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Comment by divbzero | Hacker News Reader

What we could do is increase the number of IP addresses available. Just imagine if we enlarged the IP address space from 32 bits to 128 bits: Every device on the Internet could have a unique IP address!

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That sounds apocalyptic. What if street addresses were unambiguous? Think of the security implications. Anyone could just walk into your house. Much better to just have "local street 10 b" etc.

You could install a door. Then again, who am I telling people what to do.

Interesting idea! But I think such upgrade would take years, if not decades, to get widely adopted.

Or maybe a century.

The thing is, this upgrade you two are praising is designed to satisfy the original article's needs and no one else's.

Why do all those devices need to talk to each other btw? It's never specified. Is it a user need or a data collection/spyware need?

In a world where security articles make the news saying that you could obtain access to something IF the attacker already has local root and IF the moon is in a quarter phase and IF the attacker is physically present in the same room as the machine and this means the sky is falling...

... we should be questioning why disparate devices on unrelated home networks need to talk to each other.

There are completely legitimate usecases that are not "spyware" related for true end-to-end connectivity

For security there is still the firewall

Peer-to-peer requires that devices from different home networks talk to each other. Gaming, audio/video chat, screen sharing, file sharing (torrents), etc.

The whole idea of the internet from the beginning is that devices can talk with each other.

The need is real. You are a service provider. You need to manage equipment at customer sites. You need to access them simultaneously. But all the customers are using the same subnet... If Bell gave out cellphones with the same phone number, how can you call anybody? But they still do. Many devices have cloud access, but every manufacturer is different. It is a nightmare at scale.

The issue is that we DO NOT want every device to have a publicly routable IP address. It does make sense for some machines, but you probably don't want your your Internet-of-Shit devices to have public IPs. Of course you can firewall the devices, but you are always one misconfiguration or bug away from exposing devices that should not be exposed, when a local network is a more natural solution for what is supposed to remain local in the first place.

- NAT is not a firewall. A firewall is a firewall. - NAT is not better than a firewall. - NAT does not replace a firewall.

And we could represent the addresses with hex numbers separated by : instead of decimal numbers separated by .

That’d be kinda inconvenient with respect to the port number syntax in URLs, though.

I heard there's some people working on a system that allows you to use names, but it seems to be very poorly designed and cause of a lot of outages.

We did. It's called IPv6. It's 20 years old and still not usable universally. At the high end, like enterprise or telcos, it's fantastic. But at the grass roots level of residential and small businesses, it's still a nightmare.

I think that was the joke

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