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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • If I give you a free beer, you have one beer. If I give you the recipe, you can make your own beer. You do have to make your own open source beer or you can hire someone to do it for you or perhaps take you through the steps a few times until you’ve got it. With luck there will be a community of open source beer brewers with whom you can interact and improve those recipes.

    Free software is free until it isn’t! The illicit drugs industry works in a similar way (the first hit is for free).



  • gerdesj@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlBeware of security risks!
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    3 months ago

    I’m not feeling too genocidal at the moment and I’m not too sure what a big blob of capitalism looks like but it sounds like you are impugning me (int al) in some way.

    If you are going to deliver a stinging attack on something you dislike, why not deploy an impassioned and pithy argument rather than … that. You do at least manage to spell it’s correctly, which is nice.



  • Errm, Wireshark. Please bear with me.

    Wireshark is a shining example of an open source project completely and utterly crapping on the closed source competition. As a result we all benefit. I recall spending a lot of someone else’s money on buying a sort of ruggedized laptop with two ethernet ports to do the job back in the day.

    Nowdays, I can run up a tcpdump session on a firewall remotely with some carefully chosen timings and filters and download it to my PC and analyse it with Wireshark.

    OK, all so convenient but is it any use?

    Say you have a VoIP issue of some sort. The PCAP from tcpdump that you pass to Wireshark can analyse it to the nth degree. Wireshark knows all about SIP and RTP (and IAX) and you can even play back the voice streams or have them graphed so you can see what is wrong or whatever. That’s just VoIP, it has loads of other dissectors and decorators built in.

    So what?

    The UK (for example) will be dispensing with boring old, but reliable, POTS (Plain Old Telephony System) by 2025. Our entire copper telephony and things like RedCare (defunct soon) will go away.

    We are swapping out circuit switching for packet switching. To be fair, a lot of the backend is already TCP/UDP/IP that is shielded away from us proles. When SoGEA (Single Order Generic Ethernet Access) really kicks in then the old school electric end to end connection will be lost in favour of packet switching, which never fails (honest guv).

    If you are an IT bod of any sort, you really should be conversant with Wireshark.