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Comment by brongondwana | Hacker News Reader

> What is the rational reason, if any, for gripes like these? The time to have this discussion would have been in like 1993 or so. Now, IPv6 is what we have, and the standards are what they are, flaws and all.

The rational reason is that despite tons of "we have to adopt IPv6 or the world will end", people aren't learning it. Trying to understand the underlying reasons is worthwhile. The shittyness of the representation is one of those reasons.

(I agree with the people who say "making the parsing namespace even more complex won't help anyone" though)

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It no longer matters if some people want to learn IPv6 or not. The world at large has adopted IPv6, by necessity. Those who refuse to follow with the times will, sooner or later, be replaced by those who are happy to learn new things. It’s not like the world will suddenly one day decide to give up and go back to IPv4. Adapt or die.

You seem to be confusing the difficulty of "learning" something which is trivially easy with the difficulty of using something that is designed in an obfuscated way that makes it hard to use.

This situation is the latter. That's the argument of the article.

The article is rather against the use of a colon at all, and that is not obfuscation.

Hardly. IPv6 is straight forward for any network engineer with experience with existing networks. It's IPv4 but you get to design address space to logically suit your infrastructure and needs.

You seem to be confusing the difficulty of "learning" something with the difficulty of "unlearning" something to learn something new.

I don't see any actual argument in the article, just narrow minded rant failing to see farther than it's own nose.

Everyone wants to have the larger address space that ipv6 provides. All the other stuff rolled into it and the obvious representation shortfalls etc are very unfortunate.

There isn't a clean way to solve representation of a 128-bit number. It's a big number. It'll be big to represent.

I am curious what other problems you think it has, that don't just come along with the bigger address space?

The realistic perspective here is still essentially the cost one: most people who have IPv4 hardware see little reason to move at all, until they have a problem.

I'm concerned about privacy implications. Let's say that I'm a dissident somewhere. I'm using VPN services, JonDonym, Tor, etc to help obscure my identity. But then maybe WebRTC or whatever reveals the device IPv6.

I'm sure that it's possible to generate a new IPv6 for each session. But it's yet another pitfall for the unwary. For now, I just disable and firewall.

What you're describing already exists. RFC 4941 defines a standard method for regularly "rotating" IPv6 addresses on a client machine, which is implemented by most major operating systems.

Rotating IP is nightmare for network admin: http://blog.bimajority.org/2014/09/05/the-network-nightmare-...

> UPDATE (2014-09-06): As Stéphane Bortzmeyer was the first to point out, RFC 7217 addresses all of my issues with “privacy” addresses. Let implementation come soon!

Very cool! Thanks :)

So you're behind a NAT for ipv4 for so long that you have forgotten that your computer is supposed to have a public IP address.

If you are a dissident or even a citizen concerned about privacy, you'd better be a part of the solution and not the problem as you are now by refusing to deal with ipv6.

They could have used base 36 and made it 16 characters. That would have made it at least feasible to remember.

I like this idea. A lot. For other readers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base36

I'd also want optional punctuation for formatting, for reading and data entry, just like with phone numbers. Maybe looking like this:

0123-ABCE-4567-FGHI

People are learning and using it just fine. Yes, it looks a bit different but that's about it. Everything works just the same except building properly routed networks is a lot easier with IPv6.

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