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Comment by dennisgorelik | Hacker News Reader

It looks like the article ignores important fact that IP4 address is used to determine location and whether the sender is spammer or not. When IP addresses are easily available, it would be harder to maintain such locations and spam databases. It looks to me that IPv6 is a waste of time and would eventually be replaced by some other technology.

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I find it hard to believe that the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 which has been anticipated for nearly two decades and is supported by all major hardware and software vendors (albeit with the issues mentioned in the article) will simply be discarded because software engineers will have to think a bit more carefully than just banning people based on IP (which is already a bad way to detect spammers since it is very common for many people to share the same IP if they are behind a NAT).

Furthermore, for location it would be no harder than IPv4 since location databases, just like routing rely on prefixing which doesn't go away with IPv6. Also because the IPv6 address space is so big, there are event proposals to allocate blocks of the address space to each country and then the country can further distribute its block among all the various cities/regions of the country which would greatly simplify determining location based on IP.

Naah.. The government will just require your unique citizen identifier in the bottom 64 bits. You won't be able to sign up for an ISP or a cell phone or any other connected device without it. Why do you think they made the address space so absurdly huge?

Who is this "the government?" In fact, I heard somewhere that the government of any arbitrary spammer is just as likely as not to be a whole different government!

Clearly the narrator is referring to that meta-governing-body, The Government. You know, the one all the conspiracy theorists never see, because it's OMG REAL, and therefore not a conspiracy. Narrators, however, have outside knowledge of the system they narrate, so they would be in a position to know of such a system.

Ok, it's a paranoid theory for now but I couldn't think of any other possible reason for such a large address space besides being permanent unique identifcation of clients, like a mac address. The bandwidth wasted on sending those addresses around multiplied by every packet on the internet seems ridiculously wastefull otherwise. For instance, there will probably never be 2^128 packets created and sent on the internet between now and the heat death of the universe.

Wasn't meaning to shoot down the paranoia, just having fun with / at your username, as I saw the potential for fun :) It's certainly excessive, but more layers = more efficient routing, and I'd assume they don't want to go through all this again in a mere 1000 years when we're populating 5 planets, everyone has 100+ network connected devices, and data centers have billions. And everyone tweets.

You don't understand how large 2^128 is do you? Let's quit all this handwavy crap about how that's a nice big number and look at how absurdly big it is.

The number of seconds since the universe started is 13.75 billion * 86400 * 365 = 4.3 x 10 ^ 17 seconds.

U.S Internet traffic was 18 exabytes (1 exabyte=10^18 bytes) a year, so let's just say that that we are sending 18 exabytes a second since the beginning of the universe and we are counting each byte. Yes, each set of 8 1s and 0s. How many is that?

4.3 x 10 ^17 * 18 * 10^18 = 7.74 * 10 ^36.

2^128= 3.4 + 10 ^ 38 / (7.74 * 10^36 ) =~ 43. So you could have a different ip address for every byte sent over the Internet, assuming the traffic for the whole year was sent over the course of 1 second for every second in 43 times the current age of the universe.

I understand it perfectly well, yes. I also understand that people like to buy ranges of IP addresses. This much space makes it not only easy, they can sell large ranges nearly indefinitely. Sell + indefinitely = yes, from their viewpoint.

Blacklisting IP's is typically based on the behavior of the address. More importantly, networks tend to be listed if a certain percentage of addresses on it send spam, act like a bot, etc.

Location databases are based on the owner of the netblock.

There are still networks in in IPv6. Typically, with IPv6, MAC addresses take up the right 48 bits of the 128 bit IPv6 address. other 90 bits are used for subnetting/routing. The new spam and location databases will focus on these 90 bits, just like location databases usually focus on the /24.

Like? And when? And on what hardware? That address space issue still looms - putting it off another 20 years won't help anything. IPv6 stuff is available now, the problem is in using two different formats - introducing a new format is unlikely to solve that issue.

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