40% of Google users now connect via IPv6 • Hacker News Board

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#31

Post by dsr_ » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 1:22 PM UTC

ngetchell wrote: post #23

trashburger wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With IPv6 each device getting a unique IP is not a bug but a feature -- what will probably happen is that your ISP will lend out a /64 range to you, which your devices will use to assign a unique IP to themselves. This completely removes the need for NAT (also, keep in mind that a NAT is not a firewall or a security feature). BTW, dynamic IP rotation was never a guarantee and is only used because the pool of IPs were…

While I understand the sentiment, NAT does so much to protect most users, it should be considered a security feature.

NAT doesn't.

1:many NAT does.

1:many NAT requires an affirmative choice on where to route incoming packets that aren't part of an existing stream.

In adaptation to that, most attacks are malware spread by email, or attack browser vulnerabilities, or attack services running on network devices, especially remote management systems.

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#32

Post by withinboredom » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 1:22 PM UTC

rr808 wrote: post #17

shmde wrote: post #3

Are there any advantages to IPv6 other than more addresses ?

I assume for mobile operators there are advantages for location roaming. I'm not sure when you change cells if IP stays the same, but must be a routing nightmare.

Ooooh, this is actually fun. Your IP does not change, even when switching from LTE, 3G, 4G and 5G. There's an excellent post in the old Sprint forums where a company network engineer explains how it works. I can't find it though, but it's pretty wild.

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#33

Post by miohtama » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 1:23 PM UTC

shmde wrote: post #3

Are there any advantages to IPv6 other than more addresses ?

In theory, IPv6 could be slighty faster over IPv4.

https://superuser.com/questions/1055584/how-does-ipv6-affect...

- Smaller headers

- Simpler routing

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#34

Post by HWR_14 » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

fulafel wrote: post #22

Northern countries have lower adoption, I wonder if IPv6 works better in warm climates.

IPV6 works better in countries that didn't start with a legacy ipv4 infrastructure.

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#35

Post by NelsonMinar » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 1:26 PM UTC

I sure wish Starlink supported IPv6. They're a brand new ISP planning for millions of customers and decided from the start they couldn't get enough IPv4 addresses for everyone. Fair enough! But we're stuck with Carrier Grade NAT and it is a drag.

On Starlink it's impossible to host a server socket directly, which makes any peer to peer networking a PITA. Geocoding IP addresses doesn't work so I have to bend over backwards to convince, say, Youtube TV that I'm in the Sacramento metro and not LA where the POP is. Also the shared IP addresses seem to trip a lot of DDOS protection; I fill out 10x as many CAPTCHAs on Starlink as I do on my other ISP. And I sometimes get random network stability problems; a few weeks ago Starlink screwed something up so no one could keep a persistent connection up more than a few minutes. Seems to be fixed now, but I bet it was their CGNAT system.

I realize half the world lives with CGNAT. It's not unusable, at least web browsing works more or less. But IPv6 would solve all these problems. A little surprised that a new ISP created in 2021 wouldn't have IPv6 support as one of their launch features. There's hints they are trying to get it working but it's not an official thing now. Some discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/tjr90n/starlink_i...

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#36

Post by rhn_mk1 » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 1:28 PM UTC

hotpotamus wrote: post #10

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.thousandeyes.com/learning/techtorials/ipv4-vs-ip... Another, different take: http://www.networkcomputing.com/networking/six-benefits-ipv6

The first link mentions no more NAT as an advantage, but I think it's actually one of the big issues holding up adoption. Rightly ot wrongly, since the 00's the perception is that sitting directly on the internet with a public address is a big security no-no.

There's an argument to be made that mixing dynamic addresses with the pool of other users of the same ISP is beneficial for privacy.

The fact that peer-to-peer applications can finally start working is an unquestionable advantage.

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#37

Post by ajsnigrutin » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

vmoore wrote: post #2

Anyone go out of their way to disable IPV6 on all their systems, even at the hardware level, like on routers etc? What's a good reason to avoid IPV6?

Firewalls are more complex on IPv6 (you need to pass a bunch of ICMPv6 through, to make it work), and some residential routers have very bad or even zero firewall support for ipv6, so your devices, that would otherwise be "protected" (not really) by NAT are now directly visible to everyone on the internet.

This usually isn't a problem for power users (who know how to set up and (re)confgure a firewall) nor for most basic users (windows firewall does that for them), but people "in the middle", who install some service and just fully disable the OS's firewall to be able to connect to it, are now vulnerable.

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#38

Post by krnlpnc » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

“In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF,[2] which subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017.”

40% adoption after 25 years? Really highlights how terrible IPv6 is in terms of backwards compatibility.

What we needed was an internet protocol with the benefits of IPv6 that runs as an extension to the IPv4 stack.

The current approach to duplicate everything into IPv6 is wasteful and time consuming, proven by the extremely slow adoption rate.

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#39

Post by p1mrx » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

bcook wrote: post #14

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #9

Why can't we paste aan ipv6 address into the browser address bar and have it go to that address? I'm forced to open [long brackets ] and the it works. Why!???? Ipv4 address just works without the hitch

Because of colons. Colons separate the different sections of an ipv6 address but HTTP URLs also use colons for the port, so the ipv6 IP must be encompassed in brackets to differentiate between IP and port.

If IPv6 had used dots instead, then addresses like "2001.db8.1.2.3.4.beef.de" would be ambiguous between an IP address and a hostname.

Perhaps they could've required every IPv6 address to use ".." exactly once for zero compression. Then you'd have "..2001.db8.1.2.3.4.beef.de", "2001.db8..beef.de", etc.

I guess the nullary ".." could go in the middle, but that would enshrine the /64 boundary into the addressing scheme, which seems like a leaky abstraction.

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#40

Post by HWR_14 » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

vmoore wrote: post #2

Anyone go out of their way to disable IPV6 on all their systems, even at the hardware level, like on routers etc? What's a good reason to avoid IPV6?

I do. I don't know why, but when debugging some network issues I discovered just shutting IPv6 down fixed the issue. Could it have been a buggy implementation on a single device on the network messing everything up? Maybe. But since I have no real benefit for IPv6, it was trivial to turn off.

It also lets me wait until other people (hopefully) build better privacy systems.