4 ms·

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

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
    > v6 with privacy addresses is not very much different to current v4 with NAT on the privacy front. Are you familiar of an ISP that will give you a new v6 prefix on demand (say, once every hour or day or week?) Or one that mixes all customers? otherwise, the NAT you do on your own behind that prefix is of very little (though not strictly zero) practical use; It just means that if someone gets access logs from two websites, they don't know if two requests were made from my laptop or one was from mine and the other from my kids. I am not living in the US these days and have no knowledge on which to base the estimate ... but I haven't received an AAAA DNS record to any request I've made through several countries. edit: added: My specific browser setup, described somewhere else around here, makes it hard to track or fingerprint. IPv6 takes that ability away from me (and everyone else).
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      > I haven't received an AAAA DNS record to any request I've made through several countries Wait, whether you receive an AAAA DNS record has nothing to do with whether you're in IPv6 - it's to do with whether you're requesting AAAA records. How exactly are you testing this? What does `dig google.com AAAA @8.8.8.8` get you?
      - beagle3 9y ago
        I actually never asked for Google, because I knew it worked; I've never asked for Amazon, because I assumed it worked -- only for the not-top-10 sites I use. However, I just tried amazon for the first time ever and got this: $ dig www.amazon.com AAAA @8.8.8.8 ; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> www.amazon.com AAAA @8.8.8.8 ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: xxxxx ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.amazon.com. IN AAAA ;; ANSWER SECTION: www.amazon.com. 1208 IN CNAME www.cdn.amazon.com. www.cdn.amazon.com. 55 IN CNAME opf-www.amazon.com. ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: opf-www.amazon.com. 895 IN SOA ns-191.awsdns-23.com. awsdns-hostmaster.amazon.com. 1 7200 900 1209600 60 ;; Query time: 70 msec ;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8) ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 147 Maybe they hate my ISP, but also anything behind cloudflare (e.g. news.ycombinator.com, and about 80% of the sites I regularly visit) doesn't seem to have an AAAA address.

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
  > v6 with privacy addresses is not very much different to current v4 with NAT on the privacy front. Are you familiar of an ISP that will give you a new v6 prefix on demand (say, once every hour or day or week?) Or one that mixes all customers? otherwise, the NAT you do on your own behind that prefix is of very little (though not strictly zero) practical use; It just means that if someone gets access logs from two websites, they don't know if two requests were made from my laptop or one was from mine and the other from my kids. I am not living in the US these days and have no knowledge on which to base the estimate ... but I haven't received an AAAA DNS record to any request I've made through several countries. edit: added: My specific browser setup, described somewhere else around here, makes it hard to track or fingerprint. IPv6 takes that ability away from me (and everyone else).
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    > I haven't received an AAAA DNS record to any request I've made through several countries Wait, whether you receive an AAAA DNS record has nothing to do with whether you're in IPv6 - it's to do with whether you're requesting AAAA records. How exactly are you testing this? What does `dig google.com AAAA @8.8.8.8` get you?
    - beagle3 9y ago
      I actually never asked for Google, because I knew it worked; I've never asked for Amazon, because I assumed it worked -- only for the not-top-10 sites I use. However, I just tried amazon for the first time ever and got this: $ dig www.amazon.com AAAA @8.8.8.8 ; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> www.amazon.com AAAA @8.8.8.8 ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: xxxxx ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.amazon.com. IN AAAA ;; ANSWER SECTION: www.amazon.com. 1208 IN CNAME www.cdn.amazon.com. www.cdn.amazon.com. 55 IN CNAME opf-www.amazon.com. ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: opf-www.amazon.com. 895 IN SOA ns-191.awsdns-23.com. awsdns-hostmaster.amazon.com. 1 7200 900 1209600 60 ;; Query time: 70 msec ;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8) ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 147 Maybe they hate my ISP, but also anything behind cloudflare (e.g. news.ycombinator.com, and about 80% of the sites I regularly visit) doesn't seem to have an AAAA address.