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Comment by raxxorrax | Hacker News Reader

I am on IPv6 and access IPv4 through bridges. For anonymity purposes I vastly prefer to have dynamic IPs to be honest.

Imagine all the tracking nightmare if we all had static IPs. All those shitty websites having you on log isn't really something I would want. I don't see advantages, getting a host with a static IP is extremely cheap today.

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That's nothing compared to my experience when I got allocated static IP (IPv4) at university. I didn't even request it, the university has /16 allocated, and doesn't do any NAT, instead a stateful firewall blocks all incoming connections by default.

Anyway, the RevDNS resolved to a host containing my full name. I suppose that would discourage any abusive behavior, but even if you didn't have intention of doing that it was still a weird experience.

That's how IP was supposed to work in the first place. Creation of things like private IP ranges was quite controversial.

Yeah, I agree with how IP works, and prefer static IP over dynamic, but having my name in the DNS name is a bit too much. The only step further from that would be including my SSN there as well.

Even when walking down the street I'm not required to wear a name tag.

Web-based tracking is done via browser fingerprinting and cookies. IP addresses aren't reliable due to NAT and organizational proxies.

Right, IP addresses aren't reliable for tracking because static IPs aren't commonplace. But if they were, then they would be.

I'm not an expert in this area really. I've heard the argument made that even if static IP's were commonplace you would still need other fingerprinting methods as there are entire houses/apartment complexes/businesses running multiple users through NAT behind their static IP.

Also, I'm not sure what your experience has been but my IP only changes very rarely. Seems to happen about once every 6 months. My understanding that this was somewhat common, at least in the land of cable/coax-ISPs. Is 6 months not long enough to glean anything useful?

IPv6 does away with NAT since there are so many IPs that everyone gets one without needing NAT.

But proxies will still group the users on the same IP.

Also mobile devices that connect to different networks would get different IPs. Your cell phone would get a different IP address at home, cell, work, friends house etc... Thus there would still need to be some tracking/fingerprint to follow across networks.

> Web-based tracking is done via browser fingerprinting and cookies.

Which is why I personally surf with cookies disabled/blocked by default. So with dynamic IPv4/IPv6, that leaves only browser fingerprinting.

Do u use a browser extension to re-enable cookies quickly for login?

At home I primarily use Safari and it's quite quick/easy to toggle.

I think it's possible to have the best of both worlds. Assign your dynamic prefixes to your wifi devices etc, and receive also a static allocation for any servers.

> All those shitty websites having you on log isn't really something I would want.

Isn't it about the same now for your home network except for a couple of extra family users?

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