Readers’ comments
Your views and feedback from email and the web
IP4 > IP6
I have just read your article about
RIPE bemoaning that we are scraping the bottom of the barrel with IPv4 addresses ( see issue 305, p13). This is really not new news as RIPE has been saying it for years.
In fact, RIPE announced that it had fully run out of all the 4,294,967,296 IPv4 addresses on 25 November 2019. This was only 50 years since DARPA started to use IPv4 in an early form of the internet, the growth of which has been exponential.
What is being done to address the limits of IPv4, like changing the world over to IPv6? Most modern hardware can use IPv6, but running both addressing methods side by side is an imperfect solution as the translation from one to the other can take time. This adds latency to transmission times, which can be bad for both gamers and traders. Michael Ashworth
Liquid pricing
Tim Danton’s editorial in issue 305 ( see p7) struck a chord. My ten-licence copy of Norton Internet Security recently expired. In advance of this happening, I received an email from Norton offering automatic renewal for £90. I searched on Amazon and found the same product on offer for £28.19. I logged on to Norton to cancel renewal and a Norton agent immediately offered to cut the price by half. I declined on the basis that £45 was still over £15 more than Amazon. The agent said he understood.
I can’t understand the business merits of this kind of flexible pricing. Perhaps it pays off for Norton because many users are duped into paying the full £990 byy the automatic renewal
process? The ethics are certainly questionable. Alan O’Brien
Letters editor Nik Rawlinson replies: This would appear to be a common practice, whether you’re buying software, a service or car insurance. When my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription was due to renew at a higher price than I had been paying, I let it lapse, then renewed at a lower price a month later, without needing to close my Adobe account and open a new one.
Low-end NAS
I saw today the article on NNAS options ( see issue 305, p76). p While impressive, it mmade me wonder what’s aaround for the lower end NNAS market such as the ZZyxel two-bay NAS that I ppurchased some years ago. It also made me think there’s something missing. A big drawback of purchasing a NAS, even from well-respected brands like Qnap and Synology, is that you are going to have a finite lifetime of firmware updates and features will begin to lose their
compatibility with internet services (as happened to my Zyxel NSA221).
What I’d like to see with a NAS test is the compatibility with open-source firmware/software such as FreeNAS on the NAS boxes, and also perhaps an article guiding us on how to use an older computer to work with FreeNAS or other software as a cheap NAS box.
My main concerns are that it’s compatible with SMB2+ and NFS, and ideally supports add-ons that will allow upgrade of these components to later versions. Paul Winstone
Editor-in-chief Tim Danton replies: First of all, thanks for the article suggestion. The lack of two-bay NAS boxes reflects the market, as few new options are being released. While you can still buy “legacy” two-bay boxes, we worry about a lack of support in the future. One of the advantages of buying a unit from Qnap or Synology (both award winners in the Labs) is that you’re buying something from a specialist with an interest in long-term support. As Sonos buyers know, that’s key.
Further future fragmentation
Your story, “China hits back with ban on foreign tech kit” ( see issue 305, p11) marks another sad turning point. I fully understand China’s decision to hit back in light of some Western
nations’ decision to exclude Huawei kit from their networks, and to restrict sharing technology with Huawei and other manufacturers but, ultimately, the further we travel down this road, the longer it will take us to make our way back.
Traditionally, the consumer (and desktop-business) tech world has been split into two camps: Windows or macOS, and Android or iOS. How many camps can we expect to be choosing between five or ten years from now? Developers will have to service more and more platforms with discrete code, ultimately leading to either ever-narrower profit margins for them, or reduced choice for us as they choose to focus on just one platform at the cost of all others.
Tom Connelly
Bye bye bits and bytes
Barry Collins is worried about his digital footprint ( see issue 305, p24). Good for him. We should all consider the cost to the planet of cloud providers storing decades of redundant data on our behalf. As Barry says, most of these services are so cheap that it’s simply not worth us clearing things out, which suggests to me that maybe, just maybe, the prices are the problem.
Nobody would dare do it, of course, but an ethical cloud provider would have a sliding scale based not on capacity, but age. The longer your data remains on its servers untouched, the more you pay. And, if you’ve not touched it for five years, bye-bye. Naturally, you’ll receive a series of ever-more frantic emails warning you of the impending data destruction.
Those of us alive today are part of the first digital generation. Our data could outlive us for centuries. When we die, our passwords die, too, and if the cloud host doesn’t have processes in place to delete our online cruft on a schedule, it could be there forever. Kim Tebbut
Those of us alive today are part of the first digital generation. Our data could outlive us for… well, centuries