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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

> because I get assigned a new prefix every 24 hours

Which kinda defeats the purpose of having a globally reachable unique address in a lot of respects. How am I supposed to allow connections to this device in my firewall if the address is always changing?

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There's advantages and disadvantages to this approach. When we're talking about residential networks, some consumers won't care about the inability to do that, some will. Those that do care also have to weigh the privacy concerns about the fact that they have a now static prefix for their networks, much like static IPv4 addresses.

Personally I'd prefer ISPs to take an approach like this by default, but allow the option for the consumer to have a statically assigned IPv6 prefix for free if they want it, who understand its implications.

> When we're talking about residential networks, some consumers won't care about the inability to do that, some will.

This prevents also to create products that need a public address. I think it is a real brake on innovation, who knows what could be invented if everyone had a public ip address ?

The address is public, you can use a dynDNS easily. Relying on fixed addresses never works.

[devils advocate] ISPs are businesses, they are also there to make money, those customers who want a static address may have to pay extra to get one. They know static IPs are more valuable so they won’t give them out by default, ipv4 was the same.

Exactly. There is more than enough address space to give a person a static IPv6 network.

Comcast is guilty of this. Verizon doesn’t even offer IPv6 on FIOS.

For both, I just set up an IPv6 tunnel to Hurricane Electric using pfSense.

>> There is more than enough address space to give a person a static IPv6 network. >> Comcast is guilty of this. Verizon doesn’t even offer IPv6 on FIOS.

Why would ISPs not deliberately(!) change address(es) for cheap/residential plans, to provide a reason for those customers to care about this to pay more for a pro/business plan with a static IP allocation?

For privacy purposes I hope most ISPs do this.

Looks like the wet dream of adtech, to have everybody use a static IP address. No thanks.

Most operating systems these days support IPv6 privacy extensions where a device will pick a semi-random address every 24 hours. IIRC, it is the default on macOS. You can have a static prefix and random addresses per device.

You will be tracked by prefix then.

> How am I supposed to allow connections to this device in my firewall if the address is always changing?

You don't. That's what ESP/AH with PKI is for.

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