8 ms·

“ But this was only possible due to the history of Harvard within the advent of the internet and the fact that they had such an excess of addresses that Zuck co

“ But this was only possible due to the history of Harvard within the advent of the internet and the fact that they had such an excess of addresses that Zuck could bind to a public IP address.” This sounds interesting. Can you ELI5?

djbusby 5y ago
That campus had loads of public IPs that students could run services like thefacebook.com from. Public IPs to boxen in your dorm-room.
southerntofu 5y ago
> Can you ELI5? There was a time when the Internet was not divided between producers and consumers of content, but everyone was an equal netizen with publishing capabilities. Then came asymmetric connections, and datacenters, and the modern hellhole we all know to well. It's never too late to act: many "community networks" are doing an amazing job to promote selfhosting and hosting cooperatives.
dsukhin 5y ago
I can speak using MIT as an example and I assume Harvard is the same way for the same reasons. Big research institutions that were present when IP addresses were being allocated got A LOT of IPs by simply asking for them. Apple has the entire 17.0.0.0/8 range. Ford Motor Company has one, the US Gov has a lot [0]. Up until recently MIT had all of 18. (they sold something like half to AWS for a hefty sum not too long ago). As a student (or visitor), when you joined the network (wired or Wi-Fi) you weren’t allocated some internal IP behind a router but a PUBLIC 18.something that was in the global address space because they had so many IPs available. This meant you could literally host something on the public internet from your dorm room because every device on the network was publicly routable by a unique public IP address. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_add... (see the last section on the original allocation)
- jjav 5y ago
  > As a student (or visitor), when you joined the network (wired or Wi-Fi) you weren’t allocated some internal IP behind a router but a PUBLIC As an interesting detail, which seems alien today, is that this was also true at my various employers throughout the 90s. My desktops at work all had public IP addresses and were directly on the Internet, no firewall or anything. I ran mail and web servers, fully internet accessible, on my work desktops (and lab machines). It was a natural thing to do.
  - jiggunjer 5y ago
    so the modem was just connected to a switch?
    - EvanAnderson 5y ago
      The router on the OP's network was probably just being a router. No fancy NAT junk, and probably no ACLs / fireballing. It was pretty common to have something like a T1 circuit, a CSU/DSU that connected to the T1 and presented a serial connection, and a PPP or SDLC connection to your upstream ISP over that serial connection. The router's Ethernet interface is connected to your switch (or hub) and all the hosts have IP addresses in the subnet your ISP assigned. Fancier shops might have a proxy server or dedicated firewall box between the LAN and the router.
      - jiggunjer 5y ago
        I see. An ISP subnet isn't really the same as a public IP though?
        EvanAnderson 5y ago
        Back in the 90s your ISP would have given you a subnet of public IPs to use. I have a Customer w/ a T1 that they've had since the late 90s with the same /26 of public addresses on it the whole time.
    - 5y ago
liamdiprose 5y ago
This is an example of how the internet was originally intended: Every user of the internet has a public address that any other user can send and receive messages from. The design works just like postal addressing. Your postal address contains the directions to your building from any location on earth. Even if you live in a dormitory building with many other residents, I can still send you a letter directly by adding "door number: 42" to your dorm's postal address. IP addressing use numbers instead of English terms like "door" and "street". So I can't simply add "door number" to your building's IP address, your building has to be given enough addresses so each resident's computer can have their own. When your computer has a public IP address, I can send Internet packets directly to you. Harvard was early to the slicing of the IPv4-address pie, so they had enough addresses each of their residents, including Zuck. Anyone with internet could put Zuck's IPv4 address on an Internet packet and it would end up on his computer. Most of these packets would be HTTP requests to facebook.com, to which his computer would reply with a page from the facebook website. This is the internet working as intended. But we ran out of IPv4 addresses in 2012, which has forced internet service providers to adopt an address-sharing scheme called network-address-translation (NAT) that makes it impossible to send letters directly to other people's computers. Imagine I wasn't allowed to put any room number or name on my letters. If I sent a letter to your dormitory, the staff there wouldn't know what to do with the letter and would be forced to return-to-sender or discard it. This is what NAT does, and it has turned the glory of the Internet into a centralized monster of control and censorship. If you want to host a website with a public IPv4, only established cloud providers that obtained enough IPv4 addresses before it was too late can help you (primarily Amazon, Google and Microsoft). The successor of IPv4, IPv6, brings enough address space for every person, their dog, their dog's fleas, and their dog's flea's microbes. We can go back to hosting websites from our dormitories, sending chat messages directly to our friends (not via Google, Facebook and Microsoft), and start new ISPs that missed out on the IPv4 pie that actually have a chance at competing with the likes of Comcast. IPv6 reintroduces equity to the internet that facebook benefited from in it's inception.
- hansel_der 5y ago
  NAT was a thing much before ip addresses became scarse, is a key enabler in the "internets" ease of use as well as the principal ability to connect nearly double-digit billions of devices with about 200mio live addresses. the end-to-end principle is mostly undermined by stateful firewalls and a total lack of secure-by-design in software developement, this will not change with ipv6

djbusby 5y ago

That campus had loads of public IPs that students could run services like thefacebook.com from. Public IPs to boxen in your dorm-room.

southerntofu 5y ago

> Can you ELI5? There was a time when the Internet was not divided between producers and consumers of content, but everyone was an equal netizen with publishing capabilities. Then came asymmetric connections, and datacenters, and the modern hellhole we all know to well. It's never too late to act: many "community networks" are doing an amazing job to promote selfhosting and hosting cooperatives.

dsukhin 5y ago

I can speak using MIT as an example and I assume Harvard is the same way for the same reasons. Big research institutions that were present when IP addresses were being allocated got A LOT of IPs by simply asking for them. Apple has the entire 17.0.0.0/8 range. Ford Motor Company has one, the US Gov has a lot [0]. Up until recently MIT had all of 18. (they sold something like half to AWS for a hefty sum not too long ago). As a student (or visitor), when you joined the network (wired or Wi-Fi) you weren’t allocated some internal IP behind a router but a PUBLIC 18.something that was in the global address space because they had so many IPs available. This meant you could literally host something on the public internet from your dorm room because every device on the network was publicly routable by a unique public IP address. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_add... (see the last section on the original allocation)

jjav 5y ago
> As a student (or visitor), when you joined the network (wired or Wi-Fi) you weren’t allocated some internal IP behind a router but a PUBLIC As an interesting detail, which seems alien today, is that this was also true at my various employers throughout the 90s. My desktops at work all had public IP addresses and were directly on the Internet, no firewall or anything. I ran mail and web servers, fully internet accessible, on my work desktops (and lab machines). It was a natural thing to do.
- jiggunjer 5y ago
  so the modem was just connected to a switch?
  - EvanAnderson 5y ago
    The router on the OP's network was probably just being a router. No fancy NAT junk, and probably no ACLs / fireballing. It was pretty common to have something like a T1 circuit, a CSU/DSU that connected to the T1 and presented a serial connection, and a PPP or SDLC connection to your upstream ISP over that serial connection. The router's Ethernet interface is connected to your switch (or hub) and all the hosts have IP addresses in the subnet your ISP assigned. Fancier shops might have a proxy server or dedicated firewall box between the LAN and the router.
    - jiggunjer 5y ago
      I see. An ISP subnet isn't really the same as a public IP though?
      - EvanAnderson 5y ago
        Back in the 90s your ISP would have given you a subnet of public IPs to use. I have a Customer w/ a T1 that they've had since the late 90s with the same /26 of public addresses on it the whole time.
  - 5y ago

liamdiprose 5y ago

This is an example of how the internet was originally intended: Every user of the internet has a public address that any other user can send and receive messages from. The design works just like postal addressing. Your postal address contains the directions to your building from any location on earth. Even if you live in a dormitory building with many other residents, I can still send you a letter directly by adding "door number: 42" to your dorm's postal address. IP addressing use numbers instead of English terms like "door" and "street". So I can't simply add "door number" to your building's IP address, your building has to be given enough addresses so each resident's computer can have their own. When your computer has a public IP address, I can send Internet packets directly to you. Harvard was early to the slicing of the IPv4-address pie, so they had enough addresses each of their residents, including Zuck. Anyone with internet could put Zuck's IPv4 address on an Internet packet and it would end up on his computer. Most of these packets would be HTTP requests to facebook.com, to which his computer would reply with a page from the facebook website. This is the internet working as intended. But we ran out of IPv4 addresses in 2012, which has forced internet service providers to adopt an address-sharing scheme called network-address-translation (NAT) that makes it impossible to send letters directly to other people's computers. Imagine I wasn't allowed to put any room number or name on my letters. If I sent a letter to your dormitory, the staff there wouldn't know what to do with the letter and would be forced to return-to-sender or discard it. This is what NAT does, and it has turned the glory of the Internet into a centralized monster of control and censorship. If you want to host a website with a public IPv4, only established cloud providers that obtained enough IPv4 addresses before it was too late can help you (primarily Amazon, Google and Microsoft). The successor of IPv4, IPv6, brings enough address space for every person, their dog, their dog's fleas, and their dog's flea's microbes. We can go back to hosting websites from our dormitories, sending chat messages directly to our friends (not via Google, Facebook and Microsoft), and start new ISPs that missed out on the IPv4 pie that actually have a chance at competing with the likes of Comcast. IPv6 reintroduces equity to the internet that facebook benefited from in it's inception.

hansel_der 5y ago
NAT was a thing much before ip addresses became scarse, is a key enabler in the "internets" ease of use as well as the principal ability to connect nearly double-digit billions of devices with about 200mio live addresses. the end-to-end principle is mostly undermined by stateful firewalls and a total lack of secure-by-design in software developement, this will not change with ipv6