Node.js is a web server. It doesn’t run in a browser, therefore doesn’t deal with the browser sandbox. That should answer your first dig.

For the second part, WebRTC is a standard that allows two WebRTC peers to communicate. You can’t use WebRTC to open an arbitrary TCP or UDP stream to for example a database, unless said database decides to implement a WebRTC peer support.

If you’re unfamiliar with all of this, that’s your job to get educated. This is how browser-based JS software works.

The browser version cannot connect to Postgres without a server-side part, for rather obvious reasons - you can’t just make arbitrary network connections from the browser. Electron build is of course different, as that doesn’t have to deal with the browser sandbox.

By the way, here’s a similar issue documented in Outerbase’s repo:

Outerbase Studio Desktop is a lightweight Electron wrapper for the Outerbase Studio web version. It enables support for drivers that aren’t feasible in a browser environment, such as MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Not gonna lie, telling people how they need to get educated on stuff you don’t understand ticks me off.

Potentially the same thing, assuming PCIe 2 x1 provides enough bandwidth.

The thing that’s going to be locked behind the subscription is your ability to watch those files on your NAS through Plex when you’re not in the same network as the Plex server. That’s streaming.

If you only use Plex while at home, you will indeed be unaffected

Google Maps is US-based whether you use it in the US or anywhere else

Only true if you don’t know what you’re doing. The only reason any network is safe at all is NAT and Firewalls that come with it.

I don’t have to worry about devices on a local network in as far as firewalls go, I can expose anything I want, in fact I delete iptables at first sight on any new distro install or VM, so long as none of it is port forwarded and everything is behind NAT it’s all okay. My network is my castle. Thanks technology! Thanks smart people for figuring this out!

NAT is not a security mechanism. If you set up a NAT with an otherwise permissive firewall, your router will happily forward any incoming packets destined for RFC 1918 addresses inside, no questions asked. I use this for a “lab” network that I sometimes want accessible from the bigger LAN - the lab router doesn’t have any rules for dropping incoming packets (only blocks some outgoing traffic), and all I have to do on the main router to get this working is to set a static route to the internal lab network through the lab router’s “external” IP.

And yes, practically it’s a security nightmare to have any IP of any computer accessible from the internet. If you go around configuring firewalls forever you might get it right but oh boy one mistake and you’re done for. Instead, consider NAT, the solution to all problems. I’m writing this behind quadruple NAT rn and it’s honestly fairly easy to manage, I’ve been too lazy to change it, not that I’d advise anything more than 1 necessarily.

accept established, related; drop incoming. That’s all you need to get the same security as a NAT with a proper firewall. Outgoing connections will get marked and have return traffic allowed, everything incoming without related outgoing traffic gets dropped. Want to “port forward”? Add a rule that allows incoming traffic to a specific IP/port/protocol triplet. Done. Don’t know how to make sure a client stays reachable on a specific address? Give it that specific IP address in addition to the one it autogenerates. This was always possible with IPv4, too, it’s just that the tiny address space made it impractical to use.

How do you get the equivalent of NAT punchthrough (which is unreliable with many NAT implementations) when you want to do a VoIP call without having to bounce all the data through a central server? Simple, you can just tell both clients the other one’s IP and port, have them spam each other for a tiny while with messages and eventually a message gets through both firewalls. It is very similar to NAT punchthrough, except you don’t have to guess how the NATs work and it’ll reliably connect.

Yikes! That’s a lot to type to hammer in a nail that sticks out (Android). Thanks but no thanks. I’ll find some way to cripple mDNS on the non-compliant device instead.

Not sure why you’d regularly need to type out the whole thing. Also not sure why you picked .local when .lan is also incorrectly used for this purpose and is shorter (and isn’t yet assigned to any conflicting technology)

So are you saying you run some sort of mDNS server(not sure what the word would be there)/provider? Why? How?

The point of mDNS is that devices auto discover each other on a network without a central authority. The word multicast in multicast DNS is the key. And the reason I use it is because… it just works. There’s no need to configure it, it works like this by default on pretty much every OS. Set the hostname and you’re done, .local now works. You can even bridge it across networks with a mDNS repeater available on many routers.

Given the ambiguity of certificates everywhere, malicious devices on the local network posing as a different server are not an issue (and it’s not like they couldn’t hijack the IP address in any flat network anyway).

Well don’t build your network around unassigned TLDs.

Also NAT does literally nothing other than being a massive PITA, so… yeah, I don’t think there’s much I can agree with in your rant.

Like, oh no, fully functional point to point connectivity across the internet, how terrible

Edit: .home.arpa is actually designated as local TLD, and is what I use for a crappy old tablet that doesn’t support mDNS

Yeah, stock Google voice recognition also works offline if you download the language model beforehand.

Indeed, try switching your smartphone to airplane mode and see how far your voice commands get you.

Did that (or rather disabled mobile data and WiFi, because airplane mode would still keep the WiFi on), and then I dictated this sentence after the parentheses. So Google’s voice input works offline just fine.

Or do they mean something like a smart assistant? In that case fair, but it’s not like it will work with text input either.

It is true, however, that Google Translate doesn’t do offline voice translation even if the language you’re trying to translate from is downloaded for system-wide voice recognition.

There’s no inherent guarantee that a router has a firewall configured properly, or has it enabled.

If it’s not an enterprise router (where you sometimes start with a blank configuration), it most definitely does have a firewall blocking incoming traffic by default.

In the deployments you’re seeing, are ISPs handing out /120 blocks to each router?

/120 is not enough for IPv6 to reasonably work. It kinda requires the smallest block to be /64, otherwise half the cool stuff about IPv6 breaks. So you should get something between /48 and /64 (the recommendation for ISPs is /56 for residential users so they can subdivide their network to 256 other networks, and /48 as default commercial allocation).

Does that require the ISP to have access to alter your home router, or do customers configure the DHCP themselves (which seems unlikely to scale)?

There is DHCPv6, but it’s not really an important part of a network like DHCP for v4 networks. IIRC Android doesn’t even support it. IPv6 uses Router Advertisement (RA) to tell devices what prefix they’re in (and a few things that were originally DHCP options, like the preferred DNS servers), and the devices then pick their own address using the SLAAC mechanism (originally it was derived from the MAC address, but nowadays should be a random number). RA supports “multilayer” networks where each following router further subdivides the prefix it got.

If you want a static address (for example for a server), you can either configure it manually on the device (using tokenized addresses, i.e. “static local part with dynamic prefix”), or use a DHCPv6 server to assign the address (in which case the RA responses from your router need to indicate that there is a DHCPv6 server on the network).

Also, you talked about the fc00::/7 (or its locally managed half, fd00::/8) prefix as a proof that NAT is used with IPv6, but… There’s absolutely nothing stopping you from having both a globally routable address and a local only address at the same time. IPv6 already requires you to have at least two addresses when you connect to any network - a link local address and whatever other address you get assigned (btw IPv4 never prevented you from doing the same thing, it just wasn’t directly encouraged and wasn’t widely used, and DHCP didn’t support handing out multiple addresses unlike RA).

You can even get a security “improvement” over the claimed scenario with NAT with this - if you don’t assign a global address to a node, then not only will it be unreachable from the internet, it will also be unable to connect to the internet itself while being reachable from your network without any issues. “Air gapping” (I know, I know… but people use this term for “no internet” now) for folks afraid of firewalls!

I would hope it’s a special, heavy-duty kind at least.

I’ve seen an expensive microwave with a capacitive touch panel right above the door (and the door was the classic oven style, so attached by the bottom edge). If you ever had a phone with crappy moisture detection, you know where this is going.

You put your food in the microwave. Turn it on and let it heat the food up. Open the door, take the food out and close the door again. Congratulations, your microwave has probably just turned itself back on, because it detected the humid hot air rising from the briefly opened door as you touching the screen. And because most of the touch screen is “touchable”, there’s a pretty good chance this gust of humid air can successfully pick a cooking/heating mode and confirm it.

The microwave randomly navigating its own touch screen happened pretty much every time, passing all the menus and turning on was successful about 10% of the time.

In short, I wouldn’t expect a microwave interface to have any thought put into it.