Hmm, I'd disagree. The fact that Anapaya Systems (the for profit company mentioned) has the only commercial implementation/adjacent software is a problem, yes. But "snake oil" doesn't quite match up with the fact that SCION right now provides the backbone for the Swiss financial network moving 200 billion CHF each day [1], so at least some level of workable technology has to be there. And for no one to be taking it seriously, there's a decently long list of multinational ISPs at the very least taking steps towards offering SCION to customers [2] (e.g. British Telecom has expressed enough interest that they have various recent marketing videos on Anapaya's YouTube channel). Finally, I'm not sure what you mean regarding the "scummy inclusion of block chain / crypto" - as someone who has worked on SCION-based projects I never heard anything about this. Apparently a blockchain company invested in Anapaya, but that doesn't really change anything about the protocol itself, does it?
I don't think the swiss banking network is really the right thing to point to. Folks measure networks in bps/pps, not financial transactions - nevermind the actual control plane bits (num of prefixes, as paths, etc.). Plus it's all within one country where you have the luxury of being able to directly influence and steer those companies into adopting this.
As for BT - they're just one broadband ISP operating primarily in a single country. I don't see that moving the needle - you're missing CDNs, traditional large scale "tier 1s" and cloud or large hosting networks.
RPKI got to where it is today through community engagement by folks like Job S. and others - hitting the conferences, direct engagement with operators and raising the bar from a software quality and standards perspective - which still continues today. That's how you get the internet to adopt something that is considered the new normal.
As for your ISP list - I know there are networks listed there that aren't running scion in a production capacity (perhaps you can run scion in a virtualized environment on top of them which is different than those companies running it on their production network).
As for the block chain - it was all the Sui stuff.
> SCION right now provides the backbone for the Swiss financial network moving 200 billion CHF each day
This is a meaningless benchmark - for a small group of trusted big enterprises with insurance policies and mutually signed contracts you could've just as well used OSPF with zero filters.
The benchmark would be adoption by an actual large number of parties that don't/can't talk to eachother spread across the world. With a large chunk of them being malicious or incompetent to the point of being effectively malicious.
I'm not claiming that this shows SCION can replace the respective parts of the network stack right now, and you're right that at a global scale this is still an unproven technology. But I would argue that a technology needs a certain level of matureness / is not "snake oil" if it is deployed in a heavily regulated and comparatively conservative sector such as banking.
Aren't heavily regulated sectors the one where you usually encounter snake oil? Useless WAFs and other security snake oil products, Microsoft 'collaboration' jank like Teams and Sharepoint, MitM proxies, etc?
I gotta say some of the proposed use cases are things no one is looking/asking for. One I recall was having a network decide to reach another network by avoiding countries that aren't carbon neutral (which could take longer hops and use more infra / more energy...) feels like they're trying to say they're the green/environmental friendly protocol.
Why does a routing protocol matter for the banking sector? With proper encryption the route the packets of transaction data takes should not matter at all.
I'm assuming the context of these is lectures? Are they online anywhere? If not could you share what specifically about the protocol they feel so strongly about?
Indeed, he talks about BGP and SCION in the lectures. Sadly I think the lectures aren't available to non-students. What is available though are explanatory videos by him (Adrian Perrig) on the SCION website, where he talks about the issues BGP has: https://scion-architecture.net/pages/videos/
The tl;dw is that today's internet has comparatively poor availability, packet paths can be hijacked and there's little transparency in routing. SCION sets out to solve these problems, and has a few nice things in store, such as guaranteed bandwith between two hosts making DDoS attacks much less effective (COLIBRI QoS), or an incredibly high throughput packet filter (LightningFilter).
It seems like you are confusing two pieces of software: There is Baloo, which is the KDE file indexer. And then there is Akonadi, which is the storage service for all PIM related things (so emails, contacts, calendars etc.). If you disabled Baloo in the settings it should not show up as a process anymore and certainly shouldn't be using any system resources.
Akonadi is required for the usage of KMail, KOrganizer and such (because they use it to store their data, so that is rather essential). If you don't use those applications, you can simply remove it with your package manager. Otherwise we'd appreciate a bug report with regards to the high CPU / memory usage on bugs.kde.org. Thank you for using KDE software :)
> It seems like you are confusing two pieces of software: There is Baloo, which is the KDE file indexer. And then there is Akonadi,
Oh right, seeing those Gio in my ~/.local/share/akonadi, I was supposing that it was for file indexing and that was somehow the storage for Baloo or something like that.
I haven't investigated more than that as I don't want to spend too much time on it and just killing Akonadi server from its console is enough (the downside is that after killing it I can't use KMail anymore, which otherwise is a really great MUA).
So maybe it has something to do with my email settings then? I'll try to find time to investigate and check if I haven't activated anything like offline storage, otherwise I'll create a bug report.
Anyway thanks for the great work over the years, beside this little issue, KDE works flawlessly and I like to be able to customize just what I need when I need.
As a current student of Ueli Maurer and a Swiss citizen, I completely agree with you (the exam part is hard for me to judge... that's coming up in January for me). He claims that he did review algorithms for them, but only once did he look into one which actually got used in production.
I strongly hope that such cases where our NDB is passively allowing foreign nations to interfere with security equipment that is even used by Swiss companies will not become more frequent. It cannot be allowed that the secret service of a neutral country like Switzerland continues to act like this.
I fully understand that opinion - it is a big pain point for many users. Inside KDE, our VDG (Visual Design Group) is working on ironing out those inconsistencies and visual problems. It's a gigantic task, but I do believe we are making progress - especially System Settings has been getting a lot better lately. They are also working on a evolutionary update to our default 'Breeze' design theme. Check it out at https://phabricator.kde.org/T10891.
(And if you do find specific problems e.g. regarding margins or fonts, please report them on bugs.kde.org, and we'll take a look.)
To elaborate on this, we (we as in other developers in KDE, not me personally) have created KDE Neon (https://neon.kde.org/) which is Ubuntu LTS + the latest KDE software. It's great for using the up-to-date KDE Plasma & application versions while having a stable base in Ubuntu LTS.
I've personally used it for nearly 3 years now, and never had any problems with KDE Neon. It probably isn't a good option if you'd like to have the newest versions everywhere, since the base system is only thoroughly upgraded on every Ubuntu LTS release.
If you have any questions regarding KDE software or KDE Neon, I'd be happy to answer them on #kde:kde.org (Matrix) which is also bridged to #kde on freenode.
I've been a happy KDE Neon user on my secondary desktop, an Intel NUC, for about 3-4 years now. I use it multiple hours each day and it's been a very pleasant experience, as in it does its thing and doesn't get in my way.
Was seriously considering using it for my primary desktop, but that'll have to wait until there's a viable RDP alternative.
[1] https://www.scion.org/ssfn-scion/ [2] https://www.scion.org/isps/
reply