5 ms·

IPv4, the original decentralized Internet currency. Just get on IPv6 already! These numbers wouldn't be worth enough to fight over if we just upgrade.

sgjohnson 3y ago
> decentralized The internet might be entirely decentralized, but IP address allocations are very centralized.
- swinglock 3y ago
  > AFRINIC is one of the world's five regional internet registries, or RIRs: AFRINIC; Asia-Pacific's APNIC; North America’s ARIN; Europe’s RIPE; and Latin America’s LACNIC. These are the organizations that manage, allocate, and track the use of internet number resources – IP addresses and autonomous system numbers. Which one is the central authority?
  - autoexec 3y ago
    The Number Resources Organization is the body which represents the regional internet registries. You could maybe consider that to be the central authority, but when you're talking IP addresses, IANA is the central authority.
    - sgjohnson 3y ago
      5 regional authorities is still _centralized_
      - autoexec 3y ago
        I agree, but I can understand wanting it narrowed down to a single org.
  - sgjohnson 3y ago
    The one assigning numbers to the five regional authorities. That would be IANA. And even if there was no IANA, the 5 regional authorities would still very much be centralized.
feldrim 3y ago
> just upgrade. I wish it was that easy.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  Doesn't basically all modern hardware and software already support IPv6 just fine? Aren't we just waiting for more ISPs to start rolling it out and sysadmins to remove their stupid "disable IPv6" policies?
  - Dagger2 3y ago
    A lot of programmers are still writing v4-only code somehow. They'll write things like "socket(AF_INET, ...)" or "struct sockaddr_in address;" or "gethostbyname(...)" completely seriously and not seem to realize that any one of those things is an immediate red flag that your code is wrong and broken. OSs are fine, but the software and systems that we build on top of them are often v4-only.
    - feldrim 3y ago
      TBH, if it is not a requirement of the software, why would devs spend time on developing and testing IPv6? YAGNI kicks in way that point. If it's FOSS, it depends on the community. But if it is commercial, it's up to the specs.
      - Dagger2 3y ago
        I'm not even asking for that, I'm just asking for people to use the "new" APIs (they're older than some of the programmers making these mistakes), which are agnostic to address family. Use them even vaguely correctly and your code won't care about what address family the addresses are. Having bugs in untested functionality is understandable, but using long-deprecated known-broken APIs, or using the current ones in ways that are clearly and obviously wrong, isn't. (Also you should be using, and therefore testing, v6 at this point. But that's a separate discussion.)
  - feldrim 3y ago
tialaramex 3y ago
It's not a currency, it's a resource. Mistaking resources for a currency results in bad outcomes, which is why e.g. "gold" was a bad idea as a world currency. We need gold to make stuff, it's a resource. In fact v4 addresses are not even just an ordinary resource, they're very like Real Estate aka Real Property, or "land". There's a finite amount of it, we can't do anything about that - to some extent it's effectively "occupied" already in many cases, so an imagined "property right" doesn't trump that in practice, and it's very much not fungible.

sgjohnson 3y ago

> decentralized The internet might be entirely decentralized, but IP address allocations are very centralized.

swinglock 3y ago
> AFRINIC is one of the world's five regional internet registries, or RIRs: AFRINIC; Asia-Pacific's APNIC; North America’s ARIN; Europe’s RIPE; and Latin America’s LACNIC. These are the organizations that manage, allocate, and track the use of internet number resources – IP addresses and autonomous system numbers. Which one is the central authority?
- autoexec 3y ago
  The Number Resources Organization is the body which represents the regional internet registries. You could maybe consider that to be the central authority, but when you're talking IP addresses, IANA is the central authority.
  - sgjohnson 3y ago
    5 regional authorities is still _centralized_
    - autoexec 3y ago
      I agree, but I can understand wanting it narrowed down to a single org.
- sgjohnson 3y ago
  The one assigning numbers to the five regional authorities. That would be IANA. And even if there was no IANA, the 5 regional authorities would still very much be centralized.

feldrim 3y ago

> just upgrade. I wish it was that easy.

josephcsible 3y ago
Doesn't basically all modern hardware and software already support IPv6 just fine? Aren't we just waiting for more ISPs to start rolling it out and sysadmins to remove their stupid "disable IPv6" policies?
- Dagger2 3y ago
  A lot of programmers are still writing v4-only code somehow. They'll write things like "socket(AF_INET, ...)" or "struct sockaddr_in address;" or "gethostbyname(...)" completely seriously and not seem to realize that any one of those things is an immediate red flag that your code is wrong and broken. OSs are fine, but the software and systems that we build on top of them are often v4-only.
  - feldrim 3y ago
    TBH, if it is not a requirement of the software, why would devs spend time on developing and testing IPv6? YAGNI kicks in way that point. If it's FOSS, it depends on the community. But if it is commercial, it's up to the specs.
    - Dagger2 3y ago
      I'm not even asking for that, I'm just asking for people to use the "new" APIs (they're older than some of the programmers making these mistakes), which are agnostic to address family. Use them even vaguely correctly and your code won't care about what address family the addresses are. Having bugs in untested functionality is understandable, but using long-deprecated known-broken APIs, or using the current ones in ways that are clearly and obviously wrong, isn't. (Also you should be using, and therefore testing, v6 at this point. But that's a separate discussion.)
- feldrim 3y ago

tialaramex 3y ago

It's not a currency, it's a resource. Mistaking resources for a currency results in bad outcomes, which is why e.g. "gold" was a bad idea as a world currency. We need gold to make stuff, it's a resource. In fact v4 addresses are not even just an ordinary resource, they're very like Real Estate aka Real Property, or "land". There's a finite amount of it, we can't do anything about that - to some extent it's effectively "occupied" already in many cases, so an imagined "property right" doesn't trump that in practice, and it's very much not fungible.