Maybe not in the strict sense, but it kind of has.
In the enterprises I've worked in the past decade with IPv6 running, at least 75% of the Internet traffic is IPv6. In my discussions with other engineers managing large networks, they seem to be seeing more or less that same figure.
The problem is that virtually nobody knows IPv6. I regularly bring up IPv6 in engineers' circles and I'm often the only one who knows much about it. And so, I have doubts about it's long-term future, except for edge cases. I figure some clever scheme utilizing IPv4 and probably NAT will come around at some point.
IPv4s are about to be bought, held, portfoilo'ed, speculated, and rented/mortgaged/sold like real estate. Companies like IPXO are already doing it. The costs of public IPv4's are going to go up for no technical reason because a new distinct ownership layer is springing up between you and the ISP. You're going to start renting them or paying a holder for the right to use them (on top of your ISP to transport it) at some point. And you can continue to do that, or get IPv6's for free.
Just to be pedantic, it's "illegal" to hoard IPv4 or to buy it for any purpose other than using it directly. But yeah, in the real world it may become more financialized than it already is. OTOH if prices keep dropping maybe they won't bother.
> In the enterprises I've worked in the past decade with IPv6 running
What about those without IPv6 running?
Anyway, in the enterprises I've worked in the past decade - of course, another anecdote - not once has anyone ever specified an IPv6 address of anything. Inside the organization or outside of it.
The problem with private address ranges is that everyone thinks they're available. In a large enough enterprise you're bound to have conflicts. They usually pop up at the most inconvenient time and suddenly you're cosplaying ARIN in your IT department.
Contrary to some other comments: no, IPV6 hasn't taken over the world at all.
In my case, I administrate a small server at home, where I self host many services that are made available to myself, friends and families, over the internet.
In that context, IPv6, is SADLY (please note that I have NOTHING against IPv6), a limitation, even a nightmare to use.
Some programs do not handle IPv6 at all. Game servers for instance, do not support it, the one that I think about is: Arma 3. But there are many others
In 2025 (and 2026 too?), 4G (5G?) operators do not all route over IPv6 -> which means that if your domain only has a AAAA record, some people using 4G will not be able to access ANY of your services. This issue forced me to beg my ISP to obtain an IPv4 "fullstack" as they call it.
Without that IPv4 you have to go through some kind of tunneling (like Cloudflare) -> and guess what? Cloudflare sometimes crashes (it happened super recently remember?) and in that situation -> ALL your services accessible through the tunnel are "down" for your users. Plus, it is EXTREMELY unsatisfying to rely on an external private-owned service for a selfhosting project.
In almost ALL context IPv6 is seen as optional, additional, additional configuration and is NEVER the default. NEVER. Which means: more configuration, possibly more struggle.
>ALL your services accessible through the tunnel are "down" for your users
Not all.
I operate site with IPv6 only origins behind cloudflare.
During the outage I manged to login to the dashboard after some time and remove cloudflare for nearly 2 hours, and traffic level stayed close to 50% during the IPv6 only period.
Nobody complained: those who did not have working IPv6 probably blamed it on cloudflare.
> traffic level stayed close to 50% during the IPv6 only period.
> Nobody complained: those who did not have working IPv6 probably blamed it on cloudflare.
You described a situation where the outage resulted in 50% of your customers were unable to reach you and you were unable to do anything about it. I don’t think this story is a win for IPv6, regardless of whether your customers blame CloudFlare or not.
idk if arma3 does server discovery, but in case of manual ip input there some kind of OS-networking-level adapter should help. Usecase seems too obvious for something like that not to exist
I have fiber to my house and no native IPv6 support. I did some research and it seems there is a way to enable IPv6, but it’s janky and just tunnels over IPv4 so what’s the point?
I would love for IPv6 to actually take off but somehow it feels like we are still a decade away from ubiquitous adoption.
I remember 10+ years ago we were going to run out of IPv4 addresses and it was the next Y2K unless you adopted IPv6. I was able to get IPv6 for my servers and home, and I thought I was safe!
> "In fact, IPv4's continued viability is largely because IPv6 absorbed that growth pressure elsewhere – particularly in mobile, broadband, and cloud environments," he added. "In that sense, IPv6 succeeded where it was needed most, and must be regarded as a success."
Apparently it turns out IPv6 wasn't for me any way!
My ISP refuses to give you a static IPv6 prefix unless you're a business customer, despite having an "unlimited" amount of them. This results in me not bothering to set it up properly and focusing on IPv4 still.
I don't have a static IPv4 address and I have to use a DDNS built into the Caddy plugin on my OPNSense router. From what I understand, you can't get a static "local" (I know, IPv6 has no direct equivalent) address to use for a reverse proxy — at least not in an easy manner. I might be completely wrong but that's why I don't bother with IPv6.
Get a virtual server and do the things on it that you'd want a static address for. Use a VPN connection back to your home to merge it with your network. This is a great way to deal with CGNAT.
My ISP is xfinity. They say the same thing but my IPv6 address hasn't changed any more frequently than my IPv4. In my experience it changing isn't any more annoying than my v4 changing so I'm not sure why people still get up in arms about it.
I recently moved house and looked at a new offer from a new ISP for a long term lockin but a cheap price. They used CG-NAT. I instead chose one which gives me as many ipv4s or ipv6s as I can reasonably use, doesn't oversubscribe its upsteam connectivity etc.
For home internet service I would prefer to pay extra for a better service, it's too important to try to penny-pinch 0.1% of my income on it.
But then I live in a capitalist country where there's competition, I believe some countries you don't get a choice.
IPv6-only is the future for mobile phones, and mobile devices are the future of the internet.
And it is consumer devices (and IoT devices) which are the most numerous and also the most price sensitive, and this is where IPv4 is disappearing first.
I started looking at self-hosting many applications at home once I realized that IPv6 could enable me to do that securely without any complicated router/firewall configuration that would need to be maintained.
The only wrinkle I ran into is that apparently ISPs are still reluctant to give out static IPv6 prefixes to residential customers. So you still need some kind of DDNS setup, which is lame.
and it never will, because IPv4 has become a defacto reputation system for the exact same reason that IPv6 was created: a limited supply. It wouldn't surprise me to see the continued balkanization of the internet that there is a particular underclass of exclusively IPv6 traffic, but its not going to take over everything because once decentralized systems are now in the hands of a few decisionmakers in the case of, say, email.
> "IPv6 wasn't about turning IPv4 off, but about ensuring the internet could continue to grow without breaking,"
Then it's failure is by design. I should not want to multiplex/bridge different versions of the network-layer protocol; and certainly not to avoid using the new protocol because the old one seems more usable and approachable.
My "conspiracy theory" is IPv6's point to point connectivity is inconvenient to anyone except end users. And, rent-seekers can't extract money if the ranges aren't limited. American mind can't comprehend not rent-seeking any new invention.
Still disabled on all my networks and will be forever. Incoming HN downvotes because I'm not using the coolest latest technology.
ipv4 accidentally provides "casual anonymity" and "one ip does not identify device", which is incredibly important in this age of overbearing surveillance by government and private companies. ipv6, even with the "privacy extensions", is one subpoena away form directly identifying your individual device. ("ISP X: who did you assign this block of ips to on Y date?")
ipv4 has a boatload of issues (the worst of it is probably the unused and 'dangerous' flags), and ipv6 offers a boatload of cool features (The most beautiful is probably the flow state tracking).
However ipv6 was designed in a naive vacuum where no one possibly imagined the internet being abused to destroy an individual's inherit right to anonymity.
Oddly enough, the people most hellbent on spying on you: Facebook, Google, etc are the ones screaming for ipv6 the loudest.
It’s ok to understand something and disagree with it. It’s another to proudly wear ignorance on one’s sleeve. That’s never a good look.
There’s no way in which IPv6 is less private than IPv4. An ISP issues your house an IPv4 address and an IPv6 /48 network. Both of those can be subpoenaed equally. The privacy extensions work as advertised.
And in reality land, the big companies are the ones pushing for the upgrade because they’re the ones hardest hit by IPv4’s inherent limitations and increasing costs. Same rando in Tampa isn’t leading the charge because it doesn’t affect them much either way.
> There’s no way in which IPv6 is less private than IPv4
With IPv4 behind CGNAT you share an address with hundreds of other users. This won't protect you against a targeted subpoena, but tracking companies typically don't have this kind of power, so they have to resort to other fingerprinting options.
On the other hand, an IPv6 address is effectively a unique, and somewhat persistent, tracking ID, 48/56/64-bit long (ISP dependent), concatenated with some random garbage. And of course every advertiser, every tracking company and their dog know which part is random garbage; you are not going to fool anyone by rotating it with privacy extensions.
CGNAT is nowhere near the common case yet. And frankly, I’m horrified that anyone’s describing it as a good thing. CGNAT is the devil, even if it accidentally has one not-terrible feature, and especially when ISPs realize that they can sell those NAT logs to companies who still want to track end users.
For tracking purposes, an IPv6 address is 48 bits long. That’s what identifies a customer premise router, exactly like a IPv4 /32 identifies one. The remaining 80 random bits might as well be treated like longer source port numbers: they identify one particular connection but aren’t persistent and can’t map back to a particular device behind that router afterward.
Perhaps this is the difference, some people are concerned with being anonymous from companies like google, amazon, etc. Some don't mind that, as long as they are anonymous from a government.
Your mention of subpoena suggests you don't care about google tracking you.
I was directly replying to someone saying they could subpoena the temporal owner of an IPv6 address, as though that were somehow different than IPv4.
The tracking is a moot point. You can be tracked using the same technologies whether you connect though v4 or v6, and neither stack has the advantage there.
Unless my understanding of how IPv6 is flawed, I don’t think your assertion is true in practice. One of the big benefits to IPv6 is that addresses are plentiful and fairly disposable. Getting a /48 block and configuring a router to assign from the block is pretty straightforward.
I’m aka unsure if IPv4 really gets you the privacy advantages you think it does. Your IP address is a data point, but the contents of your TCP/HTTP traffic, your browser JS runtime, and your ISP are typically the more reliable ways to identify you individually.
You can nat all your ipv6 traffic behind a single IP if you want. Or a new IP for every connection.
Realistically though there's enough fingerprinting in browsers to track you regardless of your public IP and whether it's shared between every device in the house or if you dole out a routable ipv4 to every device.
CG-NAT gives more privacy benefits as you have more devices behind the same IP, but the other means of tracking still tend to work.
For me I just don't see the appeal of supporting both ipv4 and ipv6. It means a larger attack surface. Every year or two I move onto my ipv6 vlan and last a few hours before something doesn't work. I still don't see any benefit to me, the user.
IPv6 itself seems to provide a larger attack surface based on IPv6-specific CVEs. I don’t know if it’s the added complexity or that it’s treated as a second class citizen by devs, but I still see a solid number of these coming across the CVE feed.
> Realistically though there's enough fingerprinting in browsers to track you regardless of your public IP and whether it's shared between every device in the house or if you dole out a routable ipv4 to every device.
Yes, browser fingerprinting is a big issue, but it can be mitigated. The first thing everyone should do is to use a network-wide DNS blacklist against all known trackers (e.g. https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists) and run uBlock Origin in the browser.
You can go further and restrict third party scripts in uBlock, or even all scripts. This will break at lot of websites, but it is a surefire way to prevent fingerprinting.
> Realistically though there's enough fingerprinting in browsers to track you regardless...
Yep. For the OP, IPv6 "Privacy" addresses do what he's looking for. You can change how long they're valid for on Linux, so you can churn through them very frequently if you wish.
> Every year or two I move onto my ipv6 vlan and last a few hours before something doesn't work.
Odd. I've been using IPv6 for like fifteen, twenty years now with no trouble at all. If you've been using a "single stack" IPv6-only network, well, there's your problem.
> For me I just don't see the appeal of supporting both ipv4 and ipv6. It means a larger attack surface.
The attack surface with IPv6 is exactly as large as if all of your LAN hosts had a globally-routable IPv4 address. Thinking otherwise is as smart as thinking that the attack surface on a host increases linearly with the number of autoconfigured IPv6 addresses assigned to that host from the same subnet.
If you don't want the IPv6 hosts on your LAN to be reachable by unsolicited traffic, set the default policy for your router's ip6tables FORWARD chain to DROP, and ACCEPT forwarded packets for ESTABLISHED or RELATED connections. If you're not using ip6tables, do whatever is the equivalent in the firewall software you're using. If you know that you have rules in your FORWARD chain that this change would break, then you already knew that you could simply drop unsolicited traffic in the FORWARD chain.
Unrelated to that, I see no reason to get rid of IPv4.
I expect that the future will be that nearly all "residental" [0] and non-datacenter business connections provide globally-routable IPv6 service and provide IPv4 via CGNAT, as IPv6 will be used for servers deployed at these sorts of sites. [1] I expect that the future will be that all datacenters and "clouds" will provide globally-routable IPv6 to servers and VMs, and globally-routable IPv4 to the same by way of load balancers.
So, home servers [1] will use IPv6, datacenter and "cloud" servers will use IPv4 and IPv6, and "legacy" devices that work fine but will never have their IP software updated will use IPv4.
I see IPv6 as a "reduce the pressure on the IPv4 address pool" mechanism, rather than a "replace IPv4" system. Again, I see no reason to get rid of "short" IP addresses. Default to using "long" ones, and keep the "short" ones around just in case.
[0] I'm including people's personal mobile computers in this definition of "residential".
[1] "Servers" here include things like "listen" video game servers or short-lived servers for file transfers and stuff like that.
> still hasn't taken over the world
Maybe not in the strict sense, but it kind of has.
In the enterprises I've worked in the past decade with IPv6 running, at least 75% of the Internet traffic is IPv6. In my discussions with other engineers managing large networks, they seem to be seeing more or less that same figure.
The problem is that virtually nobody knows IPv6. I regularly bring up IPv6 in engineers' circles and I'm often the only one who knows much about it. And so, I have doubts about it's long-term future, except for edge cases. I figure some clever scheme utilizing IPv4 and probably NAT will come around at some point.
IPv4s are about to be bought, held, portfoilo'ed, speculated, and rented/mortgaged/sold like real estate. Companies like IPXO are already doing it. The costs of public IPv4's are going to go up for no technical reason because a new distinct ownership layer is springing up between you and the ISP. You're going to start renting them or paying a holder for the right to use them (on top of your ISP to transport it) at some point. And you can continue to do that, or get IPv6's for free.
Just to be pedantic, it's "illegal" to hoard IPv4 or to buy it for any purpose other than using it directly. But yeah, in the real world it may become more financialized than it already is. OTOH if prices keep dropping maybe they won't bother.
Now all we need is for someone to make a crypto currency so you can fractionally own IPv4 addresses.
IPv4s have been bought and sold for years
https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales
Prices have been going down in nonimal terms for years, let alone real terms. In terms of investment they're a terrible asset.
> In the enterprises I've worked in the past decade with IPv6 running
What about those without IPv6 running?
Anyway, in the enterprises I've worked in the past decade - of course, another anecdote - not once has anyone ever specified an IPv6 address of anything. Inside the organization or outside of it.
why would an enterprise turn to IPv6?
everything fit's nicely in the 10.0.0.0/8 range
in my many decades of enterprise infrastructure, no-one has ever mentioned IP6 either.
why would they, whats the business case?
The problem with private address ranges is that everyone thinks they're available. In a large enough enterprise you're bound to have conflicts. They usually pop up at the most inconvenient time and suddenly you're cosplaying ARIN in your IT department.
> everything fit's nicely in the 10.0.0.0/8 range
Except during a merger/acquisition and both companies have 10.0.0.0/24 in their OSPF or IS-IS topology.
you haven't had to set up intercompany vpns I see
Indeed I have not. But I suspect most people, and most companies, have not either.
I don't claim IPv6 isn't used anywhere, or even that it's not used a lot.
one poorly made decision and oops you're out of 10/8 addresses
if you've never run in to this, then sorry, you've not been in an enterprise, you're in a mom 'n pop shop cosplaying as enterprise.
I am on my company's VPN right now and I get a 0/10 at test-ipv6.com
Everything I know about IPv6 comes from this one blog post: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810. It’s from 2017, when IPv6 adoption was 17% according to https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html; today it’s close to 50%.
Contrary to some other comments: no, IPV6 hasn't taken over the world at all.
In my case, I administrate a small server at home, where I self host many services that are made available to myself, friends and families, over the internet.
In that context, IPv6, is SADLY (please note that I have NOTHING against IPv6), a limitation, even a nightmare to use.
Some programs do not handle IPv6 at all. Game servers for instance, do not support it, the one that I think about is: Arma 3. But there are many others
In 2025 (and 2026 too?), 4G (5G?) operators do not all route over IPv6 -> which means that if your domain only has a AAAA record, some people using 4G will not be able to access ANY of your services. This issue forced me to beg my ISP to obtain an IPv4 "fullstack" as they call it.
Without that IPv4 you have to go through some kind of tunneling (like Cloudflare) -> and guess what? Cloudflare sometimes crashes (it happened super recently remember?) and in that situation -> ALL your services accessible through the tunnel are "down" for your users. Plus, it is EXTREMELY unsatisfying to rely on an external private-owned service for a selfhosting project.
In almost ALL context IPv6 is seen as optional, additional, additional configuration and is NEVER the default. NEVER. Which means: more configuration, possibly more struggle.
>ALL your services accessible through the tunnel are "down" for your users
Not all.
I operate site with IPv6 only origins behind cloudflare.
During the outage I manged to login to the dashboard after some time and remove cloudflare for nearly 2 hours, and traffic level stayed close to 50% during the IPv6 only period.
Nobody complained: those who did not have working IPv6 probably blamed it on cloudflare.
> traffic level stayed close to 50% during the IPv6 only period.
> Nobody complained: those who did not have working IPv6 probably blamed it on cloudflare.
You described a situation where the outage resulted in 50% of your customers were unable to reach you and you were unable to do anything about it. I don’t think this story is a win for IPv6, regardless of whether your customers blame CloudFlare or not.
so it turned into a good ol' legacy problems
idk if arma3 does server discovery, but in case of manual ip input there some kind of OS-networking-level adapter should help. Usecase seems too obvious for something like that not to exist
I have fiber to my house and no native IPv6 support. I did some research and it seems there is a way to enable IPv6, but it’s janky and just tunnels over IPv4 so what’s the point?
I would love for IPv6 to actually take off but somehow it feels like we are still a decade away from ubiquitous adoption.
I remember 10+ years ago we were going to run out of IPv4 addresses and it was the next Y2K unless you adopted IPv6. I was able to get IPv6 for my servers and home, and I thought I was safe!
> "In fact, IPv4's continued viability is largely because IPv6 absorbed that growth pressure elsewhere – particularly in mobile, broadband, and cloud environments," he added. "In that sense, IPv6 succeeded where it was needed most, and must be regarded as a success."
Apparently it turns out IPv6 wasn't for me any way!
My ISP refuses to give you a static IPv6 prefix unless you're a business customer, despite having an "unlimited" amount of them. This results in me not bothering to set it up properly and focusing on IPv4 still.
Do you have a static IPv4, presumably a single IP?
I find it useful, mine does change periodically, but I just have a script that Updates DNS when it changes:
Sure some services might notice for a bit, but it's plenty good for me.I don't have a static IPv4 address and I have to use a DDNS built into the Caddy plugin on my OPNSense router. From what I understand, you can't get a static "local" (I know, IPv6 has no direct equivalent) address to use for a reverse proxy — at least not in an easy manner. I might be completely wrong but that's why I don't bother with IPv6.
You’re looking for a Unique Local Address there. It’s a non-externally-routable address that you can use for internal connections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address
Get a virtual server and do the things on it that you'd want a static address for. Use a VPN connection back to your home to merge it with your network. This is a great way to deal with CGNAT.
But do they give you PD?
My prefix is tied to the mac address of the device that's connected to the PON.
My ISP is xfinity. They say the same thing but my IPv6 address hasn't changed any more frequently than my IPv4. In my experience it changing isn't any more annoying than my v4 changing so I'm not sure why people still get up in arms about it.
In about a year of treating my comcast-assigned ipv6 address as static, it changed once.
Sadly, this happened despite me specifically requesting the same address as always. That caused me some grief. But it's not common.
Same here, I had a working IPv6 setup previously with my DSL provider, but now that I moved to a fibre connection, the new one refuses to support it.
My ISP (naming no names...erum...Spectrum) refuses to even admit they know what IPv6 is. It's like asking the NSA what Menwith Hill is for...
I recently moved house and looked at a new offer from a new ISP for a long term lockin but a cheap price. They used CG-NAT. I instead chose one which gives me as many ipv4s or ipv6s as I can reasonably use, doesn't oversubscribe its upsteam connectivity etc.
For home internet service I would prefer to pay extra for a better service, it's too important to try to penny-pinch 0.1% of my income on it.
But then I live in a capitalist country where there's competition, I believe some countries you don't get a choice.
IPv6-only is the future for mobile phones, and mobile devices are the future of the internet.
And it is consumer devices (and IoT devices) which are the most numerous and also the most price sensitive, and this is where IPv4 is disappearing first.
sudo networksetup -setv6off Wi-Fi ; sudo networksetup -setv6off Ethernet
to protect your privacy
I started looking at self-hosting many applications at home once I realized that IPv6 could enable me to do that securely without any complicated router/firewall configuration that would need to be maintained.
The only wrinkle I ran into is that apparently ISPs are still reluctant to give out static IPv6 prefixes to residential customers. So you still need some kind of DDNS setup, which is lame.
Is there yet answer to question "how to get random self-assigned addresses into dns records, firewall rules and switch acls?" ?
and it never will, because IPv4 has become a defacto reputation system for the exact same reason that IPv6 was created: a limited supply. It wouldn't surprise me to see the continued balkanization of the internet that there is a particular underclass of exclusively IPv6 traffic, but its not going to take over everything because once decentralized systems are now in the hands of a few decisionmakers in the case of, say, email.
> "IPv6 wasn't about turning IPv4 off, but about ensuring the internet could continue to grow without breaking,"
Then it's failure is by design. I should not want to multiplex/bridge different versions of the network-layer protocol; and certainly not to avoid using the new protocol because the old one seems more usable and approachable.
I think the original plan was definitely to turn IPv4 off. Obviously that's probably not practical in our lifetimes.
Is IPv6 going to see it's epitaph instead of it's takeover soon?
reminder that in 2026 Microsoft GitHub(TM) still doesn't support ipv6
but if you need maximum AI slop, that's everywhere
As GitHub keeps Azureifying, it'll be interesting to see if this changes.
The article itself is fairly short & fluffy.
Vs. real meat is in the comments on the Register's site.
My "conspiracy theory" is IPv6's point to point connectivity is inconvenient to anyone except end users. And, rent-seekers can't extract money if the ranges aren't limited. American mind can't comprehend not rent-seeking any new invention.
Still disabled on all my networks and will be forever. Incoming HN downvotes because I'm not using the coolest latest technology.
ipv4 accidentally provides "casual anonymity" and "one ip does not identify device", which is incredibly important in this age of overbearing surveillance by government and private companies. ipv6, even with the "privacy extensions", is one subpoena away form directly identifying your individual device. ("ISP X: who did you assign this block of ips to on Y date?")
ipv4 has a boatload of issues (the worst of it is probably the unused and 'dangerous' flags), and ipv6 offers a boatload of cool features (The most beautiful is probably the flow state tracking).
However ipv6 was designed in a naive vacuum where no one possibly imagined the internet being abused to destroy an individual's inherit right to anonymity.
Oddly enough, the people most hellbent on spying on you: Facebook, Google, etc are the ones screaming for ipv6 the loudest.
It’s ok to understand something and disagree with it. It’s another to proudly wear ignorance on one’s sleeve. That’s never a good look.
There’s no way in which IPv6 is less private than IPv4. An ISP issues your house an IPv4 address and an IPv6 /48 network. Both of those can be subpoenaed equally. The privacy extensions work as advertised.
And in reality land, the big companies are the ones pushing for the upgrade because they’re the ones hardest hit by IPv4’s inherent limitations and increasing costs. Same rando in Tampa isn’t leading the charge because it doesn’t affect them much either way.
> There’s no way in which IPv6 is less private than IPv4
With IPv4 behind CGNAT you share an address with hundreds of other users. This won't protect you against a targeted subpoena, but tracking companies typically don't have this kind of power, so they have to resort to other fingerprinting options.
On the other hand, an IPv6 address is effectively a unique, and somewhat persistent, tracking ID, 48/56/64-bit long (ISP dependent), concatenated with some random garbage. And of course every advertiser, every tracking company and their dog know which part is random garbage; you are not going to fool anyone by rotating it with privacy extensions.
CGNAT is nowhere near the common case yet. And frankly, I’m horrified that anyone’s describing it as a good thing. CGNAT is the devil, even if it accidentally has one not-terrible feature, and especially when ISPs realize that they can sell those NAT logs to companies who still want to track end users.
For tracking purposes, an IPv6 address is 48 bits long. That’s what identifies a customer premise router, exactly like a IPv4 /32 identifies one. The remaining 80 random bits might as well be treated like longer source port numbers: they identify one particular connection but aren’t persistent and can’t map back to a particular device behind that router afterward.
Google aren't subpoenaed
Perhaps this is the difference, some people are concerned with being anonymous from companies like google, amazon, etc. Some don't mind that, as long as they are anonymous from a government.
Your mention of subpoena suggests you don't care about google tracking you.
Google gets subpoenad all the fucking time. They have whole departments set up to handle the case load.
Some public evidence: https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/press/google-lays-off-c...
Sorry I meant to say google aren't subpoenaing
The people I want to protect my privacy from are google, facebook, amazon, they can't subpoena my IP, they can track me just fine though.
I was directly replying to someone saying they could subpoena the temporal owner of an IPv6 address, as though that were somehow different than IPv4.
The tracking is a moot point. You can be tracked using the same technologies whether you connect though v4 or v6, and neither stack has the advantage there.
Unless my understanding of how IPv6 is flawed, I don’t think your assertion is true in practice. One of the big benefits to IPv6 is that addresses are plentiful and fairly disposable. Getting a /48 block and configuring a router to assign from the block is pretty straightforward.
I’m aka unsure if IPv4 really gets you the privacy advantages you think it does. Your IP address is a data point, but the contents of your TCP/HTTP traffic, your browser JS runtime, and your ISP are typically the more reliable ways to identify you individually.
You can nat all your ipv6 traffic behind a single IP if you want. Or a new IP for every connection.
Realistically though there's enough fingerprinting in browsers to track you regardless of your public IP and whether it's shared between every device in the house or if you dole out a routable ipv4 to every device.
CG-NAT gives more privacy benefits as you have more devices behind the same IP, but the other means of tracking still tend to work.
For me I just don't see the appeal of supporting both ipv4 and ipv6. It means a larger attack surface. Every year or two I move onto my ipv6 vlan and last a few hours before something doesn't work. I still don't see any benefit to me, the user.
IPv6 itself seems to provide a larger attack surface based on IPv6-specific CVEs. I don’t know if it’s the added complexity or that it’s treated as a second class citizen by devs, but I still see a solid number of these coming across the CVE feed.
This one was particularly scary: https://malwaretech.com/2024/08/exploiting-CVE-2024-38063.ht...
> Realistically though there's enough fingerprinting in browsers to track you regardless of your public IP and whether it's shared between every device in the house or if you dole out a routable ipv4 to every device.
Yes, browser fingerprinting is a big issue, but it can be mitigated. The first thing everyone should do is to use a network-wide DNS blacklist against all known trackers (e.g. https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists) and run uBlock Origin in the browser.
You can go further and restrict third party scripts in uBlock, or even all scripts. This will break at lot of websites, but it is a surefire way to prevent fingerprinting.
Then of course there is Tor.
> Realistically though there's enough fingerprinting in browsers to track you regardless...
Yep. For the OP, IPv6 "Privacy" addresses do what he's looking for. You can change how long they're valid for on Linux, so you can churn through them very frequently if you wish.
> Every year or two I move onto my ipv6 vlan and last a few hours before something doesn't work.
Odd. I've been using IPv6 for like fifteen, twenty years now with no trouble at all. If you've been using a "single stack" IPv6-only network, well, there's your problem.
> For me I just don't see the appeal of supporting both ipv4 and ipv6. It means a larger attack surface.
The attack surface with IPv6 is exactly as large as if all of your LAN hosts had a globally-routable IPv4 address. Thinking otherwise is as smart as thinking that the attack surface on a host increases linearly with the number of autoconfigured IPv6 addresses assigned to that host from the same subnet.
If you don't want the IPv6 hosts on your LAN to be reachable by unsolicited traffic, set the default policy for your router's ip6tables FORWARD chain to DROP, and ACCEPT forwarded packets for ESTABLISHED or RELATED connections. If you're not using ip6tables, do whatever is the equivalent in the firewall software you're using. If you know that you have rules in your FORWARD chain that this change would break, then you already knew that you could simply drop unsolicited traffic in the FORWARD chain.
Unrelated to that, I see no reason to get rid of IPv4.
I expect that the future will be that nearly all "residental" [0] and non-datacenter business connections provide globally-routable IPv6 service and provide IPv4 via CGNAT, as IPv6 will be used for servers deployed at these sorts of sites. [1] I expect that the future will be that all datacenters and "clouds" will provide globally-routable IPv6 to servers and VMs, and globally-routable IPv4 to the same by way of load balancers.
So, home servers [1] will use IPv6, datacenter and "cloud" servers will use IPv4 and IPv6, and "legacy" devices that work fine but will never have their IP software updated will use IPv4.
I see IPv6 as a "reduce the pressure on the IPv4 address pool" mechanism, rather than a "replace IPv4" system. Again, I see no reason to get rid of "short" IP addresses. Default to using "long" ones, and keep the "short" ones around just in case.
[0] I'm including people's personal mobile computers in this definition of "residential".
[1] "Servers" here include things like "listen" video game servers or short-lived servers for file transfers and stuff like that.
> Incoming HN downvotes because I'm not using the coolest latest technology.
"IPv6 just turned 30" - literally the first part of the post title.
The rest of the post is equally baffling, you are just clinging to a legacy bottleneck (NAT) that was never designed to be a security feature