This I’m interested in, because its at the edge/limits of my knowledge when it comes to domains and cellular networking.
Are you saying if cell phones had a larger address space, let’s say 32 digits base 10, and every device was given a cell phone number, it would overwhelm the existing infrastructure?
Fair, I could have said fully qualified number, including country code.
And also fair, instead of saying a MAC could be edited, I should’ve said each phone number has one global owner, while each MAC address could have many owners.
Corrections have been made 👍
AFAIK a static IP does not fix that. If I’m wrong, which is possible, I’d be very happy to find that out.
I can send a message to the IP address but AFAIK the message won’t get to him because he will almost certainly have a new address when he connects to the airport WiFi in the new city.
The IP doesn’t persist across network hops (cell tower to cell tower) and the MAC address doesnt have one verified owner. A phone number is both verified having one owner and persists across network hops.
Yes I’m sure. Try changing the number to 911. Phone numbers only have one owner, MAC addresses may have many owners.
no need for an endpoint to be directly exposed
If I were an engineer in the past, trying to send a message back to an endpoint (e.g. a server response) I would’ve reached for everything having a static IP, same as the EID system with phones, instead of the DHCP multi-tier NAT type system with temp addresses.
I’m all but certain they didnt do it for privacy reasons at the time.
Same people who decide phone numbers and domain names. We already have central registries, why does it being a computer make it harder to have a central authority?
Solid answer, thanks! You deserve all the upvotes that were, instead, for some reason, given to the guy that just said “I think its a MAC address”
I meant “in the same way that phone numbers are unique to phones (not perfectly unique, some phones have dual Sim, some have no sim, sometimes a Sim changes numbers after contacting the provider, etc)”
Its just typing all that^ in a title is kinda long.
EUI-64 IPv6 (and why its not a reality) though is kinda what I’m curious about. But not really because, even under that spec, its still not static like a phone number. I want to know why networks were not created in a way where I can send a message to a laptop regardless of what WiFi its connected to (assuming it is connected and online).
Every phone number has one owner, but MAC addresses can have many owners. They’re categorically different.
How would the internet know how to find your phone?
The same way phone calls try to find a phone when its powered off. Attempt, and then fail under a timeout.
Where would the registery be?
Same place as the phone number registry. Or the domain name registry.
That would be one giant database
Yep the domain name registry and cell phone registry very much are AFAIK
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Cell phones don’t get a new phone number every time they switch cell towers, so why do laptops.
Its not like I can write down the IP address of my friends laptop so I can send it a message once he gets to a new city. Right?
I’m shocked this answer has so many upvotes. No, a MAC address is not close to a phone number. No two people have the same phone number, and I can’t just edit my phone number to be someone else’s number.
The “front page” of most instances are not interesting to average people or to professionals (e.g. local gov that wants to go open source, like those switching to Mastodon).
Part is lemmy’s hot-sort is basically broken as a ranking, another part is bad language filters, another part is that major communities here (fediverse, Linux memes, star trek memes, science memes, etc) are off-putting to out-of-group people because of so many in-group jokes. Its a hard fix.
I think we can agree “Good reseach” is in the how-its-done. I wish journals would chose/require/verify the how-its-done (time frame, resources, hypothesis, method etc) but after that be contractually required publish whatever conclusion is discovered by the team/project they picked and verified.
This is why my field (reinforcement learning) is unfortunately not science.
(Can’t really publish “hey I tried this algorithm and it didn’t work”)
If I’m understanding correctly, you’re saying that right now the network doesn’t have an exhaustive table of IP addresses to physical locations. It has a cache, and a hierarchy, and the path to a location of the IP is fluid.
But a system where every device could be directly contacted/identified like a Sim card, would effectively require a complete table of “what network is device ABC at”. A table that is updated every time the device changes network connections. It would be like trying to change domain name to point to a different IP address.
The problem is, updating a domain to point to a new IP takes hours or days not seconds, so doing that every time a phone changes WiFi is not practical.
Is that a good summary?