4 ms·

I am very glad IPv6 didn't catch on. The world in which it was designed was not a world in which everyone (NSA, Google, Facebook) was trying to document and cor

I am very glad IPv6 didn't catch on. The world in which it was designed was not a world in which everyone (NSA, Google, Facebook) was trying to document and correlate every tiny thing you do, whether it is related to them or not. If IPv6 eventually becomes widespread, I hope it comes with ISPs that will let you replace your prefix, and phones/hardware that will randomize your suffix - otherwise, the internet becomes completely pseudonymous.

beagle3 9y ago
Would a down voter care to explain why I am so wrong in their opinion?
- azernik 9y ago
  Because a) statements in your comment are false, b) some proposals in your comment have already been implemented, and c) the ones that haven't are bad ideas. IPv6 has caught on (I'm commenting from an IPv6-only connection right now, on a residential US ISP). Most clients do perform RFC4941 suffix randomization. Replacing the prefix destroys one of the most useful features of IP addresses and in particular the larger IPv6 address space - routability (the property that getting to two addresses that share a prefix usually uses the same next-hop router).
  - beagle3 9y ago
    Thank you for taking the time to explain. Let me try to word things a little better: What is the percentage of US homes who are on an IPv6? What is the percentage of websites on IPv6? What are the number of web site hits that are IPv6 to IPv6? (in the US? in the world?) The highest estimate I've ever seen for any of these is less than 20%, which - 20 years into IPv6, is in my opinion "not caught on". The mobile world when 3G arrived preferred carrier-grade-NAT to IPv6 (which was technically a better solution), which is in my opinion "not caught on". Suffix randomization has been implemented, but is not universal in my experience; and it is essentially useless for privacy in one's home. It slightly blurs the distinction between my laptop and my son's iPad. And that's ALL it does. Right now I enjoy getting an address from a pool of 16K addresses every time I reset my cable modem; And it is likely to transition soon to a carrier-grade NAT which would give me even more privacy. It is likely that I should be taking crazy pills - I seem to remember the snowdens of yesteryear and facebook shadow profiles, which either I'm hallucinating or no one else seems to care about. On the other hand, I have a startup idea to profit from the impending v6-complete-lack-of-privacy that I should probably start working on. If you can't beat them, profit off them.
    - detaro 9y ago
      Giving a user the same IPv4 address on every connection is not uncommon either. It's a policy decision made by the provider, unrelated to IPv4/v6.
      - beagle3 9y ago
        You are technically correct, the best kind of correct. It is possible that my sampling bias is giving me a distorted view of where the world is going, but: All local ISPs I've asked, don't give out the same IPv4 (they all charge for a fixed IP, so no guarantee you'll get the same one unless you pay; at least 3 out of the 6 actively change your IP whenever they can, to force you to pay even if you need fixed IPs for short times). All local ISPs I've asked provide the same IPv6 prefix to a customer. I assumed that was common practice - at the very least, more common than the other way around (fixed IPv4 when you didn't ask for it, random IPv6)
        detaro 9y ago
        Quite likely that it varies a lot between markets, true. From what I've seen, cable providers often give you a "static" IP (I think often tied to the modems hardware ID?). ADSL providers here in Germany did commonly reset your connection and IP every 24 hours (or on manual reconnect). From what I hear not all of them do that anymore, but e.g. Deutsche Telekom seems to change IPv6 as well (probably since you're supposed to pay for business class if you want static). And some run the connection as IPv6 only and then CG-NAT IPv4, which of course gives you a random IP again, but is even worse for P2P applications and means you can't use DynDNS etc anymore. My personal connection has had the same IP for the past 5 years, and I think changing it would mean asking my ISP and coming up with an answer for why I need that.
    - azernik 9y ago
      Google puts global native IPv6 adoption among their users (i.e. proportion of incoming connections that are IPv6) at 17%-ish and exponentially/logistically increasing; the US numbers are much higher, at around 35% [https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption&tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...]. These numbers do not distinguish between mobile and fixed clients; I suspect that mobile deployment is higher than residential. The server-side IPv6 adoption is not so great; see [http://www.delong.com/ipv6_alexa500.html http://www.delong.com/ipv6_alexa500.html] for deployment numbers. Luckily, most ISPs providing IPv6 (or at least, my personal one) provide a carrier-grade NAT64 gateway to allow access to IPv4 services from IPv6-only clients. By web site hits, I have no idea - I don't know where to find those numbers. IPv6 suffix randomization is enabled by default on Windows, OSX, and iOS. For Android, it probably varies (like everything else) by vendor, but my personal Android phone is using a random suffix. What are the machines you're using that aren't doing this? Yes, suffix randomization doesn't hide which home connection you're on; but neither did old-school IPv4 + NAT. Sure, IPv6 didn't add that feature, but that's enough of a performance killer that it should be relegated to a separate system like TOR. The IPv6 prefix you are assigned by your carrier is a feature of whatever DHCPv6 setup they have; if they're assigning you the same prefix for every time you power-cycle your modem on IPv6 and they were not doing so with DHCPv4, that's super weird.
vertex-four 9y ago
IPv6 did catch on. Every consumer of the UK's largest broadband services (BT, Sky) now has access to the IPv6 internet. Many, many people across the world have access to it, with clients that prefer connecting to IPv6. And much of the world, especially on mobile but now even on broadband, doesn't even have an IPv4 address of their own - they're NATed along with their ISP's other subscribers through a handful of IPs for a whole ISP. An IPv6 address is the only address they actually have. IPv6 is the only way we're ever going to create working peer-to-peer infrastructure. If you intend to keep anonymous, integrate Tor or HORNET into your protocols.
- beagle3 9y ago
  I am not familiar with the UK situation these days, but every country I've visited in the last year (US, quite a few european and a couple of asian) IPV6 wasn't more than a small irrelevant thing. > And much of the world, especially on mobile, doesn't even have an IPv4 address of their own - they're NATed along with their ISP's other subscribers through a handful of IPs for a whole ISP. An IPv6 address is the only address they actually have. And that's a great thing, if you care about privacy (and I do). And yet, peer to peer on these things works reasonably well using ICE, STUN, TURN and friends, and if you want a public IPV4 address, the going rate wherever I look is about $1/month. > IPv6 is the only way we're ever going to create working peer-to-peer infrastructure We practically have less-than-perfectly-but-still working peer to peer; the lack of immediately direct connection is not, I believe, what's stopping "working peer to peer" from happening -- the vast majority of the ISPs in the US, for example, block incoming port 80 and outgoing port 25, and for good reasons - most users cannot be trusted to run an addressable peer. So with IPv6 it would be technically easier to p2p, but practically the same as it will be firewalled by the ISPs. And the price for this improvement will be utter complete tracability of your actions among every website -- right now, google and facebook can only (easily) exchange info about you if you gave enough of it to them, or if they decide to share cookies (which you can see and stop). On IPV6, it would be enough for them (and wikipedia, and ISPs and everyone else) to just trade access logs.
  - Dagger2 9y ago
    v6 with privacy addresses is not very much different to current v4 with NAT on the privacy front. You'll still be tracked with cookies and browser fingerprinting either way. Out of curiosity... without cheating, what do you reckon v6 deployment is at for clients in the US -- that is, what percentage of clients do you think use v6 to connect to v6-enabled sites?

beagle3 9y ago

Would a down voter care to explain why I am so wrong in their opinion?

azernik 9y ago
Because a) statements in your comment are false, b) some proposals in your comment have already been implemented, and c) the ones that haven't are bad ideas. IPv6 has caught on (I'm commenting from an IPv6-only connection right now, on a residential US ISP). Most clients do perform RFC4941 suffix randomization. Replacing the prefix destroys one of the most useful features of IP addresses and in particular the larger IPv6 address space - routability (the property that getting to two addresses that share a prefix usually uses the same next-hop router).
- beagle3 9y ago
  Thank you for taking the time to explain. Let me try to word things a little better: What is the percentage of US homes who are on an IPv6? What is the percentage of websites on IPv6? What are the number of web site hits that are IPv6 to IPv6? (in the US? in the world?) The highest estimate I've ever seen for any of these is less than 20%, which - 20 years into IPv6, is in my opinion "not caught on". The mobile world when 3G arrived preferred carrier-grade-NAT to IPv6 (which was technically a better solution), which is in my opinion "not caught on". Suffix randomization has been implemented, but is not universal in my experience; and it is essentially useless for privacy in one's home. It slightly blurs the distinction between my laptop and my son's iPad. And that's ALL it does. Right now I enjoy getting an address from a pool of 16K addresses every time I reset my cable modem; And it is likely to transition soon to a carrier-grade NAT which would give me even more privacy. It is likely that I should be taking crazy pills - I seem to remember the snowdens of yesteryear and facebook shadow profiles, which either I'm hallucinating or no one else seems to care about. On the other hand, I have a startup idea to profit from the impending v6-complete-lack-of-privacy that I should probably start working on. If you can't beat them, profit off them.
  - detaro 9y ago
    Giving a user the same IPv4 address on every connection is not uncommon either. It's a policy decision made by the provider, unrelated to IPv4/v6.
    - beagle3 9y ago
      You are technically correct, the best kind of correct. It is possible that my sampling bias is giving me a distorted view of where the world is going, but: All local ISPs I've asked, don't give out the same IPv4 (they all charge for a fixed IP, so no guarantee you'll get the same one unless you pay; at least 3 out of the 6 actively change your IP whenever they can, to force you to pay even if you need fixed IPs for short times). All local ISPs I've asked provide the same IPv6 prefix to a customer. I assumed that was common practice - at the very least, more common than the other way around (fixed IPv4 when you didn't ask for it, random IPv6)
      - detaro 9y ago
        Quite likely that it varies a lot between markets, true. From what I've seen, cable providers often give you a "static" IP (I think often tied to the modems hardware ID?). ADSL providers here in Germany did commonly reset your connection and IP every 24 hours (or on manual reconnect). From what I hear not all of them do that anymore, but e.g. Deutsche Telekom seems to change IPv6 as well (probably since you're supposed to pay for business class if you want static). And some run the connection as IPv6 only and then CG-NAT IPv4, which of course gives you a random IP again, but is even worse for P2P applications and means you can't use DynDNS etc anymore. My personal connection has had the same IP for the past 5 years, and I think changing it would mean asking my ISP and coming up with an answer for why I need that.
  - azernik 9y ago
    Google puts global native IPv6 adoption among their users (i.e. proportion of incoming connections that are IPv6) at 17%-ish and exponentially/logistically increasing; the US numbers are much higher, at around 35% [https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption&tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...]. These numbers do not distinguish between mobile and fixed clients; I suspect that mobile deployment is higher than residential. The server-side IPv6 adoption is not so great; see [http://www.delong.com/ipv6_alexa500.html http://www.delong.com/ipv6_alexa500.html] for deployment numbers. Luckily, most ISPs providing IPv6 (or at least, my personal one) provide a carrier-grade NAT64 gateway to allow access to IPv4 services from IPv6-only clients. By web site hits, I have no idea - I don't know where to find those numbers. IPv6 suffix randomization is enabled by default on Windows, OSX, and iOS. For Android, it probably varies (like everything else) by vendor, but my personal Android phone is using a random suffix. What are the machines you're using that aren't doing this? Yes, suffix randomization doesn't hide which home connection you're on; but neither did old-school IPv4 + NAT. Sure, IPv6 didn't add that feature, but that's enough of a performance killer that it should be relegated to a separate system like TOR. The IPv6 prefix you are assigned by your carrier is a feature of whatever DHCPv6 setup they have; if they're assigning you the same prefix for every time you power-cycle your modem on IPv6 and they were not doing so with DHCPv4, that's super weird.

vertex-four 9y ago

IPv6 did catch on. Every consumer of the UK's largest broadband services (BT, Sky) now has access to the IPv6 internet. Many, many people across the world have access to it, with clients that prefer connecting to IPv6. And much of the world, especially on mobile but now even on broadband, doesn't even have an IPv4 address of their own - they're NATed along with their ISP's other subscribers through a handful of IPs for a whole ISP. An IPv6 address is the only address they actually have. IPv6 is the only way we're ever going to create working peer-to-peer infrastructure. If you intend to keep anonymous, integrate Tor or HORNET into your protocols.

beagle3 9y ago
I am not familiar with the UK situation these days, but every country I've visited in the last year (US, quite a few european and a couple of asian) IPV6 wasn't more than a small irrelevant thing. > And much of the world, especially on mobile, doesn't even have an IPv4 address of their own - they're NATed along with their ISP's other subscribers through a handful of IPs for a whole ISP. An IPv6 address is the only address they actually have. And that's a great thing, if you care about privacy (and I do). And yet, peer to peer on these things works reasonably well using ICE, STUN, TURN and friends, and if you want a public IPV4 address, the going rate wherever I look is about $1/month. > IPv6 is the only way we're ever going to create working peer-to-peer infrastructure We practically have less-than-perfectly-but-still working peer to peer; the lack of immediately direct connection is not, I believe, what's stopping "working peer to peer" from happening -- the vast majority of the ISPs in the US, for example, block incoming port 80 and outgoing port 25, and for good reasons - most users cannot be trusted to run an addressable peer. So with IPv6 it would be technically easier to p2p, but practically the same as it will be firewalled by the ISPs. And the price for this improvement will be utter complete tracability of your actions among every website -- right now, google and facebook can only (easily) exchange info about you if you gave enough of it to them, or if they decide to share cookies (which you can see and stop). On IPV6, it would be enough for them (and wikipedia, and ISPs and everyone else) to just trade access logs.
- Dagger2 9y ago
  v6 with privacy addresses is not very much different to current v4 with NAT on the privacy front. You'll still be tracked with cookies and browser fingerprinting either way. Out of curiosity... without cheating, what do you reckon v6 deployment is at for clients in the US -- that is, what percentage of clients do you think use v6 to connect to v6-enabled sites?