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At a high level one of the sad things about IPv6 is that it surrenders a wierd, valuable and emergent property of IPv4 for the average home user in $random_coun
by rao-v 6mo ago
At a high level one of the sad things about IPv6 is that it surrenders a wierd, valuable and emergent property of IPv4 for the average home user in $random_country:
IPv4 addresses in logs are not super helpful in tracking a specific person and household’s behavior long term (NAT, reuse etc.)
Almost every end user oriented IPv6 deployment makes it significantly easier to use IPv6 addresses to persistently track individual machines (ie individual people) and map them to a household (yes I’m aware of RFCs 7217 and 8981, I’m mostly talking about long term stable prefixes).
How much of a real concern this is is debatable but it’s perhaps a little bit unfortunate.
- doubled112 6mo agoAt home, my external IPv4 address was the same for extended periods of time even though I never paid for a static IP. You could have figured the traffic was coming from the same location. The one external IP to many internal devices relationship does help with privacy. But once you enable those IPv6 privacy extensions, I have so many devices bouncing between IPs I’m not sure how you’d even know how many devices I have, let alone which device is which.
- rao-v 6mo agoMy experience is that this is largely true only of the biggest ISPs in the US and Europe that were around in the 90s and have IPv4 in plenty. In other countries or even with other ISPs I see fairly frequent turnover. Agree it’s not the biggest deal but it is a pity and something the protocol stack around IPv6 should support (daily/weekly randomizing of prefix unless someone needs the stability). The vast majority of modern devices and usecases get no additional value from being stably addressable from the internet.