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Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

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Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#71

Post by schoen »

aidenn0 wrote: post #7
zaroth wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that makes the current IPv4 address space total market cap ~$112 billion.

There are roughly 20 class 8s worth of special addresses, which reduces that by $10 billion or so.

I'm working on a project with John Gilmore to make those special addresses usable.

https://github.com/schoen/unicast-extensions

(note that most of the content in this repository was written by Dave Taht, who was running this project before; he got patches merged in the mainline Linux kernel that causes it to accept 0/8 and 240/4 as regular unicast addresses)

If anyone would like to talk more about any aspect of this, please get in touch!

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#72

Post by mprovost »

Animats wrote: post #63
mike_d wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deploying IPv6 is nice, but it doesn't impact the value of IPv4 at all. Any internet service you want to be widely available will need to be dual-stack as long as we are alive.

Maybe not. Google says their traffic is now at 30% IPv6, and climbing at 5%/year.[1] Worldwide, Google is undercounting, because they are blocked in China. Google claims that China is 0.27% IPv6, but actually China is around 55%, according to APNIC. Policy goal in China is all IPv6 by 2025. [1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

So it's taken 25 years to get to ~30% adoption. And a few years ago APNIC reported [0] that the rate was going down - I haven't found an updated report.

In 2005 the US government mandated that all their computers be v6 connected by 2008. [1] This year they updated the mandate to 80% by 2025. [2]

I learned networking in college in 1996 and I remember v6 coming up but so far I've never had to use it and chances are that I'll be able to retire still getting away with only working with v4.

[0] https://blog.apnic.net/2018/05/21/what-drives-ipv6-deploymen... [1] https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/omb/memoranda/fy... [2] https://www.cio.gov/assets/resources/internet-protocol-versi...

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#73

Post by md5person »

wmf wrote: post #67
md5person wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted, but I think it's yet another confirmation that this place has gone full Reddit.

Performative cynicism + speaking hypothetically about past events = I'd downvote it twice if I could. In reality very very few ISPs are giving one IPv6 address per customer. ISPs are greedy but they're not wantonly cruel.

> "In reality very very few ISPs are giving one IPv6 address per customer"

In actual reality, global IPv6 adoption is at ~33% [0, 1], so I'd say this is, at best, a premature and naive presumption. ISPs actively engage in rent-seeking, and resource scarcity is another contributing factor. In-short, there's nothing in OPs comment that warrants the downvotes.

[0] - https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html [1] - https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/resources/our-thinking/state-of...

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#74

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

KA9Q wrote: post #68
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple has long had IPv6 support in their operating systems, so I don't think they have been trying to hold it back either. And Microsoft has supported IPv6 since Windows 2000: https://news.microsoft.com/2000/03/15/microsoft-announces-ip... . I understand that LTE networks are exclusively IPv6, ditto "5G". My frustration with IPv6 is that my home ISP (Wave Broadband's DOCSIS service) is still IPv4 and they still hav…

Do you know about Hurricane Electric's free IPv6 tunnel broker? www.tunnelbroker.com. I have used it for a very long time, and it has been very stable and reliable. The only technical requirement is that you have control of a globally routable IPv4 address where you can set up a tunnel endpoint. I.e., "carrier grade NAT" (a contradiction in terms) won't suffice. I still use HE's tunnel even though Spectrum Cable has…

> Do you know about Hurricane Electric's free IPv6 tunnel broker?

I was aware of it, but I could swear that I heard news a couple of years ago that they shut it down due to decreased demand, but thank you for letting me know it's still running. I'll see if I can use it!

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#75

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

KA9Q wrote: post #70
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv6's has a fixed subnet size of 64-bits[1]. A router needs its own subnet, ergo everyone gets their own 64-bit address range. ISPs cannot give each customer a single IPv6 address because that would require each customer to have a single device connected directly to their router with no router in the CPE - basically like how dial-up used to work. There's no demand for a service like that. [1] See https://www.ripe.ne…

It is not true that an ISP cannot give each customer just a single IPv6 address. The Linux box I use as a router gets a single (i.e., /128) address from Spectrum Cable on its upstream interface, and it has to explicitly ask for a separate /64 prefix to advertise on the local interface (this is called prefix delegation, PD). So it's certainly possible for an ISP to give a customer just one IPv6 address. I'm not sure,…

Thank you for correcting my misunderstanding of IPv6! :)

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#77

Post by elihu »

rswail wrote: post #4

Is there any wonder that moving to IPv6 is delayed? Assuming an average $25/address, that's $400m/class A. Some of the organizations that own a class A: Apple, Ford, Softbank, Daimler, Prudential, Comcast. Softbank needs the money and the others wouldn't sniff at $300m+. Not sure how long the 100m odd addresses would last though.

Yeah, that's been my theory for awhile: that IPv4 addresses are effectively a currency, and that a move to IPv6 would devalue that currency. A disproportionate amount of that currency is held by companies and institutions based in the United States, and in many cases they're the same companies and institutions that one might otherwise would expect to be responsible for much of the work of transitioning to IPv6.

Meanwhile, Asia has a relative scarcity of IPv4 addresses and so is (as far as I know) ahead of the curve because their incumbents have less to lose.

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#78

Post by gh02t »

tialaramex wrote: post #52
metalliqaz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why?

Securely encrypted data and noise are indistinguishable. If you can distinguish them then my encryption isn't good. We don't want people to deliberately broadcast noise, but encrypted data is indistinguishable from noise, we can't allow that either.

Eh, this is not exactly true. Digital traffic, even encrypted, is easily recognizable unless the protocol is explicitly designed to look like noise (which is very uncommon/unheard of). It's true that encrypted data is (ideally) distributed like noise, but digital noise doesn't necessarily look or sound at all like ambient RF noise and there is also usually some non-encrypted packet structure wrapping the encrypted payload by necessity. You can very easily identify on e.g. DMR or P25 by ear if you know what to listen for, encrypted or not.

The restrictions have nothing to do with preventing people from transmitting noise. Transmitting encrypted on amateur radio stations was originally not allowed because of espionage concerns in the earlier days of amateur radio, and has stuck around largely to prevent abuse. Allowing unencrypted but encoded transmissions makes sense in that context, as long as the protocol is published.

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#80

Post by thaeli »

cletus wrote: post #12

So we've now had several interesting cases of how breaking changes to something popular (even foundational) are made and how that works out: - Perl 5 to Perl 6. I think this was an unmitigated disaster. 20 years ago Perl 5 had a lot of users. I'm pretty sure it's completely irrelevant now; - Python 2 to Python 3. It's been almost 12 years and we still have Python 2. Personally I think a lot of bad decisions were made…

Ironically, the biggest argument in favor of IPv6 adoption is the massive debacle IPv6 has been. It's virtually guaranteed that we won't ever get a successor to IPv6, and since IPv4 exhaustion has pushed enough adoption of IPv6 that we can't get rid of IPv6 either.. we're stuck with it.

Yes, I do wish we'd realized this 15 years ago, when it might have still been possible to throw IPv6 away and start over. But we didn't, so here we are.

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