Comment by Kim_Bruning | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kim_Bruning | Hacker News Reader

I keep wondering how much of these problems would go away if IPv6 adoption were outright enforced by government (and on top of that static IP addresses as well). You suddenly have sufficient IP addresses, don't need NAT, know where you're supposed to connect to, and the need for central servers is much diminished. [1]

Possibly it's a bit on the late side to push for this though, since people have now already gone down the centralization path; as opposed to natural peer-to-peer. But OTOH maybe better late than never?

Put it this way. If we could go back in time and make a Minimum Necessary Change to history: possibly forcing IPv6 adoption early might have given us a more privacy-compatible timeline. [2][3][4]

[1] This is not necessarily The One True Way to achieve this, but certainly a way.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Eternity

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/51f584/reali...

[4] I really wish Minimum Necessary Change had made it into regular vocabulary. I think more people know what an Outside Context Problem is, or Psychohistory.

I don't think IPv6 or IPv4 has much to do with it.

(1) The car is going to have a unique id for services the driver pays for (2) the car has a cellular modem, and (3) the car has a GPS, the apocalypse is not in the future but happened in 1996

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

Back then I wanted to make a spoof ad that focused on the keyword 'safety' (used in their ads) but in the register of a British person defending the presence of enough cameras in the London Underground to make Big Brother blush. White collar criminals are driving to the hydrofoil with suitcases of cash and the day is only saved because the car has OnStar and the control center is able to track the car and shut it down with a warrant from law enforcement.

---

This technology is stuck after 20 years

https://www.its.dot.gov/research_archives/safety/v2v_comm_sa...

and is likely to stay stuck indefinitely because there is no acceptable answer to the problems of privacy and security. (e.g. the best is "All drivers have to buy a plan from Verizon but Verizon has to fix the dead spots in its network" but Verizon's bean counters know that this ends in the bankruptcy court because the fixing the next x% of dead spots doubles the cost) You might think the cellular network doesn't have to be involved but otherwise stopping spoofing seems intractable; I think the killer app for

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedicated_short-range_communic...

is something that simulates a demolition derby in your neighborhood so that people slow down or that can make the tailgater behind you hit the brake. I'd have built one a long time ago if it was easy to get DSRC chips.

In the DSRC projects I've been across, V2X packets that aren't signed appropriately are dropped by the stack

That's a very interesting argument. It makes me that little bit more open to IPv6.

But the standard argument is that IPv6 is detrimental to privacy because it amplifies identity at the device level.

So what's with the fixed IPs?

The privacy upside to IPv6 is surely that, like mac address space, and rotating device IDs with macchanger, you can simply get lost in the vast IPv6 address space. Obviously I am equating privacy with anonymity here, but that's a reasonable part of a mature understanding of the "security, privacy, anonymity" triad.

Are you sure the forces favouring centralisation have anything to do with the shortage of IPv4 address space? Would an IPv6 rich network really revive the original Internet design (peer-to-peer relations)?

I think it would!

To be frank, even dynamic addresses don't provide that much extra privacy by themselves; but static addresses DO provide individual agency.

Given individual agency, there's got to be hundreds of ways to secure your privacy. But without individual agency, your privacy will always be dependent on someone else.

By having static addresses and permitting home services, you shift power away from centralized tech giants and bypass privacy issues caused by eg. content scanning, centralized storage and dependency on third-party systems.

As just one example among many: right now it's very hard to provide IoT gear that "just works" without central services somewhere. If the equipment could just talk to each other directly; I do think that'd improve privacy by quite a bit! (among many other advantages)

I think you make some good points. People got quite hung up on thinking of privacy at the IP/TCP layer because of legal disputes with RIAA/MPAA etc circa 2005 over IP addresses. It became lore that IP mobility/NAT/cloaking were the ways to protect yourself. But that's living on the run. With all the overlays these days, IPFS, Tor, wireguard tunnels, the game has moved to endpoints, so decentralising and creating peer diversity rather than network diversity is a win, as you say. But we should not entirely abandon ephemerality of network identity as a defence.

How in God's green Earth do you think giving everyone a static IPv6 address guaranteed somehow by the government would help mitigate privacy issues? You literally just handed aggregators yet another primary key for data aggregation.

Nothing about IPv6 even tilts one way or the other on the centralization vs. decentralized axis. In point of fact, your implementation maximizes centralization pretty much by default.

> You literally just handed aggregators yet another primary key for data aggregation.

The key phrase is "Yet Another". They already collect so much data about you that one more data point won't shift the needle. The only way to deal with this is to force decentralization, so that aggregators don't get to see your data in the first place. Or at least, you have a fighting chance to keep it from them.

> Nothing about IPv6 even tilts one way or the other on the centralization vs. decentralized axis.

IPv6 allows every single device on earth to have its own unique IP address. This makes it possible for them to talk to each other directly; you don't need a central server to relay between them. IPv4 used to be this way too in the '90s at least, but we've started running out of IPv4 addresses since then. The solutions to fix this (especially NAT) lead to a need for centralized servers to mitigate the downsides.

> In point of fact, your implementation maximizes centralization pretty much by default.

You're saying a government mandate to switch everyone to IPv6 on a short timescale leads to centralization? That seems like a contradiction with your previous sentence: "Nothing about IPv6 even tilts one way or the other on the centralization vs. decentralized axis."

Maybe you were thinking something else?

> IPv6 adoption were outright enforced by government

That would destroy overnight the market of most of the services built upon the artificial scarcity of personal+static+public addresses (cloud, SaaS, hosting, etc) whose traffic cold be sustained by a home/soho connection. Sadly, it's not going to happen anytime soon.

Those solutions are still very useful for all sorts of reasons, they wouldn't be going anywhere. (in fact, going by my own experience/situation with a high quality ISP, I actually end up using more of these services!)

But new business models do open up: A lot of functionality now needs to have some sort of cloud backing to be able to guarantee some level of 'Just Works'.

Imagine regular muggles being able to install stuff at home, which Just Works, doesn't need a central cloud service, doesn't invade your privacy, and continues to work even when the original manufacturer shuts down.

Right now really only specialists who know what to ask for can do that, and not all ISPs even have the option.

>Imagine regular muggles being able to install stuff at home, which Just Works, doesn't need a central cloud service, doesn't invade your privacy, and continues to work even when the original manufacturer shuts down.

Most of those central services are built on the premise it's difficult for most people to open up internal network ports. That's just as difficult for IPv6 without NAT: my IPv6 capable router defaults to all ports closed which is good security practice.

Regular muggles don't update anything ever so if the manufacturer shuts down there's an open security hole on their network.

Do you have UPNP enabled?

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