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Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, I was taught and practiced IPv6 in 2003-5 in engineering school (France).

As of 2024, IPv6 deployment in France was >97% mobile and >98% residential due to not being required for obtaining a 5G radio license (and then v6 simply carried downward to being available on 4G) + every ISP that provides FTTH also providing v6.

https://www.arcep.fr/fileadmin/reprise/observatoire/ipv6/Arc...

Over here IPv6 JustWorks to the point of absolute boredom.

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I was taught IPv6 in the mid 2000s too, in Italy.

But penetration there is just about 15% or so :/

Is it commonly used within small/medium/large businesses?

German situation is mostly/rarely/never. Small businesses have their DSL line where their cheapo router will announce an IPv6 prefix which almost all ISPs over here provide. Medium to large businesses usually have some braindead security policies that include switching off all IPv6 functionality in devices.

Don’t get me started on security policies of large German (non-tech adjacent) companies - so many of them are still stuck in the 90s

Are they still faxing?

I work for an insurtech (!), and something like 90% of our communications with mortgage companies is via fax. I kid you not.

Is there actual ink being printed onto paper or is fax just used as email with extra steps?

Ink on paper, where I work. There have been court decisions that have seen Fax as "remote copying". And said that those remote copies only had any legal value if there was an actual paper original. Thus the workflow always has to involve paper that is then archived as paper in a folder...

I once had to print a form and fax to a company with a signature and the instructions said specifically that "signing with a computer and sending digitally is not allowed".

I just signed with macOS Preview, applied some random noise filter and used a one-off online fax service. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

On our end, it's all electronic - we never print anything out. So yeah, on our side, "email with extra steps". But I have no idea how the mortgage companies handle it on their end.

> Medium to large businesses usually have some braindead security policies

what's the argument behind that? are they scared they might configure their firewall bad and have no NAT to safe them from accidentally making all devices public?

Usually there is no official justification given, just a list (in excel...) of security requirements that have to be ticked off. One of them is "Disable IPv6".

I've heard some ex-post justifications, make of them what you will: Existing infrastructure like firewalls, VPNs and routers might not be able to handle IPv6 properly. Address distribution in IPv6 is unpredictable. No inhouse knowledge of IPv6. Everything has an address in IPv6, so the whole internet can access it. No NAT in IPv6, so it is insecure. IPv6 makes things slow.

It comes from the same place as "passwords expire every 30 days".

People don't understand something and just apply the most annoying rule possible.

The craziest one I saw in Germany was "cookies are allowed, localStorage is not", that was for our app. CTO overrode the CISO on the spot and called him an idiot for making rules he doesn't understand. Interesting day.

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