4 ms·

I believe a lot of this traffic is from mobile devices on networks where cellular carriers do have a good incentive to roll out IPv6 and mobile phones have good

I believe a lot of this traffic is from mobile devices on networks where cellular carriers do have a good incentive to roll out IPv6 and mobile phones have good support for it. I would like to see google break this down by desktop / mobile traffic to see how much penetration traditional ISPs have. My ISP has IPv6 support and address space but refuses to roll it out to customers, I suspect due to the support issues it will create. V6 addresses are not friendly. Four numbers is east to communicate, easy to enter, and easy to spot even for a non technical person. V6 is more difficult and variable length which is harder to explain to your grandparents. I also think there is something to be said about people with dyslexia and how the numbers are perceived by them. And there will be lots of support needed to roll this out to home routers with various levels of support and bugs, needing to enable firewalls at the device level instead of at the router, all of the IoT devices with just enough processing power to send an up address on a half baked networking stack. It’s still a massive uphill battle. And yes, I know there are solutions to all of these issues, it’s just getting them out there.

eru 3y ago
> V6 addresses are not friendly. Four numbers is east to communicate, easy to enter, and easy to spot even for a non technical person. V6 is more difficult and variable length which is harder to explain to your grandparents. I also think there is something to be said about people with dyslexia and how the numbers are perceived by them. URL's don't have a fixed length, so I'm not sure variable length is significant barrier to adoption by itself? Phone numbers also have variable lengths.
- threesevenths 3y ago
  > Phone numbers also have variable lengths. Yes in many parts of the world you are correct. In North America, phone numbers are all 10 digits prefixed with a 1 for long distance. > URL's don't have a fixed length, so I'm not sure variable length is significant barrier to adoption by itself? URLs tend to be a word or phrase that can be communicated. You tend to have to just say google dot com not gee oh oh gee el ee dot cee oh em.
  - eru 3y ago
    > Yes in many parts of the world you are correct. In North America, phone numbers are all 10 digits prefixed with a 1 for long distance. 911, and other special and vanity numbers don't count? People have never heard of international numbers, either? Or that long distance vs local changes the length?
yetanotherloss 3y ago
If you're using V6 addresses by hand often enough to consider them unfriendly, you're doing something wrong. Also basically every home router in the last 10 years is V6 dual stack because they're all more or less just running variations on Linux or FreeBSD with user land stripped out for Busybox. Ipv6 has been fine for years. It is purely institutional laziness at this point.
- threesevenths 3y ago
  > If you're using V6 addresses by hand often enough to consider them unfriendly, you're doing something wrong. I more or less agree that it should be hands off. However explaining to someone over a voice channel how to enter an IPv6 address who isn't familiar even once is unfriendly. Not impossible, more difficult than IPv4. > Also basically every home router in the last 10 years is V6 dual stack because they're all more or less just running variations on Linux or FreeBSD with user land stripped out for Busybox. Yes, however they all have various levels of support for managing IPv6. Many early routers didn't have friendly interfaces to set this up, or did so automatically if the ISP provided addresses. Firewall support is still a mixed bag IMO, especially when you start to consider the crap router/gateways that ISPs provide to the lowest bidder. Good hardware with good support isn't something a non-technical person with a single tablet in the house is going to pick up next to the 40-Dollar option on a shelf. You are right, it's getting better. > Ipv6 has been fine for years. It is purely institutional laziness at this point. You could also argue that despite the dire warnings about the impending doom of the internet, IPv4 has largely been 'fine' for years as well, and will likely continue to hamper IPv6 adoption until v4 is no longer 'fine'.
  - yetanotherloss 3y ago
    Ipv4 has been "fine" largely due to carrier level NAT that has had significant impact on protocol functionality. Also who are you explaining entering v6 addresses to? Serious question. And how is that effectively longer than a dns name? People aren't used to v6 addresses, I get that. But they aren't meaningfully harder than myts3server.cgnatsucksdns.com.
CJefferson 3y ago
How many non-tech grandparents have ever needed an IP address? I don't think I've needed one, other than 8.8.8.8, in 5 years.
- macleginn 3y ago
  10.0.0.1 happens to be quite useful from time to time.
  - sbarre 3y ago
    For your grandparents?
    - macleginn 3y ago
      One situation a grandparent can find themselves in: they connect to a free wi-fi network that should show you a welcome screen, where you agree to something, before actually turning on the internet. Quite often this welcome screen fails to appear on at least some devices. A very useful workaround is to open a browser and go to 10.0.0.1; the agree-and-join page is quite likely to appear then.
      - kalleboo 3y ago
        I've used a lot of crappy free wifi, all around the world, and never one that http://neverssl.com http://neverssl.com didn't work on
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Isn't it time to stop using "grandparents" as a stand-in for "naive user"? I know a lot of grandparents who are more tech-savvy than their grandchildren.
- threesevenths 3y ago
  For me it's mostly been IoT type devices where you need to join the network of the device, and if I am lucky, it will have a captive portal to setup the device. This could still be V4 for the foreseeable future, however I see this as a problem in any level of communication. Just time yourself saying a full IPv4 address vs an IPv6 one, without a block of zeros, it's significantly longer and more error prone. Your example of 8.8.8.8 is itself designed to be easy to communicate and enter, same with 1.1.1.1 and 9.9.9.9, etc. They exist because communicating an ISPs DNS server or a standard IPv4 address can be hard sometimes.
WorldMaker 3y ago
> V6 is more difficult and variable length which is harder to explain to your grandparents. IPv6 addresses are still fixed size. They aren't variable length. The :: shortcut is just "fill with zeroes here" and your grandparents probably had lots of bank account numbers and credit card numbers they memorized as prefix, suffix and some number of zeroes in the middle. (Like the :: shortcut they might not even bother to remember how many zeroes and just fill out the boxes until it looked right.) That's still common among some banks to use account/card numbering schemes like that, even in the computer age where you probably shouldn't memorize your account number and it is better for security if the account number had something a lot more pseudo-random than a long series of zeroes in the middle. > I also think there is something to be said about people with dyslexia and how the numbers are perceived by them. I can't speak for anyone else with dyscalculia (like dyslexia but only for the ordering of numbers) but hexadecimal is a lot kinder to me than decimal. I often remember the right digits but not their order, but I rarely have such problems with "words" and IPv6's use of hex 4-digit groups looks to my brain a lot more like words than numbers, especially when a through f show up. I hate trying to remember IPv4 addresses in dotted quad format because it is sometimes a million ways to get the orders wrong even knowing the format, but I've personally had fewer problems visually/memorably with IPv6 addresses, especially when you get a nice chunky :: in there somewhere. (It's so great sometimes to just handwave away all the less meaningful zeroes.) Again, that's just my experience with my own (undiagnosed from a professional standpoint, undebilitating) dyscalculia.

eru 3y ago

> V6 addresses are not friendly. Four numbers is east to communicate, easy to enter, and easy to spot even for a non technical person. V6 is more difficult and variable length which is harder to explain to your grandparents. I also think there is something to be said about people with dyslexia and how the numbers are perceived by them. URL's don't have a fixed length, so I'm not sure variable length is significant barrier to adoption by itself? Phone numbers also have variable lengths.

threesevenths 3y ago
> Phone numbers also have variable lengths. Yes in many parts of the world you are correct. In North America, phone numbers are all 10 digits prefixed with a 1 for long distance. > URL's don't have a fixed length, so I'm not sure variable length is significant barrier to adoption by itself? URLs tend to be a word or phrase that can be communicated. You tend to have to just say google dot com not gee oh oh gee el ee dot cee oh em.
- eru 3y ago
  > Yes in many parts of the world you are correct. In North America, phone numbers are all 10 digits prefixed with a 1 for long distance. 911, and other special and vanity numbers don't count? People have never heard of international numbers, either? Or that long distance vs local changes the length?

yetanotherloss 3y ago

If you're using V6 addresses by hand often enough to consider them unfriendly, you're doing something wrong. Also basically every home router in the last 10 years is V6 dual stack because they're all more or less just running variations on Linux or FreeBSD with user land stripped out for Busybox. Ipv6 has been fine for years. It is purely institutional laziness at this point.

threesevenths 3y ago
> If you're using V6 addresses by hand often enough to consider them unfriendly, you're doing something wrong. I more or less agree that it should be hands off. However explaining to someone over a voice channel how to enter an IPv6 address who isn't familiar even once is unfriendly. Not impossible, more difficult than IPv4. > Also basically every home router in the last 10 years is V6 dual stack because they're all more or less just running variations on Linux or FreeBSD with user land stripped out for Busybox. Yes, however they all have various levels of support for managing IPv6. Many early routers didn't have friendly interfaces to set this up, or did so automatically if the ISP provided addresses. Firewall support is still a mixed bag IMO, especially when you start to consider the crap router/gateways that ISPs provide to the lowest bidder. Good hardware with good support isn't something a non-technical person with a single tablet in the house is going to pick up next to the 40-Dollar option on a shelf. You are right, it's getting better. > Ipv6 has been fine for years. It is purely institutional laziness at this point. You could also argue that despite the dire warnings about the impending doom of the internet, IPv4 has largely been 'fine' for years as well, and will likely continue to hamper IPv6 adoption until v4 is no longer 'fine'.
- yetanotherloss 3y ago
  Ipv4 has been "fine" largely due to carrier level NAT that has had significant impact on protocol functionality. Also who are you explaining entering v6 addresses to? Serious question. And how is that effectively longer than a dns name? People aren't used to v6 addresses, I get that. But they aren't meaningfully harder than myts3server.cgnatsucksdns.com.

CJefferson 3y ago

How many non-tech grandparents have ever needed an IP address? I don't think I've needed one, other than 8.8.8.8, in 5 years.

macleginn 3y ago
10.0.0.1 happens to be quite useful from time to time.
- sbarre 3y ago
  For your grandparents?
  - macleginn 3y ago
    One situation a grandparent can find themselves in: they connect to a free wi-fi network that should show you a welcome screen, where you agree to something, before actually turning on the internet. Quite often this welcome screen fails to appear on at least some devices. A very useful workaround is to open a browser and go to 10.0.0.1; the agree-and-join page is quite likely to appear then.
    - kalleboo 3y ago
      I've used a lot of crappy free wifi, all around the world, and never one that http://neverssl.com http://neverssl.com didn't work on
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Isn't it time to stop using "grandparents" as a stand-in for "naive user"? I know a lot of grandparents who are more tech-savvy than their grandchildren.
threesevenths 3y ago
For me it's mostly been IoT type devices where you need to join the network of the device, and if I am lucky, it will have a captive portal to setup the device. This could still be V4 for the foreseeable future, however I see this as a problem in any level of communication. Just time yourself saying a full IPv4 address vs an IPv6 one, without a block of zeros, it's significantly longer and more error prone. Your example of 8.8.8.8 is itself designed to be easy to communicate and enter, same with 1.1.1.1 and 9.9.9.9, etc. They exist because communicating an ISPs DNS server or a standard IPv4 address can be hard sometimes.

WorldMaker 3y ago

> V6 is more difficult and variable length which is harder to explain to your grandparents. IPv6 addresses are still fixed size. They aren't variable length. The :: shortcut is just "fill with zeroes here" and your grandparents probably had lots of bank account numbers and credit card numbers they memorized as prefix, suffix and some number of zeroes in the middle. (Like the :: shortcut they might not even bother to remember how many zeroes and just fill out the boxes until it looked right.) That's still common among some banks to use account/card numbering schemes like that, even in the computer age where you probably shouldn't memorize your account number and it is better for security if the account number had something a lot more pseudo-random than a long series of zeroes in the middle. > I also think there is something to be said about people with dyslexia and how the numbers are perceived by them. I can't speak for anyone else with dyscalculia (like dyslexia but only for the ordering of numbers) but hexadecimal is a lot kinder to me than decimal. I often remember the right digits but not their order, but I rarely have such problems with "words" and IPv6's use of hex 4-digit groups looks to my brain a lot more like words than numbers, especially when a through f show up. I hate trying to remember IPv4 addresses in dotted quad format because it is sometimes a million ways to get the orders wrong even knowing the format, but I've personally had fewer problems visually/memorably with IPv6 addresses, especially when you get a nice chunky :: in there somewhere. (It's so great sometimes to just handwave away all the less meaningful zeroes.) Again, that's just my experience with my own (undiagnosed from a professional standpoint, undebilitating) dyscalculia.