alt Hacker NewsIf IPv4 were land
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From a Georgist perspective, IPv4 is actually a form of land (it's a finite "natural resource", although that's not quite proper), and you could make a case for "land rent" being taxed on the addresses. This is the same as radio broadcast frequencies, web addresses, actual land, un-mined gold/oil/coal/whatever, and other finite natural resources that create monopolistic tendencies.
IPv6 got some real traction in the last decade. From around 10% adoption up to 50%. It's not dead, like many are claiming. It works fine, just keep implementing it.
The only thing that surprised me was that Canada was so small compared to other Western countries. But I suppose that might be an artifact. The map shows IPv4 proportional to land area, but a "fair" allocation would have IPv4 proportionate to population, not land area, and I'd assume Canada is (overall) less densely populated than most other developed countries.
The fact that we have yet to fully deprecate IPv4 should be considered a great failure in the tech industry's competence.
Ran across a comment a while ago on some fun "IPv6 math":
On the surface of the Earth [land+water], there are 8.4 IPv4 addresses per km². Not counting the oceans, that would be 28 IPv4 addresses per km² land.
IPv6 gives 10¹⁷ addresses per mm² (yes, square millimetre).
In terms of volume, 10⁸ IPv6 addresses per mm³ throughout the Earth.
A second way of thinking about it:
* Stars in the Milky Way: 400 Billion
* Galaxies in the universe: 2 Trillion
* So (4x10¹¹)x(2x10¹²) = 8x10²³ stars in the universe.
* Size of IPv6 address space: 3.4x10³⁸
* Find the ratio between addresses and stars: 3.4x10³⁸ / 8x10²³
IPv6 offers about 430 trillion times more addresses than estimated stars in the universe. From Tom Coffee's presentation "An Enterprise IPv6 Address Planning Case-Study":
Comparing land area to IP address assignments is one of the sillier visualizations I've ever seen. I can't imagine what this is intending to convey. Should Siberia have more IP addresses than all of Europe?
Unsurprisingly, the map is very similar to the World Population Density Map: https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#3/20.00/10.00
I'd be interested to see how this compares to the same scaling procedure, but by population. Essentially seeing what the IPv4-per-capita is.
Fun fact: At the Assembly demoparty, every system wired to the party network receives a dedicated, publicly routable IPv4 address. It's a lot of fun, but can lead to some interesting moments. One year as I was getting my setup ready, I had a bit of a heart dropping moment when I realized that the raspberry pi I use to bridge ethernet to my Mac Plus over SCSI, the very same one that usually lives on my home network with all kinds of exciting old daemons running, was in fact reachable on the public internet!
The only real use-case for IPv6 is self-hosting, and that's just very niche. Other than that the arguments in favor of IPv6 turn to stuff like latency and network complexity. That's not nothing, but it won't make anyone change ISP, and so ISPs don't have to care about it.
From the ISP's POV a complex IPv4 network plus a simple IPv6 network is more work than just having a complex IPv4 network. IPv6 is optional, and IPv4 isn't.
The only way I can imagine IPv6 succeeding is if somehow big websites decide to slow things down for IPv4 users enough that they complain to their ISPs.
Good to see the Dutch were able to seize a lot of blocks from the sea!
One thing that was always a curious anomaly for me is Brazil having the second largest number of autonomous systems (ASNs) in the world. [1]
I've been told that this is actually because Brazil has a very competitive local ecosystem of small ISPs competing with eachother on the regional scale.
Noone pointing out that it's a mistake to use a Mercator projection for thjs
I still think we should just extend the length of IPv4. In my proposed system, existing addresses would become a subnet of the new set.
Eg 192.168.0.1 becomes 0.0.0.0.192.168.0.1
And then we dish out all the new address space. You would get the network providers to handle address conversion until software and hardware has been updated. Because all the existing addresses are reserved in the new set, it doesn’t affect them.
Keeps all the nice parts of IPv4, doesn’t require everyone to switch to an entirely new system, backwards compatible with existing hardware/software. Problem solved.
As a small WISP operating within the RIPE region, Are there ways to obtain usable IPv6 address space for customer connectivity (to provide e.g. /56 to customer CPEs) without becoming a LIR and paying the associated fees (Which frankly are unfair considering that companies that hold millions of ipv4 addresses pay the same amount... but that's another topic)? I currently own a single IPv4 PI /24 prefix, but I am not a LIR.
I’m hoping with RE everything, for at least consumer IOT products we’ll get to a point where we can just get rid of a lot of the need for ipv4 for home.
What’s left are just apps and devices that people don’t wanna change out but are probably pwnd and I don’t think are gonna get updates because the teams that wrote the software moved on and the companies don’t wanna keep spending on sustaining.
The elephant in the room: I didn't check the other mammoths, but e.g. Amazon has 4.4% of all ipv4 addresses.
Meanwhile I’m here carving out a couple of /64s from the /48 block of IPv6 addresses Comcast gave me.
Yeah, but it’s not land and the analogy quickly breaks down given that’ ya know, NAT exists and DNS servers are under soverign control.
The scrolling scaling-controller on the map is genius. I wish more maps would add this dynamic ability to scale the logical size when there is a considerable ratio delta to the land size.
I initially read the "As" in the "As land" label as "land of plural letter A". Which I understood as the land of DNS A records, which seemed like a whimsical yet fitting name.
Interesting. I think this can be used a measure of prosperity of a nation. like GDP.
Either I've lost it, or there are other countries there that are bigger losers than the DRC. North Korea says it is 1069.6 times smaller, Greenland says it is 1507.8 times smaller, etc.
What an interesting critter the UK is in terms of its shape
Can't we use AI to rewrite the whole internet (including flashing of routers) so it supports IPv6 everywhere?
was fun at college to plug in a laptop into the dormroom's ethernet jack and get assigned a public address. (i went to a /16 school, not a /8 sadly)
This should be scaled by population. would make the India/china numbers more drastic.
FWIW I get the most hilarious spam and strangest scanners from Netherlands.
at a certain point in time there has to be a forcing function or event that causes people to migrate from ipv4 to ipv6.
As an Italian, I'm astonished by Italy.
I like how Hawaii migrates to California and Egpyt yeets itself into the Indian ocean. Quality animation that instills confidence in accuracy!
Now this is an interesting map.
First impression: Poland stronk. Even Czechia strong. Charles IV.'s realm restored. Russia in shambles, not a very efficient conqueror of the address space. And the glory of Rome restored, with pitiful Constantinople looking at their backs from afar.
Second impression: Morocco, Kenya, Egypt and South Africa as the African heavy-weights. Corresponds to what I know.
Third impression: the real bosses are Taiwan and South Korea - just wow.
Hi, I’m helping a hospital in Buenos Aires that has lost their IPv4 due to their ISP moving to CGNAT, putting their on prem imaging servers offline for 7 days. (it’s ok for us though, we have a backup failover isp)
Might have to do something horrible like:
- setup an ipv4 tunnel, which will require hacking a VPN to allow TCP listening, and routing connections to some external proxy with a dedicated static ipv4 address
- or do some modem router level nat port forwarding, and use a ddns to avoid ip changes breaking stuff. but that won’t work probably since public ip is shared
will investigate the isp to see if they are truly short in ipv4 or if they are just moving clients off them in order to sell them to higher bidders and plans, which is likely since I’ve been upsold into optic fiber, static ip surcharge, sd-wan, dedicated connection so far
if you have any advice or RIR contacts (or an ipv4 block to donate, invest or sell), I’d be thankful, my email is in my profile
Interesting.
IP6 babe!
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Reddit shadowbanned me multiple times for either absurd or political reasons, but my ISP used to assign dynamic IPv4 addresses, so I could easily create a new account. Then it switched to IPv6 with a static address, and now I can't create new Reddit accounts anymore.
India: 47M
China: 358M
Both countries have roughly the same population. The IPv4 problem has been swept under the rug with CGNAT and a normal person doesn't even notice it. But it sucks. Forget having a dedicated IP, even on a broadband connection, you don't get a public IP that's truly yours. According to IPInfo[1], there are around 1,000 users sharing my IP. I get flagged for malicious activity, and online gaming is impossible without a Tailscale relay.
Of course, much of this comes down to the bad luck (+ policies) of developing late, when most IPv4 blocks had already been allocated. But it's pretty unfair how US DoD, Apple, Ford, and others [1] are sitting on enormous IPv4 blocks they'll probably never fully use, and may never sell. Meanwhile I am sharing a single public IP with a thousand strangers.
[1]: https://ipinfo.io/223.233.77.184
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...