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This article is focused on the US, a country which was never really going to feel the brunt of the IPv4 crunch. For an example of a real victim, look at Qatar,
by chimeracoder 13y ago
This article is focused on the US, a country which was never really going to feel the brunt of the IPv4 crunch.
For an example of a real victim, look at Qatar, a country which only has a single IP address for the entire country (everyone sits behind a NAT): https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Qatari_proxy_IP_address_temporarily_blocked_on_Wikipedia https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Qatari_proxy_IP_address_tempora... [0]
Whenever someone from Qatar decides to vandalize Wikipedia, Wikipedia is forced (temporarily) to block the entire country from accessing Wikipedia. This has an adverse impact on the rest of the country.
Non-Qatari Wikipedia users also suffer, because Wikipedia makes those blocks very temporary (since they are effectively shutting off an entire country), which makes it easy for those vandals to regain access to Wikipedia quickly.
[0] This sad state of affairs is not solely due to IPv4 (incompetent/apathetic network administrators are also at fault), but it's a contributing factor.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- shawabawa3 13y ago> Whenever someone from Qatar decides to vandalize Wikipedia, Wikipedia is forced (temporarily) to block the entire country from accessing Wikipedia Can't they just block IPs from editing? Seems like that would solve the problem
- insertnickname 13y agoThat's what they do. But this still prevents everyone in Qatar (who does not have an IP ban exception) from editing.
- Jach 13y agoHow many of Qatar's 2 million people use the internet, and how many of them pay for a VPN service? (https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/6715/5-best-vpns-for-qatar/ https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/6715/5-best-vpns-for-qatar/ indicates there are a lot of internet cafes whose owners are using VPNs and passing on the access to customers.) It sounds to me like a person from Qatar wouldn't have a problem editing wiki if they wanted to, nor a vandal from vandalizing if they wanted to...
- philwelch 13y agoThey can and probably do.
- Udo 13y agoTo be fair, Qatar's situation has nothing to do with the IPv4 crisis. It's a country-wide firewall/proxy that exists due to political reasons and it wouldn't behave any differently if it was implemented in IPv6.
- davidw 13y agoExactly - Qatar is not exactly some poor country. They have the cash to buy all the IP's they want, should they so choose.
- okasaki 13y agoWhy not use something else to ban users in this case? For example the user agent, browser window resolution, installed fonts, etc.
- Buge 13y agoThose can all be changed. A determined spammer could make a bot that automatically changes them.
- alexandros 13y agoWhereas an IP can't be trivially masked?
- herokusaki 13y agoI assume a browser fingerprint of the right granularity is hard to change for someone who would vandalize Wikipedia without a proxy.
- einhverfr 13y agoBecause vandals never use different browsers? ;-)
- danielweber 13y agoYou act like Wikipedia has no agency in this matter and is simply forced to block Qatar's IP address from editing. Wikipedia has choices, and it's choosing something well within its rights to prevent abuse of its property, but they could choose to do something different.
- forgottenpass 13y agoI think you're getting distracted by property for no real reason. Given the type of website Wikipedia aims to be, it's hard for them to give Qataris the service they want to deliver.
- gpvos 13y agoI am curious. Which other criterion than IP address could they use to prevent anonymous users from Qatar from vandalizing? (I guess one method could be to force everyone from this IP address to create an account, but that goes against their openness/ease-of-editing-for-new-or-casual-users principle.)
- danielweber 13y agoI mostly object to the phrasing that Wikipedia is "forced" to block all of Qatar, as if Wikipedia is a mindless force of nature or not in control of its own actions.
- poolpool 13y agoFinally someone sticking up for wikipedia around here. Its disgusting the way She is treated.
- diminoten 13y agoWhat is the IP address, then? I got lots of different answers while googling. Is it still a range (they rotate through their allocated space), or do my googling skills just stink?
- ctrl_freak 13y agoThis is probably the address in question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:82.148.97.69/header http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:82.148.97.69/header
- kordless 13y agoI can assure you the US is feeling the brunt of the IPv4 crunch. I'm building something that needs massive amounts of public address space and I simply can't get IPv4 addresses for it. I've asked multiple providers. You are LUCKY if you can get a /28 at this point. Hoarding. Rolling with IPv6 instead. I get you have an interest in the Qatar/Wikipedia situation, but it seems to be unlikely due to IP address resource management issues. Probably more like tyrannical control, if anything.
- jlgaddis 13y agoI know of multiple providers who have gotten allocations in the last month (up to /19) and will be requesting another one myself in the near future. ARIN has plenty of IPs.
- kordless 13y agoRight on. I'll keep looking then. I sorta gave up after two told me the same story. Probably need to talk to someone bigger.
- jauer 13y agoAre you asking for more than you can immediately use? Elsewhere you mentioned having difficulty getting more than a /28. That's pretty much the largest block you can get without some paperwork to justify your immediate usage. If you haven't already, take a look at the ARIN requirements in https://www.arin.net/policy/nrpm.html#four23 https://www.arin.net/policy/nrpm.html#four23 and make sure you have your ducks in a row before you go back at it.
- lflux 13y agoI had absolutely no problem getting a /27 from my ISP here in Sweden the other week.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago>I'm building something that needs massive amounts of public address space // You piqued my interest, what?
- AshleysBrain 13y agoHow could NAT work for an entire country of people behind one IP? My understanding was that NAT allows communication over separate ports, so for example a router with ip 123.45.67.89 can run three clients by sending their data over ports 50000, 50001 and 50002. How does this work when more than 65k people are trying to connect? There don't seem to be enough ports for that to be possible.
- mmastrac 13y agoThis is a dramatic simplification, but TCP uses the quadruplet of source IP/source port/dest IP/dest port as a session identifier, so you can potentially get 2 billion people using one outgoing port to 2 billion different servers with different IPs in the absolute best case (which wouldn't happen, of course).
- bartwe 13y agothat limit only happens when 65k people try to use the same remote ip, otherwise the distinction can still be made for tcp streams.
- jethro_tell 13y agoIs there a minister of Port forwarding? What happens when I fire up chrome and Firefox with 80 pages each? Am I limited to a number out going connections? I assume the entire country is running off a Windows 95 box with two nics but that's just the way I imagine most cg-nat.
- yardie 13y agoI've exhausted a SQL server for ports, for science. Yes you are limited to the number of outgoing to ~64000 outgoing ports. Chances are your network equipment (not enterprise grade) will run out of switching contexts before you run out of ports.
- nwh 13y agoQatar has a huge allocation of unused IP addresses. It's a matter of choice that their censorship proxy only exposes one IP address on the internet side.
- mandeepj 13y agoI am surprised to see a comment which got everything wrong to be top voted. Is this the state of HN now? Waiting for down votes for myself now.......
- computator 13y agoYou make a case why IPv6 is good for traceability of users. On the other hand, IPv4 and NAT are a boon to privacy. We'd be exquisitely trackable if NAT didn't exist and every single device had a unique, unchangeable, life-long IP address. That's more-or-less how IP addresses were supposed to behave and IPv6 brings that back. We need to be thankful for NAT for the privacy it brought by accident.
- warp 13y agoIPv6 only brings that back if you want it too. By default Windows, OS X and iOS have privacy extensions enabled which will generate random IPv6 addresses which change every few minutes, which makes tracking a device more or less as difficult as with NATted IPv4.
- gonzo 13y agoNAT is not a privacy mechanism. For IP addresses to be lifelong (and therefore portable) the routing mechanism would need to change. Now you have two problems.