• 0 Posts
  • 6 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle

  • Transmission loss/attenuation only informs the power needed on the transmission side for the receiver to be able to receive the signal. The wireless networks I am talking about don’t really have packet loss (aside from when the link goes down for reasons like hardware failure).

    I mention Chicago to New York specifically because in the financial trading world, we use both wireless network paths and fiber paths between the locations and measured/real latency is a very big deal and measured to the nanoseconds.

    So what I mention has nothing to do with human perception as fiber and wireless are both faster than most human’s perceptions. We also don’t have packet loss on either network path.

    High speed/ high frequency Wireless is bound by the curvature of the earth and terrain for repeater locations. Even with all of the repeaters, measured latency for these commercially available wireless links are 1/2 the latency of the most direct commercially available fiber path between Chicago and New York.

    Fiber has in-line passive amplifiers, which are a fun thing to read about how they work, so transmission loss/attenuation only applies to where the passive amplifiers are.

    You are conflating latency (how long it takes bits to go between locations) with bandwidth (how many bits can be sent per second between locations) in your last line.


  • The speed of light through a medium is what varies, since I have to deal with this at work, and the speed of light through air is technically faster than the speed of light through fiber. But now there is hollow core fiber that makes this difference less.

    Between Chicago and New York the latency of the specialized wireless links commercially available is around about 1/2 of standard fiber taking the most direct route. But bandwidth is also only in gigabits/s vs terabits/s you can put over typical fiber backbone.

    But both are faster than humans can perceive anyway.




  • The main benefits to paying for certs are

    • as many said, getting more than 90 days validity for certs that are harder to rotate, or the automation hasn’t been done.
    • higher rate limits for issuing and renewing certs, you can ask letsencrypt to up limits, but you can still hit them.
    • you can get certs for things other than web sites, ie code signing.

    The only thing that matters to most people is that they don’t get cert errors going to/using a web site, or installing software. Any CA that is in the browsers, OS and various language trust stores is the same to that effect.

    The rules for inclusion in the browsers trust stores are strict (many of the Linux distros and language trust stores just use the Mozilla cert set), which is where the trust comes from.

    Which CA provider you choose doesn’t change your potential attack surface. The question on attack surface seems like it might come from lacking understanding of how certs and signing work.

    A cert has 2 parts public cert and private key, CAs sign your sites public cert with their private key, they never have or need your private key. Public certs can be used to verify something was signed by the private key. Public certs can be used to encrypt data such that only the private key can decrypt it.