balanced computer). It's still the unicast service model, and it's still fundamentally about building a channel between two operating systems.
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listening 5279 days ago
Imagine if you dialled a full telephone number, including applicable country code and local regional code, and depending on where you were dialling from, you reached a different telephone in a different geographical location.

As long as it's an answering machine and the message is the same at every telephone reached by this number, it does not matter.

But as soon as you want to reach a live person, and not simply "content", then what?

Is end-to-end about accessing "content" or is it about communicating with someone operating another computer?

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tptacek 5279 days ago
I wouldn't want to noodle on this too much. I take your point. Anycast abstracts away some of the notion that you're talking to a specific computer. But the unicast service model is inherently about computers talking to each other. Many, maybe most, of the most important Internet applications aren't about 1-1 conversations, or if they are, they're 1-1 conversations in special cases of systems that also work 1-many.
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listening 5278 days ago
Importance is a subjective concept.

One opinion is that a very important Internet application will inevitably be 1-1.

Who did the FCC just hire as their new CTO? What is happening to POTS?

1-to-many systems, hacked to give an illusion of 1-1 conversations, e.g. smtp middlemen, social networking's http servers or twitter-like broadcast sms, are what we settle for today, but, imo, this is a limitation not a desired goal.

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