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For The Love of Internet

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:37:05 +0530

Two decades ago, when Indian ISPs had adequate IPv4 addresses, they were allocating free public IPs. I remember how exciting it was to host my own website from home and be able to access it from anywhere. Gaming was seamless with public IP. Peer to peer apps just worked. But as Internet users grew ISPs decided to deploy NAT. No more public IPs, no more free hosting. And it’s been like that for two decades now.

Take a look at table below. It shows countries, their population and % IPv4 address allocation. I have ommitted most countries which have adequate IP addresses except United States which has excess of IPs. You can view the full table here.

#	Location	IP addresses	%	Population
1	United States	1,611,297,420	43.71	343,477,335
2	China	343,125,576	9.31	1,422,584,933
3	Japan	189,145,768	5.13	124,370,947
4	United Kingdom	134,054,832	3.64	68,682,962
11	Netherlands	48,112,552	1.31	18,092,524
12	Australia	46,444,728	1.26	26,451,124
13	Russia	44,859,860	1.22	145,440,500
14	India	41,624,148	1.13	1,438,069,596
15	Taiwan	35,715,484	0.97	23,317,145

Do you see the issue? The country with largest population, India, is allocated merely 1.13% of total IPv4 addresses. China, the second largest country by population, has somewhat better allocation than India but still nothing as compared to United States. Both India and China has to deploy layers upon layers of NAT to deal with these limited IPv4 addresses. It’s mind boggling to me that we are letting IPv4 continue in it’s current state even after knowing this sad reality.

Sometimes, I wonder, if India should just switch off IPv4. I mean we have done something far more crazier than this. We changed the currency notes over a course of few months. A transition from IPv4 to IPv6 seems far more easier especially since we already have 77% of people on IPv6. A drastic move like this seems to be the only way the west would take concrete steps to move on to IPv6.

There are countless threads online on forums like Hacker News, Reddit where people who never really got comfortable with idea of IPv6 and are still discussing whether it’s the right choice going forward. Some of them keep using NAT out of convenience and believe that’s what makes their networks secure. Others believe IETF should have adopted IPv4 to include more addresses. I don’t know if that’s possible but I do know that the people who designed IPv6 were experts in their domain. Maybe we should trust them and move on.

Besides, it’s been 3 decades, the world has been preparing for IPv6 to be the backbone of the Internet. Most devices now have support for IPv6. Any discussions questioning IPv6 now are absurd. IPv6 is the only way forward and the sooner we do it the better it is for everyone.

Distractions

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 21:37:05 +0530

Our age is age of distractions. Instant messages, notifications, breaking news, endless stories, cute pet videos, random comments on social media are all distractions of one form or other. These distractions are dividing our attention which is already in short supply. Due to this, anything real like relationships, our own problems and issues, our thoughts and ideas forever remain on back burner. We don’t have time to sit with our own thoughts and ideas. How can we be healthy if we remain disconnected from ourselves?

We distract ourselves with shorts, reels or some random series on a streaming platform. We desperately want connection with real people but settle for fictional characters. Binge watching helps subsume the pain of truth. Truth that we should be working on our own problems, developing new skills, building strong relationships with real people. Somewhere in the back of our minds we all are well aware of this. We know all these distractions are sucking happiness out of our lives. But instant gratification wins over real hard work. “What are you talking about, Rohan? I can easily stave off distractions”. Maybe you can but I have found it incredibly hard thing to do. Maybe that’s just me but something tells me I’m not alone.

Large corporations have poured billions to ensure as many eyeballs as possible remain active on their platforms. Why is notification on every social media plotform, red? Because we humans associate red with danger, something that needs our attention. That is why traffic light for stop is red. These large corporations have discovered numerous such hacks and they employ it without any regard for users well being. For them our attention is worth billions. The real question is how much our own attention is worth to us? What would we achieve if we could direct all our energy into our own well being?

So how do we focus on ourselves? Well the first thing is to identify these distractions. It may be the most crucial step. Once we identify distractions it becomes easier to block them. The blocking process can involve using browser extensions or apps that block access to certain websites with fixed time slots. No solution is fool proof. You will go back and forth between blocking and unblocking. What is important is you enable blocking every time you unblock. Think of it like this: blocking distractions is like building a muscle in your brain. The more you practice the stronger it becomes. Doom scrolling is what they gave us and took control of our time. Blocking is our way of fighting back and taking back that control.

Why Start Self Hosting

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 00:02:34 +0530

Remember Picasa? There is no native application even today that comes close to it’s feature parity. But sadly it was discontinued in favour of a cloud application: Google Photos. What happened with Picasa also happened to millions of other applications around the same time Picasa was discontinued. The applications we use to run on our PC have moved to cloud. It makes sense from corporations perspective because they get more control over updates, user data and licenses but users are at huge disadavantage as they no longer are in control of their own data. You might ask why that is such an issue? Let’s see:

Consider this, you carefully curate your playlists on Spotify but every now and then you see a certain song missing from your playlist. Same goes for videos saved in your YouTube playlists or other music/video streaming services. Then there is also the case of OTT streaming platforms where the show you were going to watch over weekend has now disappeared. If this was not bad imagine what happens when you need document from your email but the provider has suspended your account because of something you did (which was not even violation of terms of service) on other service of that email provider. Hacker News is littered with such stories. There are some stories where the user never figured out what they had done wrong to deserve suspension of account.

Then there is this whole different problem of corporations tracking you and your data. Whenever I bring this up people are like “I don’t care, I have nothing to hide”. But this is exactly similiar to saying “I don’t care about free speech because I have nothing to say”. Would you give up your right to free speech because you have nothing to say? No. The same goes about right to privacy. The data you share is used to cater you personalized ads. That same data is also used to ensure that you spend maximum time with the particular service. There are millions of engineers across the world who are getting paid hefty sum to keep as many eyeballs as possible glued to service offered by their employers. This engineering talent is supposed to be solving world’s problems but instead they are ensuring how everyone wastes their time. That’s a whole different topic for another blog post.

What self hosting does is it protects you against all these issues and more. It gives you the peace of mind by keeping you in control of your data. You can choose if you never want your data to leave your premises or home. You can also choose to make your data available to you whenever or wherever you want it securely. In upcoming posts, we will explore self hosted applications and how they protect you and your data. But if you cannot wait, head over to r/selfhosted or check out this awesome self hosted list to get started with your self hosting journey.

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