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Because adoption of ipv6 allows everyone to be an equal on the internet again. Right now half of the computers hooked up to the 'net aren't even given a routabl

Because adoption of ipv6 allows everyone to be an equal on the internet again. Right now half of the computers hooked up to the 'net aren't even given a routable IP address. They're behind carrier NAT unable to participate like a real computer. They can't use protocols, they can only consume third party services over HTTP/S for the most part. If everyone is routable it cuts the gordian knot in the "What kind of content should be allowed on our platform?" question by allowing everyone to simply be their own platform. If ipv6 gets adopted fast enough it might just save the 'net from being just a more privacy invasive form of television.

close04 7y ago
> be their own platform The public commercial platforms offer far more than just a routable IP. You get reach, reliability, resilience, and security (the kind you don't get to build yourself). Being your own YouTube/FB/Twitter/someChan/etc. platform means almost nobody will ever hear about you, the ones that do can easily wipe you off the internet, coming back is a real hassle, and that your data will leak is basically a forgone conclusion. Being your own Dropbox/GDrive may not need the reach but still relies the other three to provide value. And the list can go on for almost anything you can think of for "being your own platform". The overwhelmingly vast majority of people have little to no interest in building and maintaining any such platform. It's why so few people actually do it today even when having a routable address. It's inconvenient even for skilled people, let alone regular ones. I'll wait for a counterargument.
- echelon 7y ago
  Back in my day bittorrent was pretty popular. We'd have doused Zuck's dorm room sever in gasoline if we'd known what was to happen.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - close04 7y ago
    But that wasn't your own platform was it? It was explicitly distributed. The crux of my comment was the "own" part. You don't just have a share in it, it's yours.
    - echelon 7y ago
      The desire to own and control is what led us to where we are. Let's go back to distributed. Let content proliferate according to novelty and interest gradients. Don't tax it. Don't rent seek. There are ways to profit without ruining it for everybody else.
      - close04 7y ago
        The comment I was replying to clearly states "be their own platform" which is why I replied to it. What you're saying is a completely different conversation and the arguments don't dismiss what I said: the number of people who can successfully "be their own platform" is statistically insignificant so IPv6 is irrelevant for this purpose in particular. I still don't understand how bittorrent (or any decentralized platform) is "your own platform". Most people will always just be part of someone else's platform. Whether it's YouTube, PeerTube, or friendica, it's never their own and IPv6 won't change that. And they explicitly sell themselves as distributed which by definition makes them shared, everybody's, or nobody's. They can never really be your own and that's exactly what their appeal is. Most people are unable (due to skill, money, or effort constraints) to manage their own platform. And the ones who can don't need to wait for IPv6.
- wizzwizz4 7y ago
  Huh. So, nobody's heard of PeerTube (https://www.joinpeertube.org/ https://www.joinpeertube.org/), Friendica (https://friendi.ca https://friendi.ca), Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/) or Diaspora (https://joindiaspora.com/ https://joindiaspora.com/). The overwhelming majority have little to no interest in building and maintaining such things. Interesting… (It's fine to assert things, but make sure you're right first. Asserting things you don't know to be true is disingenuous, and a bad habit.)
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    Yes, by comparison, approximately no one in the world has heard of PeerTube, Friendica, Mastodon or Disapora. And even of those that have heard of them, few actually use them. Centralized platforms for these things are simply so much more convenient and discoverable that there really is no competition. Look at the speed with which WhatsApp was adopted (talking about before the FB acquisition), and compare to Mastodon or Diaspora - there is no contest.
    - wizzwizz4 7y ago
      Mastodon is big news in India at the moment, to the point that some newspapers are trying to pretend it's centralised and "hates right-wing people" (because one instance refused an account to a police organisation). If it's getting newspaper coverage, it's probably not all that niche.
  - close04 7y ago
    None of those are your own platform. You have a share in them. Their value isn't in being "your own", it's explicitly in being "nobody's own" or "everyone's", depending on how you read it. If you somehow use them only for yourself so they run effectively as "your own" (assuming you can and want to isolate them) you run into the same issues I mentioned above. Your comment in brackets applies very much now ;).
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  While people seem to be unhappy with this argument and are downvoting it, it gets at a fundamental truth about "big silos" vs. "own your own content": the vast majority of the world isn't on Facebook and Twitter rather than individual Jekyll and Mastodon instances because they're waiting for widespread IPv6 adoption. There are substantial usability hurdles for the Average User in doing this sort of thing, and if we're really serious about letting more than tech nerds "be their own platform," that needs to be addressed. Having said that, it's still possible to hear about independent websites, nobody can "easily wipe me off the internet," and I'm pretty sure my data is far more likely to leak from actual YouTube/FB/Twitter/someChan/etc. than it is from a non-monetized, advertising-free Mastodon instance, let alone my static website. But it's also absolutely true that the best way for me to drive traffic to my web site is getting linked from Twitter or Reddit; discovery is one of the big problems for federated, decentralized networks.
HeckFeck 7y ago
> They can't use protocols, they can only consume third party services over HTTP/S for the most part. Your comment brings a whole new angle to IPv6 I hadn't before considered. Having each packet routable straight to a TCP/UDP port number eliminates the complexities of NAT. Since the {hard,soft}ware that handles NAT wouldn't be needed, perhaps a shift to IPv6 could also give throughput gains.
- wmf 7y ago
  Since the {hard,soft}ware that handles NAT wouldn't be needed, perhaps a shift to IPv6 could also give throughput gains. It does, although barely noticeable. More noticeable is the cost to ISPs for carrier-grade NAT equipment.
- ATsch 7y ago
  IPv6 is already faster on it's own, because the packet header was modified to be more easily routed in hardware.
  - snuxoll 7y ago
    We also took advantage of the stupid huge address space to make routing tables smaller, it's not necessary to have every /24 (or /64 in IPv6 equivalents) in your tables because we can assign big blocks and stop dealing with fragmented networks all over the place.
    - gerdesj 7y ago
      Yes, provided your ISP allocates you a P2P link as well as your prefix. Once you get used to breaking up your prefix into subnets it all starts to work quite nicely. I have even found that real world IPv6 addresses are not quite as bad as they look. We have all seen the auto-generated ones and they look awful but you don't actually use those as such. For example you are allocated a /48 prefix: 2001:db8:1234:: in general you might think of the ISP as 2001:db8:: and your site as 2001:db8:1234::. Your first subnet might be say 000a or simply "a" for VLAN 10 because you decide not to allocate IPv6 to your default VLAN 1 and start with your current PC VLAN which is 10.123.10/24. In IPv4 you have 10.123.10.1 as the default gateway (VRRP) with .2 and .3 for the physical routers. Hence your PC VLAN routers get given 2001:db8:1234:a::2 and 3 and ::1 for the VRRP address. You can play games with 1337 addresses using 0-9a-f eg face:b00c sigh.
jacquesm 7y ago
NAT is a poor person's firewall, and even if everybody were to switch to IPV6 I believe that NAT'ing would be here to stay. There are lots of disadvantages to sitting behind a NAT but the positive part of it is that it actually does have some security benefits. I used to absolutely hate NAT but over the years I've come around a bit, and UPnP made it bearable from a tech point of view.
- stingraycharles 7y ago
  Most IPv6 routers allow you to keep the same behavior as NAT, e.g. simply do not allow new incoming connections to your prefix. Not saying that you’re incorrect, but the problem might not be as big as you think.
- ATsch 7y ago
  This is completly incorrect. While NAT is almost always combined with a stateful firewall, the NAT itself does not provide any security. Home devices are always going to be deployed with an allow outgoing, deny incoming firewall, regardless if they have IPv6 or not. They are identical in terms of security.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    You're technically correct but in practice ever since NAT has been a thing routers have stopped passing on incoming connections to the machines behind it unless specifically - and usually laboriously - configured to do so. This is also why NAT is considered hostile to a peer-to-peer internet, which prompted this very good article: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ by John Walker, of Autodesk fame. The router has a public IP and everything behind it has a local one. That you can do NAT in different contexts and that technically you could have NAT without the firewall functionality doesn't change that this is 99.9% of all NAT applications. A bit more text about this concept: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/176744/why-is-nat-referred-to-as-the-poor-mans-firewall https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/176744/why-is-n...
    - 7y ago
criddell 7y ago
> If everyone is routable it cuts the gordian knot in the "What kind of content should be allowed on our platform?" question by allowing everyone to simply be their own platform. Do you think the adoption of IPv6 would lead ISPs to drop their ban on running servers from non-business accounts?
echelon 7y ago
> net from being just a more privacy invasive form of television. This is such a great analogy. The Internet has become a dopamine fix. Platforms are generic and inflexible. (Remember when you could change the HTML?) Content is watered down or demonetized for the sake of ad money (Youtube, Tumblr). You can't read the news without getting a video ad shoved down your throat. Commercial video is DRM'd. Browsers (read: Chrome) enables websites to prevent you from copying text or viewing source images. Your every move is tracked to better target ads and sell your profile.
- madars 7y ago
  re: being prevented from copying the text -- one can just use Stylus + the following stylesheet * { -webkit-user-select: text !important; user-select: text !important; } + others for saving Instagram pictures, removing hangouts.google.com background, etc It is incredible how much more palatable the web becomes with uBlock Origin + uMatrix + Stylus. Not optimistic for the web in the long term, though.
  - throwaway-9320 7y ago
    There are websites which can and will manipulate the text you are copying. I am aware of at least one news site which will replace the copied article text with a short summary and a link to the article. Example: https://www.ghacks.net/2016/05/24/chrome-copy-text-manipulation/ https://www.ghacks.net/2016/05/24/chrome-copy-text-manipulat...
mindslight 7y ago
> If everyone is routable it cuts the gordian knot in the "What kind of content should be allowed on our platform?" question by allowing everyone to simply be their own platform No, it really doesn't. It makes easier one aspect of developing peer to peer software. Which sure is a good thing, but it's not some panacea. Our regressive software landscape didn't come about because end users simply didn't have easy access to routeable IP addresses. But rather because tinkering with software can be tedious, developing easy to use software takes resources, and the most straightforward way of recouping that investment through surveillance and control. Right now, you can get a VPS with perfectly routable addresses for $5/mo. And if you're not interested in or able to afford that, you're certainly not going to leave your own machine up 24/7 as a server. In reality, IP/DNS is a namespace that's terrible for user-facing systems - it itself causes centralization by necessitating that singular authoritative servers answer requests for a named object. What we actually need for a non-corporate net is higher level addressing such as content concentric networking (IPFS et al). (I've gotten some downvotes, and I would be really interested in hearing the actual disagreement. I know we're all biased to think this paradigm of IP4/6 could do everything we want, if only it were used "correctly". But after a few decades of watching things evolve I just don't see how it's sufficient for de-centralization).
yyyk 7y ago
In practice we'll still be traffic shapred on ISP level so not so much P2P. It's far more likely that IPv6 will be used to give everyone one single unique trackable address* and we'll all be easily tracked down by IP again. The practical semi-privacy IPv4 let people have will be gone. Ultimately, technologies are less important than public opinion, politics and commerce in dictating how the net goes. * Or a single trackable address range, no matter. Yes, ISPs could do differently. Why would they? All the incentives are on the other side.
peterwwillis 7y ago
> Because adoption of ipv6 allows everyone to be an equal on the internet again Sorry, but this is incorrect. No matter how you connect to the internet, someone has to agree to route your traffic. Just having an allocation of "public" address space doesn't mean you are free to do whatever you want. Other people have to actually pick up your traffic. If you don't have an ASN and a core router on a backbone to announce and carry your traffic, and instead are just using what an ISP gave you, you really have almost no control over whether that address is routable, what protocols you can use with it, etc. They can impose the same limits on IPv6 as IPv4 - and in order to reduce overt abuses of their network resources, they almost certainly will. Remember: passing packets requires real money. The larger the number of packets, the larger the bandwidth used, the larger the concurrent connections, the more money it costs. Any segment in the network that takes up significantly more traffic than another, will end up costing a disproportionate amount of dollars and maintenance to support. So unless you're paying for all of it, you will have limits. And just like every other resource on the planet, some people will have more resources than others. IPv6 is identical to IPv4 in terms of what "freedom" you have on the internet.
- throw0101a 7y ago
  > IPv6 is identical to IPv4 in terms of what "freedom" you have on the internet. It is easier to offer services on IPv6 IMHO. If you want to have some boxes at home to SSH into, you need to provide port forwarding after the first. So for the first system in IPv4 you would have pubip:22 -> inta:22, but then you have to do pubip:23 -> intb:22, pubip:24 -> intc:22, etc. With IPv6 you can just use the hosts' IPv6 addresses and punch holes for :22 for each individual system as desired: no port tomfoolery needed.
  - peterwwillis 7y ago
    Sure, but you're talking about using NAT vs not using NAT. You can still get a dozen IPv4 addresses from an ISP and do the same thing as IPv6. But you have to pay for 'em. The ISP can decide to impose exactly the same limit on allocated IPv6 as IPv4, and charge you for more hosts. Your freedom hasn't changed, only your billing has.
Havoc 7y ago
>ipv6 allows everyone to be an equal on the internet again. Right now half of the computers hooked up to the 'net aren't even given a routable IP address. Given how sht the security on IoTs is I'm not convinced giving everything a routable IP is a good idea frankly. At least not until the IoT players up their game significantly
- noodlesUK 7y ago
  Unfortunately NAT has made us lazy. If even a small number of a particular type of IOT device is being deployed on native IPv6 networks, you’ve got to face the security consequences anyway. Also NAT is not a firewall, but that’s a story for another day.
lxgr 7y ago
Not allowing inbound connections is arguably a feature for most users, not a bug. I don't think that even given widespread IPv6 adoption, we'll ever go back to a model where residential or mobile internet connections will allow for public reachability by default. Of course, NATs and firewalls are not the same thing (you just effectively happen to get the latter when deploying the former). But I firmly believe that the bulk of technologies that give us dynamic endpoint lookup and coordinated firewall traversal will outlive IPv4 and NAT. As an anecdotal example, I used to have a mobile data plan that assigned a public IPv4 address to my phone, including inbound TCP/UDP reachability! That's neither good for battery life, nor for data consumption (on a metered plan). By contrast, my current one puts me behind a carrier grade NAT, but I have no problems whatsoever making peer to peer VoIP calls to friends behind the same type of NAT.

close04 7y ago

> be their own platform The public commercial platforms offer far more than just a routable IP. You get reach, reliability, resilience, and security (the kind you don't get to build yourself). Being your own YouTube/FB/Twitter/someChan/etc. platform means almost nobody will ever hear about you, the ones that do can easily wipe you off the internet, coming back is a real hassle, and that your data will leak is basically a forgone conclusion. Being your own Dropbox/GDrive may not need the reach but still relies the other three to provide value. And the list can go on for almost anything you can think of for "being your own platform". The overwhelmingly vast majority of people have little to no interest in building and maintaining any such platform. It's why so few people actually do it today even when having a routable address. It's inconvenient even for skilled people, let alone regular ones. I'll wait for a counterargument.

echelon 7y ago
Back in my day bittorrent was pretty popular. We'd have doused Zuck's dorm room sever in gasoline if we'd known what was to happen.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- close04 7y ago
  But that wasn't your own platform was it? It was explicitly distributed. The crux of my comment was the "own" part. You don't just have a share in it, it's yours.
  - echelon 7y ago
    The desire to own and control is what led us to where we are. Let's go back to distributed. Let content proliferate according to novelty and interest gradients. Don't tax it. Don't rent seek. There are ways to profit without ruining it for everybody else.
    - close04 7y ago
      The comment I was replying to clearly states "be their own platform" which is why I replied to it. What you're saying is a completely different conversation and the arguments don't dismiss what I said: the number of people who can successfully "be their own platform" is statistically insignificant so IPv6 is irrelevant for this purpose in particular. I still don't understand how bittorrent (or any decentralized platform) is "your own platform". Most people will always just be part of someone else's platform. Whether it's YouTube, PeerTube, or friendica, it's never their own and IPv6 won't change that. And they explicitly sell themselves as distributed which by definition makes them shared, everybody's, or nobody's. They can never really be your own and that's exactly what their appeal is. Most people are unable (due to skill, money, or effort constraints) to manage their own platform. And the ones who can don't need to wait for IPv6.
wizzwizz4 7y ago
Huh. So, nobody's heard of PeerTube (https://www.joinpeertube.org/ https://www.joinpeertube.org/), Friendica (https://friendi.ca https://friendi.ca), Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/) or Diaspora (https://joindiaspora.com/ https://joindiaspora.com/). The overwhelming majority have little to no interest in building and maintaining such things. Interesting… (It's fine to assert things, but make sure you're right first. Asserting things you don't know to be true is disingenuous, and a bad habit.)
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  Yes, by comparison, approximately no one in the world has heard of PeerTube, Friendica, Mastodon or Disapora. And even of those that have heard of them, few actually use them. Centralized platforms for these things are simply so much more convenient and discoverable that there really is no competition. Look at the speed with which WhatsApp was adopted (talking about before the FB acquisition), and compare to Mastodon or Diaspora - there is no contest.
  - wizzwizz4 7y ago
    Mastodon is big news in India at the moment, to the point that some newspapers are trying to pretend it's centralised and "hates right-wing people" (because one instance refused an account to a police organisation). If it's getting newspaper coverage, it's probably not all that niche.
- close04 7y ago
  None of those are your own platform. You have a share in them. Their value isn't in being "your own", it's explicitly in being "nobody's own" or "everyone's", depending on how you read it. If you somehow use them only for yourself so they run effectively as "your own" (assuming you can and want to isolate them) you run into the same issues I mentioned above. Your comment in brackets applies very much now ;).
chipotle_coyote 7y ago
While people seem to be unhappy with this argument and are downvoting it, it gets at a fundamental truth about "big silos" vs. "own your own content": the vast majority of the world isn't on Facebook and Twitter rather than individual Jekyll and Mastodon instances because they're waiting for widespread IPv6 adoption. There are substantial usability hurdles for the Average User in doing this sort of thing, and if we're really serious about letting more than tech nerds "be their own platform," that needs to be addressed. Having said that, it's still possible to hear about independent websites, nobody can "easily wipe me off the internet," and I'm pretty sure my data is far more likely to leak from actual YouTube/FB/Twitter/someChan/etc. than it is from a non-monetized, advertising-free Mastodon instance, let alone my static website. But it's also absolutely true that the best way for me to drive traffic to my web site is getting linked from Twitter or Reddit; discovery is one of the big problems for federated, decentralized networks.

HeckFeck 7y ago

> They can't use protocols, they can only consume third party services over HTTP/S for the most part. Your comment brings a whole new angle to IPv6 I hadn't before considered. Having each packet routable straight to a TCP/UDP port number eliminates the complexities of NAT. Since the {hard,soft}ware that handles NAT wouldn't be needed, perhaps a shift to IPv6 could also give throughput gains.

wmf 7y ago
Since the {hard,soft}ware that handles NAT wouldn't be needed, perhaps a shift to IPv6 could also give throughput gains. It does, although barely noticeable. More noticeable is the cost to ISPs for carrier-grade NAT equipment.
ATsch 7y ago
IPv6 is already faster on it's own, because the packet header was modified to be more easily routed in hardware.
- snuxoll 7y ago
  We also took advantage of the stupid huge address space to make routing tables smaller, it's not necessary to have every /24 (or /64 in IPv6 equivalents) in your tables because we can assign big blocks and stop dealing with fragmented networks all over the place.
  - gerdesj 7y ago
    Yes, provided your ISP allocates you a P2P link as well as your prefix. Once you get used to breaking up your prefix into subnets it all starts to work quite nicely. I have even found that real world IPv6 addresses are not quite as bad as they look. We have all seen the auto-generated ones and they look awful but you don't actually use those as such. For example you are allocated a /48 prefix: 2001:db8:1234:: in general you might think of the ISP as 2001:db8:: and your site as 2001:db8:1234::. Your first subnet might be say 000a or simply "a" for VLAN 10 because you decide not to allocate IPv6 to your default VLAN 1 and start with your current PC VLAN which is 10.123.10/24. In IPv4 you have 10.123.10.1 as the default gateway (VRRP) with .2 and .3 for the physical routers. Hence your PC VLAN routers get given 2001:db8:1234:a::2 and 3 and ::1 for the VRRP address. You can play games with 1337 addresses using 0-9a-f eg face:b00c sigh.

jacquesm 7y ago

NAT is a poor person's firewall, and even if everybody were to switch to IPV6 I believe that NAT'ing would be here to stay. There are lots of disadvantages to sitting behind a NAT but the positive part of it is that it actually does have some security benefits. I used to absolutely hate NAT but over the years I've come around a bit, and UPnP made it bearable from a tech point of view.

stingraycharles 7y ago
Most IPv6 routers allow you to keep the same behavior as NAT, e.g. simply do not allow new incoming connections to your prefix. Not saying that you’re incorrect, but the problem might not be as big as you think.
ATsch 7y ago
This is completly incorrect. While NAT is almost always combined with a stateful firewall, the NAT itself does not provide any security. Home devices are always going to be deployed with an allow outgoing, deny incoming firewall, regardless if they have IPv6 or not. They are identical in terms of security.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  You're technically correct but in practice ever since NAT has been a thing routers have stopped passing on incoming connections to the machines behind it unless specifically - and usually laboriously - configured to do so. This is also why NAT is considered hostile to a peer-to-peer internet, which prompted this very good article: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ by John Walker, of Autodesk fame. The router has a public IP and everything behind it has a local one. That you can do NAT in different contexts and that technically you could have NAT without the firewall functionality doesn't change that this is 99.9% of all NAT applications. A bit more text about this concept: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/176744/why-is-nat-referred-to-as-the-poor-mans-firewall https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/176744/why-is-n...
  - 7y ago

criddell 7y ago

> If everyone is routable it cuts the gordian knot in the "What kind of content should be allowed on our platform?" question by allowing everyone to simply be their own platform. Do you think the adoption of IPv6 would lead ISPs to drop their ban on running servers from non-business accounts?

echelon 7y ago

> net from being just a more privacy invasive form of television. This is such a great analogy. The Internet has become a dopamine fix. Platforms are generic and inflexible. (Remember when you could change the HTML?) Content is watered down or demonetized for the sake of ad money (Youtube, Tumblr). You can't read the news without getting a video ad shoved down your throat. Commercial video is DRM'd. Browsers (read: Chrome) enables websites to prevent you from copying text or viewing source images. Your every move is tracked to better target ads and sell your profile.

madars 7y ago
re: being prevented from copying the text -- one can just use Stylus + the following stylesheet * { -webkit-user-select: text !important; user-select: text !important; } + others for saving Instagram pictures, removing hangouts.google.com background, etc It is incredible how much more palatable the web becomes with uBlock Origin + uMatrix + Stylus. Not optimistic for the web in the long term, though.
- throwaway-9320 7y ago
  There are websites which can and will manipulate the text you are copying. I am aware of at least one news site which will replace the copied article text with a short summary and a link to the article. Example: https://www.ghacks.net/2016/05/24/chrome-copy-text-manipulation/ https://www.ghacks.net/2016/05/24/chrome-copy-text-manipulat...

mindslight 7y ago

> If everyone is routable it cuts the gordian knot in the "What kind of content should be allowed on our platform?" question by allowing everyone to simply be their own platform No, it really doesn't. It makes easier one aspect of developing peer to peer software. Which sure is a good thing, but it's not some panacea. Our regressive software landscape didn't come about because end users simply didn't have easy access to routeable IP addresses. But rather because tinkering with software can be tedious, developing easy to use software takes resources, and the most straightforward way of recouping that investment through surveillance and control. Right now, you can get a VPS with perfectly routable addresses for $5/mo. And if you're not interested in or able to afford that, you're certainly not going to leave your own machine up 24/7 as a server. In reality, IP/DNS is a namespace that's terrible for user-facing systems - it itself causes centralization by necessitating that singular authoritative servers answer requests for a named object. What we actually need for a non-corporate net is higher level addressing such as content concentric networking (IPFS et al). (I've gotten some downvotes, and I would be really interested in hearing the actual disagreement. I know we're all biased to think this paradigm of IP4/6 could do everything we want, if only it were used "correctly". But after a few decades of watching things evolve I just don't see how it's sufficient for de-centralization).

yyyk 7y ago

In practice we'll still be traffic shapred on ISP level so not so much P2P. It's far more likely that IPv6 will be used to give everyone one single unique trackable address* and we'll all be easily tracked down by IP again. The practical semi-privacy IPv4 let people have will be gone. Ultimately, technologies are less important than public opinion, politics and commerce in dictating how the net goes. * Or a single trackable address range, no matter. Yes, ISPs could do differently. Why would they? All the incentives are on the other side.

peterwwillis 7y ago

> Because adoption of ipv6 allows everyone to be an equal on the internet again Sorry, but this is incorrect. No matter how you connect to the internet, someone has to agree to route your traffic. Just having an allocation of "public" address space doesn't mean you are free to do whatever you want. Other people have to actually pick up your traffic. If you don't have an ASN and a core router on a backbone to announce and carry your traffic, and instead are just using what an ISP gave you, you really have almost no control over whether that address is routable, what protocols you can use with it, etc. They can impose the same limits on IPv6 as IPv4 - and in order to reduce overt abuses of their network resources, they almost certainly will. Remember: passing packets requires real money. The larger the number of packets, the larger the bandwidth used, the larger the concurrent connections, the more money it costs. Any segment in the network that takes up significantly more traffic than another, will end up costing a disproportionate amount of dollars and maintenance to support. So unless you're paying for all of it, you will have limits. And just like every other resource on the planet, some people will have more resources than others. IPv6 is identical to IPv4 in terms of what "freedom" you have on the internet.

throw0101a 7y ago
> IPv6 is identical to IPv4 in terms of what "freedom" you have on the internet. It is easier to offer services on IPv6 IMHO. If you want to have some boxes at home to SSH into, you need to provide port forwarding after the first. So for the first system in IPv4 you would have pubip:22 -> inta:22, but then you have to do pubip:23 -> intb:22, pubip:24 -> intc:22, etc. With IPv6 you can just use the hosts' IPv6 addresses and punch holes for :22 for each individual system as desired: no port tomfoolery needed.
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  Sure, but you're talking about using NAT vs not using NAT. You can still get a dozen IPv4 addresses from an ISP and do the same thing as IPv6. But you have to pay for 'em. The ISP can decide to impose exactly the same limit on allocated IPv6 as IPv4, and charge you for more hosts. Your freedom hasn't changed, only your billing has.

Havoc 7y ago

>ipv6 allows everyone to be an equal on the internet again. Right now half of the computers hooked up to the 'net aren't even given a routable IP address. Given how sht the security on IoTs is I'm not convinced giving everything a routable IP is a good idea frankly. At least not until the IoT players up their game significantly

noodlesUK 7y ago
Unfortunately NAT has made us lazy. If even a small number of a particular type of IOT device is being deployed on native IPv6 networks, you’ve got to face the security consequences anyway. Also NAT is not a firewall, but that’s a story for another day.

lxgr 7y ago

Not allowing inbound connections is arguably a feature for most users, not a bug. I don't think that even given widespread IPv6 adoption, we'll ever go back to a model where residential or mobile internet connections will allow for public reachability by default. Of course, NATs and firewalls are not the same thing (you just effectively happen to get the latter when deploying the former). But I firmly believe that the bulk of technologies that give us dynamic endpoint lookup and coordinated firewall traversal will outlive IPv4 and NAT. As an anecdotal example, I used to have a mobile data plan that assigned a public IPv4 address to my phone, including inbound TCP/UDP reachability! That's neither good for battery life, nor for data consumption (on a metered plan). By contrast, my current one puts me behind a carrier grade NAT, but I have no problems whatsoever making peer to peer VoIP calls to friends behind the same type of NAT.