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That seems backwards: with NAT you couldn't identify all of the individual computers on my Internet connection; but now, with IPv6, you either can at worst (as
by saurik 7y ago
That seems backwards: with NAT you couldn't identify all of the individual computers on my Internet connection; but now, with IPv6, you either can at worst (as every device has its own IP address that it reuses) or, at best (generating a new address for every single connection), are just getting yourself back to where you were with NAT. I appreciate that for a while IPv6 was actively much worse as it allowed address correlation across multiple networks (due to the MAC address being the same in the lower 64 bits), but fixing that doesn't make it better than NAT: if you mostly care about privacy, it still seems to make the most sense to use NAT if at all possible.
- ignoramous 7y ago> with NAT you couldn't identify all of the individual computers on my Internet connection... Not if you're using WebRTC which would promptly leak the private IP address: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528184
- zrm 7y agoThere are also several other methods that often work, e.g. the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header if there is a local proxy, or a long list of non-HTTP protocols or tunnel-XYZ-inside-HTTP protocols that have the client IP as part of the protocol. Temporary IPv6 addresses actually solve this, especially for P2P systems that do benefit from knowing the client IP in case there is a peer on the same LAN, because the address they get is the same one the remote server sees (no additional information) and then it's both a valid local address but hard to correlate with anything when every device can have hundreds of them at once.