Verizon edges closer to adopting IPv6, which, among other things, will allow for unique IP addresses to be assigned to all your electronic kitchen appliances. [EETimes]
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I'm looking forward to my toaster getting haxxored.
Well, when you use your toaster, it pings the fridge to see if there's any jelly. If the fridge doesn't detect the RFID from the jelly jar, it automatically places an order to your local supermarket. And then the supermarket charges your account and delivers the jelly to you just in time when your toast is ready.
Sure, it's all fun and games. Until the toaster starts sending nakkid picts of itself to the 'fridge, demanding to hook up...
Toaster jokes aside, this is a very good thing. Why? NAT blows up so many useful protocols and applications it's not even vaguely funny.
With IPv6, the need for NAT goes away, and breakage for things like SIP, IPsec Transport Mode, etc. all disappear.
And for anyone who wants to hide behind the idea that NAT == Security, think again. Security by obscurity == no security at all. It just makes *some* attacks a bit more difficult.
For those wondering if there will be an IPv8, along with the need to re-do all this work again, I'll say, "probably not." Why? Current IPv4 space has 2^32 (about 4.3 x 10^9) addresses in total. IPv6 space is 2^128, or about 3.4 x 10^38. Recognize, there are only ~ 6 x 10^9 people on Earth.
I currently have an IPv6 subnet delegated to me (a /48), which consists of 65536 /64 subnets, each of which has 2^64 addresses. I use one /64 for my home, and another for a server in a colo, leaving me a bit of room for expansion. :)
Yes, it seems wasteful, but put it into perspective. ISPs get issued /32 blocks (2^96), which gives them 65536 /48 blocks to work with. Is it becoming clear just how enormously large IPv6 space is? :)
Floob, could you retype that, please? Only in English? :D
I heard this will all be tied into a mainframe called Skynet.
@Floobtronics: Of course, IPv6 will help greatly.
But of course, it's yet another one of those things that has been "coming soon" for aaaaaaaages. We complain about how annoying NAT is ... but we haven't implemented the very fix for the problem we whine about!
I'm happy. My toaster oven sure hates NAT!
Heh.... skynet. I like that.
@trai_dep: Sure.
Lots of IP space for everyone. Applications that work without all sorts of hocus pocus in your firewall. Not to mention, it's far more fair to other nations less fortunate than the US (in terms of address allocation).
And Skynet. Ha. Good one.
As an aside, most anyone with a Linksys WRT54G/GS (not all, the recent ones don't fare as well) have custom firmware versions that can be loaded to provide ipv6 support. I currently use OpenWRT for that. Another popular one is DD-WRT.
Wait... Verizon is doing this? Their DSL tech support can't even troubleshoot a bad DSL connection let alone deal with IP6. It'll probably be done by the same offshore cust. service reps which insist I reboot my PC to make my DSL modem sync up and make my Cisco IP phone work.
I like IP6, but no thanks. At least not from Verizon.
I can't wait to see the RIAA/MPAA file suit against my dishwasher!
@Buran: The entire internet won't be strictly IPv6 anytime soon. I bet in a couple years, we'll see all of the backbone providers switching to IPv6, releasing a huge chunk of the IPv4 address space. Large corporations who have only a few public IPs and NAT for all the workstations will probably have their public IPs replaced with IPv6 ones, and the internal NAT will still be IPv4, leaving a ton of IPv4 addresses to be reassigned to ISPs to hand out to customers. Stuff like that. But we, as consumers, probably won't be seeing IPv6 in the near future.
The day when you stop getting an IPv4 address from your ISP and get your own personal 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 IPv6 addresses (and that number of zeros is no exaggeration) are far off. It will be a slow transition for consumers.
Will I have to like...dial up my toaster or something?