• 13 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • I just really want to see where the numbers come from.

    You know people self hosting email, I know people self hosting email. But that is certainly not the case for the vast, vast majority of individuals. For businesses, I have seen Exchange take over what used to be smaller hosts, and Google has broken into the small/medium business world as well. I have searched and searched and found nothing, but I don’t see why it should be so hard to do. Obtain a list of email addresses from some data breach (I dunno how but I’m sure security researchers do it all the time) then check their DNS to see what proportion point at big tech. My gut feel is that it’s a large proportion, but maybe that’s just the corner I work in.


  • email can be run using hundreds of servers on dozens of platforms even from your own house and interact with the email network.

    It’s nice that it can, but the point of this list is is that what actually happens for the majority of people?

    And from my experience, the answer is no, the vast majority of people use Microsoft or Google.

    This claim is “Top Provider User Share: Google ≈ 17% → Score: 27/30”

    Where does this number come from? Gmail alone claims 1.5 billion active users. Outlook.com has 500 million. But then you have to start adding up all the email users worldwide that are using services hosted by Microsoft (all the Exchange business customers), and the google customers as well (that may or may not be included in the Gmail figures). Then there are all the ISP email addresses that use these services as the provider.

    I find it hard to believe that email is as decentralised as claimed here, and I’m really keen to see more data on how it was calculated.

    The reason I find it so hard to believe is that when Microsoft fucks up (and given time they always do), a significant portion of the business customers I deal with get affected.






  • I’m not sure what others see as the context of the meme, but in my experience it’s normally when you are fiddling with it, but you never expect it to be the problem because it seems so simple.

    There are many reasons you might need to fiddle with is. The most obvious is when you move your server to a new computer, it might get a new IP address. But your browser might cache the old address. Your computer might cache it. Your DNS server might cache it (like the rest of the internet, there is not one big DNS server but many smaller ones - most non-technical people would be using one provided by their internet provider). It might not be working and you presume it’s a problem with the new server but actually it’s the DNS.

    But also DNS as a system is also used for things that are not directly related to looking up a domain name. For example, when sending an email, there are many checks on the receiving side to ensure that the email is actually coming from somewhere that is allowed to send an email from that domain name. I can send an email to you from bill@microsoft.com, but it would go straight to spam because it would fail those checks. DNS records are used to authorise servers that can send email on behalf of that domain. And just generally DNS is used for proving domain ownership (for example, it’s one method to get a certificate from Let’s Encrypt to allow secure connections to your website).


  • When you access something on the internet, you are accessing something on someone else’s computer.

    Computers have (effectively) postal addresses. When you want to access content on another computer, you type in its address.

    But computer addresses don’t look like “fedia.io” they look like “123.122.1.111”.

    When you type “fedia.io” your computer needs to go and ask what the computer’s address is.

    That’s DNS. The Domain Name System. The system for finding the computer address from a domain name.

    The above is very simplified and doesn’t cover all scenarios, but I hope it’s enough to get the idea.


  • I’m assuming the reasons we don’t use a square are cost and space. Phones are pretty tightly packed in, every 1mm width you add probably has flow on effects for other things you can’t have.

    And I am not sure what the limiting factor is but if you add a bunch more light sensors to make it square I’m assuming that comes with additional cost, not just the sensors but now you need to connect up a bunch more to whatever controls it which then might need more processing power or smaller connectors or some other flow on impact.






  • Dave@lemmy.nztoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    10 days ago

    Isn’t the idea that if you advertise you will get more people looking at/downloading your app and therefore rank higher?

    It doesn’t make it not paid product placement, but I don’t think it implies that people are buying spots on the ranking.

    It does imply the rank is almost useless because most high rankers are just spending a lot on ads.