> I wonder how I'll ever be able to use the code I wrote over the years that controls uncounted lathes, mills, plasmacutters, lasers and a whole raft of other industrial tools.
You are knowledgeable enough to make them work. Many aren't. Some can't be. Hacking requires knowledge and skill, and most importantly, being contained. Cutting yourself with your self-programmed hackable laser in your garage is unfortunate, but cutting other people is a disaster you can't afford.
> Vehicles are hackable, but they're not documented which makes them more dangerous, not less dangerous. Witness comma.ai and others.
I see two points here.
1. Security through obscurity is bad. That's true, but we have "business" in the play, so that's how it goes. Maybe push for better regulation.
2. comma.ai, an "autopilot", based on reverse engineering, or as you put it, the base product "not documented", thus makes it "more dangerous". No, it's dangerous not because the base product is not documented, but because there's no real autopilot at the moment, and comma.ai is irresponsibly advertising as being able to "drive for hours without driver action". There are many "black box" products with a ToS that forbid reverse engineering. Does that make the product inherently more dangerous too?
Besides, you seem to suggest that, with open products, people can not make things unsafer. That's not true. Some don't know what they are doing when they "hack" things.
I don't know a single gamer who rented a domain for private use. In fact, I would argue than the hassle of setting one up is the reason why Hamachi got popular back then. You don't have to bother with knowing any technical stuff, just download a software, share a code and play.
DynDNS was big among some of my gaming friends way back in the 90s at one point, when it was a free, donation-supported tool. It was quite useful and relatively low hassle.
At the time it provided a real simple desktop tool that you would install, sign in to your account name, and it would auto-update a (very) short TTL DNS A record for you. (Generally in the form of username.dyndns.org, but as I recall donators could also bring their own top level domain.)
We've got mDNS today to fill some of that gap, but I still wonder if it would also still be nice to have a "no click" desktop tool in 2023 that could quickly update very short TTL DNS AAAA records for you on a subdomain of your choice, and sort of lament Dyn's many pivots (and eventual Oracle buy out) because that original idea still has legs even if it didn't survive the 90s. (Though maybe this time as a true non-profit internet service or operating system feature.)
Hamachi was popular back in the day because it meant you didn’t need to forward ports on your router. (Something that still confuses some of my friends).
The last post was https://css-tricks.com/passkeys-what-the-heck-and-why/ on 12 April. Their mastodon account announced in June an update of a 2022 article, but after that, silence. Twitter account didn't even mention the update.
