There are plenty of vectors left to squeeze the existing IPv4 space especially all the Legacy assignments held by deceased companies and individuals. There is no procedure to reclaim them. Even when you invest time and money to find the relatives, the RIR may decline a transfer so nobody invests here as long as plenty of former hosting, colocation and regional access providers leave the market after their customers moved to the US hyperscalers or out or business.
I think around 2000 every new LIR at RIPE got a /19 allocation. Smaller companies are now almost 30 years old and the founders divest their assets step by step unless someone buys everything.
The collapse in IPv4 transfer prices is what caught my eye here, dropping from a ~$55 peak in 2021 to a mean of $22 in early 2026 (figure 12).
This validates my hypothesis that the run-up in 2020–2022 was an artificial scarcity bubble driven largely by hyperscalers. AWS was right up there stockpiling before they shifted their pricing model. Once AWS introduced the hourly charge for public IPv4 addresses (effectively passing the scarcity cost to the consumer), their acquisition pressure vanished. The text notes Amazon stopped announcing almost 15M addresses in Nov 2025. I think they have moved from aggressive accumulation to inventory management.
We are seeing asset stranding in real-time. The market has realized that between the AWS tax and the efficacy of mobile CGNAT, the desperate thirst for public v4 space was not infinite. I'm curious to hear more takes on this.
The CGNAT point is underrated. Carriers have zero incentive to move away from it - thousands of users per public IP, no transition cost.
The interesting downstream effect is on IP reputation systems. Traditional detection assumed 1 IP = 1 user. CGNAT breaks that entirely - platforms can't aggressively filter mobile carrier IPs without blocking legitimate customers by the thousands.
Makes sense the IPv4 price dropped once mobile networks proved you can serve massive user bases with relatively few public addresses.
Expect CG-NAT boxes are expensive, and introduce another point of failure into the network. Most mobile carriers are running IPv6 first networks these days anyway.
Like you said, CG-NAT does have the benefit of making v4 address reputation less reliable, which means it's not as big a deal for the transition to v6.
Anecdotally on how this affects the day to day user experience: I just deployed T-Mobile 5G Business Internet to a temporary pop-up art space (it's only active for a few months) and I'd say twice daily I get a CAPTCHA challenge on Google search.
"As you may know, IPv4 addresses are an increasingly scarce resource and the cost to acquire a single public IPv4 address has risen more than 300% over the past 5 years. This change reflects our own costs and is also intended to encourage you to be a bit more frugal with your use of public IPv4 addresses and to think about accelerating your adoption of IPv6 as a modernization and conservation measure."
Their move disgusted me and I moved from AWS to OCI.
They hadn't bothered to add ipv6 support to most of their services and the ones that did have it usually were only dual stack - still requiring an ipv4 address.
As someone with a background in electronics who doesn't manage any internet-connected equipment but has multiple embedded devices connected to a WAN, I'm glad that IPv4 still seems to have a bit of life left in it.
When IPv6 was developed, over 30 years ago, connecting everything to the internet seemed like a great idea. I know that IPv6 can be made secure, but I don't have the background or research time to learn how to do so, and the NAT-by-default of IPv4 effectively means that I get the benefit of a default-deny security strategy that makes it impossible to accidentally directly connect anything to the internet.
I'm hoping I can keep using IPv4 until IPv8 or IPv4.5 or whatever comes next is developed with the modern proliferation of cheap insecure IoT in mind.
For some background on why IoT products are so insecure:
Hardware manufacturers don't really comprehend the idea of updates, let alone timely of security patches. Hardware has to work on the day of release, so everything is documented and tested to verify it will work. I have hardware with a TCP/IP stack that was released 20 years, (https://docs.wiznet.io/Product/Chip/Ethernet/W5500) and doesn't have a single errata published, despite widespread use. This is expected for every single component, for even the smallest 1-cent transistor, which has dozens of guaranteed performance characteristics laid out over several pages of documentation (https://en.mot-mos.com/vancheerfile/files/pdf/MOT2302B2.pdf).
When manufacturers venture into a product that runs software, they don't realize that for a given complexity, working through undocumented or, worse yet, incorrectly documented APIs takes more time than the equivalent hardware development and documentation. I've worked on multiple projects where software bugs were fixed with hardware workarounds, because it's faster, cheaper, and easier to develop, test, document, retool, and add a few cents of bill-of-materials cost per product, than to get reliable output from the already-written library that's supposed to provide the functionality.
The hardware TCP/IP stack that I linked to was developed at a time when it was the cheapest way to connect a low-power embedded system to a network. Modern low-power embedded systems have multiple cores running at hundreds to thousands of MIPS making the resources to run a softtware TCP/IP stack trivial, but the product still sells well, because when security is an absolute must, the hardware development and maintenance cost for the functionality is still cheaper than through software, even when there's no marginal cost to run the software.
NAT is not a security measure at all. It just obscures what's behind a firewall, but that is leaky and not reliable from a security perspective. It might make you feel better, but that is not security.
IPv4 is not NAT-by-default. The reality of the world we live in today is that most home networks have a NAT, because you need multiple devices behind a single IP.
That said, I agree: it's quite unknowable how many services I've turned on on local machines with the expectation that a router firewall sat between me and potential clients.
But that doesn't go away with IPv6 - the NAT does, the router doesn't, and the firewall shouldn't either. For example, the default UniFi firewall rules for IPv6 are: 1. Allow Established/Related Traffic (outbound return traffic), 2. Block Invalid Traffic, 3. Block All Other Traffic
You must explicitly open a firewall rule for inbound IPv6 traffic. NAT is not the firewall.
IPv6 is just as secure as IPv4. NAT usually combines address translation with a stateful firewall. I remember when they were separate things. IPv6 has the stateful firewall, all the same security but without the mess of address translation.
Also, if you have devices connected to WAN, then they are insecure because they are not NATed.
> I know that IPv6 can be made secure, but I don't have the background or research time to learn how to do so, and the NAT-by-default of IPv4 effectively means that I get the benefit of a default-deny security strategy that makes it impossible to accidentally directly connect anything to the internet.
To get the "unsolicted traffic is rejected or dropped" behavior of the typical IPv4 NAT, forward inbound traffic that's related to an established connection and drop or reject the rest.
You can also use the exact same NAT techniques you use for IPv4 addresses with IPv6 addresses. The only differences are that instead of you using RFC 1918 Private Internets addresses (10./8 and friends) you use RFC 4193 ULA addresses (fd00::/8), and you need the usual NAT rules on your edge router, except for IPv6, rather than IPv4. Remember that IPv6 is still IP, just with larger addresses.
It's recommended that you generate your ULA subnet rather than selecting one by hand, but absolutely nothing stops you from choosing fd::/64. If you're statically assigning addresses to your LAN hosts, then your router could be -say- fd::1 and you count up from there. Also note that DHCP exists for IPv6 [0] and is used by every non-toy OS out there except for Android.
> I'm hoping I can keep using IPv4 until IPv8 or IPv4.5 or whatever comes next...
IPvnext is not happening in either of our lifetimes. You're either going to have to buy edge gear that's set up with a "reject or drop unsolicited inbound forwarding traffic" firewall, or learn how to set it up yourself. Either path is not hard. Well, I guess there's secret option #3: "Die without doing either.". That's also not hard.
[0] It has been around for nearly twenty-three years.
I don't think you even need a stateful firewall. If it's an IoT device that's not meant to provide services to the internet then it seems to me you can just drop all non local subnet originated traffic and get most of the security you would expect with NAT.
If you want to drop all non-local subnet originated traffic, you need to keep state. Otherwise, how can you tell which side originated the flow?
Even that is only a partial solution - UPNP hole punching exploits holes in this logic to allow peer-to-peer traffic into a network which otherwise has a default-deny ACL.
For some background why IoT products will stop being insecure: if you sell one in the EU, you're liable for all the damage your botnet causes.
Luckily, common EU home routers have firewalls, even for IPv6. And it's so much easier to punch holes on purpose! Instead of messing with port forwarding and internal and external IP addresses, you can just say "this device is a server, please allow traffic on port 80 and 443, thank you"
"As the Internet continues to evolve, it is no longer the technically innovative challenger pitted against venerable incumbents in the forms of the traditional industries of telephony, print newspapers, television entertainment and social interaction. The Internet is now the established norm. The days when the Internet was touted as a poster child of disruption in a deregulated space are long since over, and these days we appear to be increasingly looking further afield for a regulatory and governance framework that can challenge the increasing complacency of the very small number of massive digital incumbents.
It is unclear how successful we will be in this search for responses to this oppressive level of centrality in many aspects of the digital environment. We can but wait and see."
If you think the time that a given social network spends at the top is long now, wait until there's a "regulatory and governance framework" knocking out most newcomers.
The real story here is China and India have been quietly buying up gobs of African IP blocks - most of which are used for botting operations. I see it in my server logs.
China already de-facto owns half of Africa so it's natural they would prey on their scarce IP resources as well.
When you see AI scraping at a massive scale originating from $AFRICAN_COUNTRY IP space, and that country's GDP is smaller than Rhode Island, you sure as shit know someone else is behind it.
I see this often that people refer to countries as actors. Are you implying that the government of these countries bought those resources and they're now owned by the government? Or are you saying that citizens/corporations of those countries are buying? I find it weird, I wouldn't use the phrase "The United States is buying XYZ" unless it was the current government doing so?
I'm not sure the distinction matters, and attribution is inherently hard and easy to get wrong. I frequently read Country X is doing Y, less as a indicator of government action and more of a single that we can't be more specific of who within the country is performing an action but we know the behavior is occurring there.
In the case of IP address purchases, these are publicly tied to specific public and private entities and can be easily queried through the regional registries. These private entities are frequently the same kind of shell company you'll get with hiding shady financial details.
China does not have a meaningful distinction between private industry and the state. She also maintains a level of surveillance and control, particularly in the IT world, that makes this hard with some level of government sanction.
It seems to be widly accepted that the Chinese State (don't know about India) often imposes on or sponsers citizens to perform actions it finds adventagious.
And, I'd say, the US is known to do this. I'll lead with 'Project Azorian' to back it up.
India does it too. You see it on all socials as well as reddit. Brain dead posts and comments praising the current govt or gate against anyone criticising.
Almost all the Indian subreddits are against the current government. You will be banned from a subreddit even if you rightly speak in support of current government on Reddit.
It's hard to take your rest of your comment seriously if you are blatantly dishonest about this.
In the US, the government can apply pressure and bargain with companies for favor, but there is no legal requirement of companies agreeing (shy of court orders). Far more than cases of corporate compliance with the government are cases of corporate defiance.
In China, there is no meaningful difference between the party and any Chinese company. Companies are seed funded by the state and carry the will of the state. There is no "come back with a court order" in China. And even if there was, the courts are also just another arm of the party.
I pay close attention to IPv4 addresses for outgoing emails. At work we use several email services and pay for a dedicated IP(v4) at each. And when we provision a new service, we expect our new IP address to be “clean,” by which I mean it is ideally not found on any email reputation list.
For websites and services I don’t care. Some hosting platforms publish via CNAME, and some via A and AAAA records. Most seem to use a mix of v4 and v6 addressing.
The falling price of IPv4 addresses looks to me like we’ve made it to other side of the IPv6 rollout: demand for IPv4 is falling faster than supply now. Not clear if those prices are adjusted for inflation; the post-COVID spike looks like a lot of other nominal price graphs. If not, then the recent price drop is even more dramatic than it appears.
Perhaps in the long run, IPv4 becomes an artisanal choice for uses that depend on stable IP reputation: email sending, primarily. And everyone else relies on TLS for reputation signals, not caring about the IP address.
There is a growing grey market for IPv4 still, though, and probably always will be. It seemed like people were treating them like crypto for a while. Still people out there trying to re-route old abandoned ranges. There are still a lot of legacy ranges that belong to defunct organizations and never got properly sold.
There is no shortage. Go look at IPXO, you can sublease any block size. The RiR's should be reclaiming these unused addresses, but instead the ASN is allowed to sit on them or rent them out, regardless they're not being used. The shortage is caused by hoarding and RiR's not doing their job.
Just yesterday--and I don't know how I wound up there--I looked at RFC1166 (from 1990) which is "a status report on the network numbers and autonomous system numbers used in the Internet community." There's a long list of companies and individuals who were assigned "internet numbers". To my surprise, my real name is listed there! I have no clue why.
Not to spoil the article (but there's a lot in there) but I was particularly intrigued by the ongoing tumbling of the price of IPs. After peaking in 2022, "these days the low price of $9 per address is back to the same price that was seen in 2014."
I was also surprised to find that out the other day when someone on Reddit was complaining they couldn’t get a good price on a /17 they were hoarding to sell for a profit. Good riddance.
That looks weird. I am guessing that someone knows about the mismatch between ccTLDs (where the UK is .uk) and ISO codes (where the UK is GB and Ukraine is UA) and tried to correct something and got it wrong.
I'm interested in any new successful startups going full IPV6 from the beginning. Once we cross that bridge, where your internal IPV4 knowledge is equivalent to token ring knowledge, there's nothing else to watch.
Exclusively IPv6 without any transitional mechanisms would be difficult to succeed with.
However, there are network upstarts like Jio (India) which made huge v6 investments from day one which use 464xlat for subscribers to access v4-only resources.
>Exclusively IPv6 without any transitional mechanisms would be difficult to succeed with.
That's my point; why is it still difficult? What exactly are the pain points for a fully commercialized native IPV6-only business, and why do we think it will be easier to maintain the status quo?
Also every mobile phone network ever (with a handful of exceptions) is IPv6-only, with a slow translation layer to reach v4 sites. Your app or website literally runs faster if you use IPv6.
It always sends me to sleep when IP enthusiasts lament the lack of adoption for IPv6.
It's obvious to anyone that looks at the two formats that any kind of hacky workaround like NAT gateways will be preferable indefinitely to actually adopting the monstrosity that is IPv6.
- Did you disable UPnP on your router? If not, any device behind the router can simply ask the router to open a port, typically without authentication, bypassing this "firewall" completely.
- TURN and STUN trivially bypass this side-effect, and a side effect of that is a third party has to often be involved, which can be collecting data later leaked or used against you.
- The monstrosity of NAT is that it's the core thing that drives centralization - because of NAT any two Internet hosts generally have to involve a third party to communicate, a third party which again, can be collecting data later leaked or used against you.
If you don't care about the security implications of the above, then you don't really care about the "firewall" either.
I doubt that most consumer routers expose this functionality. IPv6 NAT is rarely needed and should be avoided. Interestingly enough I stumbled upon a use case today. No IPv6 connectivity at my office but at my dad's house. Since a WireGuard tunnel is layer 3 I can't use router advertisements and the prefix is dynamic, so private IPv6 addresses and NAT66 it is. It was an exercise out of curiosity though, route64.org works much better for IPv6 connectivity.
I’m curious about that meta viewport declaration and where it came from: I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it in that order. The customary ordering has the attributes and content properties all reversed:
No. You either design the site to be fully responsive (which would necessarily include CSS changes), or leave out that line. If your CSS assumes a desktop layout, it is strictly better not to set the viewport width to device-width so that the mobile browsers will use the traditional desktop viewport and the user can zoom around without anything broken. In contrast, carelessly slapping that line without CSS changes will often lead to content being clipped and invisible on mobile. This is why I have a bookmarklet to delete any viewport meta elements.
Really need governments to start pushing harder on IPv6 adoption. We need sticks, not just carrots. My favorite is chaos engineering forced IPv4 downtime.
In the US, I really want the FCC to mandate that an ISP provides IPv6 connectivity in order to meet the criteria to be considered broadband (and access the subsidies related to that). Don't even care if the functionality is off by default / you have to call and agree the routing may be sub-optimal, whatever. I currently use HE tunnels but on top of additional latency, the HE <-> Cogent peering dispute still makes it difficult to access services over IPv6.
There should be rule that ISP with CGNAT must offer IPv6 as an alternative. The US doesn't use CGNAT as much as other countries, but would help people stuck behind crappy CGNAT.
Yeah I this is the bigger issue. CG-NATs break things, you shouldn't be able to sell a pooled IP CG-NAT only service as broadband connection. Looking at you MetroNet
Nah, we just need actual carrots. If something new is better than what people currently have, and you make it easy for them to get the new thing, people will naturally abandon the old thing. They'll do it happily. In fact, it will be hard to stop them from abandoning the old thing for the new thing.
IPv6 has failed at being better, being accessible, or both. Rather than punish people for failing to adopt something that isn't better or easy to get, either improve IPv6 so that it's actually attractive or admit defeat and start work on the next version that people will genuinely want.
The moment you start thinking "Let's make what people have now worse until they move to this other thing they don't want" its an admission that whatever you're pushing people to is shit.
> IPv6 has failed at being better, being accessible, or both.
I don't agree that it has. IPv6 is clearly better (no collisions between address space and thus no NAT requirement), and it's perfectly accessible to anyone who actually tries. I'm not by any means a top tier network guy but even to me IPv6 is dead easy to setup. The problem with the v6 transition is that people have very inaccurate views on one or both of those points (usually they falsely believe NAT provides security benefits, or they falsely believe IPv6 is a difficult thing to implement). I'm not sure how to fix this widespread misinformation but that is the problem from what I've seen.
IPv6 primarily solves a problem that most people either don't have ("I have IPv4 IPs already") or don't care about ("I don't know/care what my IP is") and it introduces a bunch of problems people didn't have before like worries over comparability with existing hardware/software (improving all the time) or even just "now I have to spend a bunch of time learning about how to correctly and securely implement this on my network" (still a problem)
Maybe one day in the distant future, IPv4 collisions/shortages will be an actual problem for most people. If that happens, those people will naturally make the switch. Until then, why would they?
It turns out a bunch of people actually like NAT. They like it so much that they pushed for solutions like NAT66 so that they can keep it even after switching to IPv6.
If IPv6 offered substantially better security/privacy, speeds, reliability, or introduced some new killer feature people didn't even know they wanted until they learned about it there wouldn't be any reason to try to force people to move to v6. Because it doesn't do any of that, and most people are happy with IPv4, they'll stick with what has been working for them.
Even 15 years ago IPv6 was much worse than IPv4 for most of the people. Only when the mobile operators has started to insist on it then the usage started to grow to significant numbers. Which showed the real problem with IPv6: lack of compatibility with IPv4. That was absolutely possible 30 years ago, but the designers decided that it would just complicate things.
The US government is pushing IPv6 for government sites and contractors.
I think there needs to be a push for IPv6-first networks for companies. ISPs in the US are pretty good about IPv6. But network engineers learned IPv4, and don't want to change what works, so companies lag behind. Changing existing networks is hard, but IPv6 is good candidate for new networks. This includes writing docs and eventually the education so IPv6 is the default.
I am on zen which you can consider to be as vertical tab mode in FF as well (considering zen is based on FF) (but all be it, I love how slick zen looks! Zen is amazing)
And I have the same texture too! I hadn't observed it until your message
Different RIRs & LIRs have different policies, but the "foolproof" way is to just set up an LLC and register resources through that. There are usually renewal fees as well. If you're not hoping to be able to sell them after you get them, a careful reading of RIR policies can usually net you one or two /24s without needing to buy any blocks.
In either case, if you end up with internet resources you can trawl through sites like https://bgp.services/ to find a cheap VPS provider near you that supports peering. I run my own AS and advertise 3 network blocks (2 IPv4 + 1 IPv6) out of 2 different DCs for several hundred $ per year all in all (including renewal fees, VPS, taxes, etc).
I think around 2000 every new LIR at RIPE got a /19 allocation. Smaller companies are now almost 30 years old and the founders divest their assets step by step unless someone buys everything.
This validates my hypothesis that the run-up in 2020–2022 was an artificial scarcity bubble driven largely by hyperscalers. AWS was right up there stockpiling before they shifted their pricing model. Once AWS introduced the hourly charge for public IPv4 addresses (effectively passing the scarcity cost to the consumer), their acquisition pressure vanished. The text notes Amazon stopped announcing almost 15M addresses in Nov 2025. I think they have moved from aggressive accumulation to inventory management.
We are seeing asset stranding in real-time. The market has realized that between the AWS tax and the efficacy of mobile CGNAT, the desperate thirst for public v4 space was not infinite. I'm curious to hear more takes on this.
The interesting downstream effect is on IP reputation systems. Traditional detection assumed 1 IP = 1 user. CGNAT breaks that entirely - platforms can't aggressively filter mobile carrier IPs without blocking legitimate customers by the thousands.
Makes sense the IPv4 price dropped once mobile networks proved you can serve massive user bases with relatively few public addresses.
Like you said, CG-NAT does have the benefit of making v4 address reputation less reliable, which means it's not as big a deal for the transition to v6.
At driving the majority of mobile traffic to IPv6? Otherwise, it seems hard to describe mobile CGNAT as efficacious to me.
Aka Kuiper
>stopped announcing almost 15M addresses in Nov 2025
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address...
"As you may know, IPv4 addresses are an increasingly scarce resource and the cost to acquire a single public IPv4 address has risen more than 300% over the past 5 years. This change reflects our own costs and is also intended to encourage you to be a bit more frugal with your use of public IPv4 addresses and to think about accelerating your adoption of IPv6 as a modernization and conservation measure."
Their move disgusted me and I moved from AWS to OCI.
When IPv6 was developed, over 30 years ago, connecting everything to the internet seemed like a great idea. I know that IPv6 can be made secure, but I don't have the background or research time to learn how to do so, and the NAT-by-default of IPv4 effectively means that I get the benefit of a default-deny security strategy that makes it impossible to accidentally directly connect anything to the internet.
I'm hoping I can keep using IPv4 until IPv8 or IPv4.5 or whatever comes next is developed with the modern proliferation of cheap insecure IoT in mind.
For some background on why IoT products are so insecure:
Hardware manufacturers don't really comprehend the idea of updates, let alone timely of security patches. Hardware has to work on the day of release, so everything is documented and tested to verify it will work. I have hardware with a TCP/IP stack that was released 20 years, (https://docs.wiznet.io/Product/Chip/Ethernet/W5500) and doesn't have a single errata published, despite widespread use. This is expected for every single component, for even the smallest 1-cent transistor, which has dozens of guaranteed performance characteristics laid out over several pages of documentation (https://en.mot-mos.com/vancheerfile/files/pdf/MOT2302B2.pdf).
When manufacturers venture into a product that runs software, they don't realize that for a given complexity, working through undocumented or, worse yet, incorrectly documented APIs takes more time than the equivalent hardware development and documentation. I've worked on multiple projects where software bugs were fixed with hardware workarounds, because it's faster, cheaper, and easier to develop, test, document, retool, and add a few cents of bill-of-materials cost per product, than to get reliable output from the already-written library that's supposed to provide the functionality.
The hardware TCP/IP stack that I linked to was developed at a time when it was the cheapest way to connect a low-power embedded system to a network. Modern low-power embedded systems have multiple cores running at hundreds to thousands of MIPS making the resources to run a softtware TCP/IP stack trivial, but the product still sells well, because when security is an absolute must, the hardware development and maintenance cost for the functionality is still cheaper than through software, even when there's no marginal cost to run the software.
IPv4 is not NAT-by-default. The reality of the world we live in today is that most home networks have a NAT, because you need multiple devices behind a single IP.
That said, I agree: it's quite unknowable how many services I've turned on on local machines with the expectation that a router firewall sat between me and potential clients.
But that doesn't go away with IPv6 - the NAT does, the router doesn't, and the firewall shouldn't either. For example, the default UniFi firewall rules for IPv6 are: 1. Allow Established/Related Traffic (outbound return traffic), 2. Block Invalid Traffic, 3. Block All Other Traffic
You must explicitly open a firewall rule for inbound IPv6 traffic. NAT is not the firewall.
NAT _is_ a firewall. And a much safer one than IPv6 firewalls, because NAT will fail safe if misconfigured.
Also, if you have devices connected to WAN, then they are insecure because they are not NATed.
To get the "unsolicted traffic is rejected or dropped" behavior of the typical IPv4 NAT, forward inbound traffic that's related to an established connection and drop or reject the rest.
You can also use the exact same NAT techniques you use for IPv4 addresses with IPv6 addresses. The only differences are that instead of you using RFC 1918 Private Internets addresses (10./8 and friends) you use RFC 4193 ULA addresses (fd00::/8), and you need the usual NAT rules on your edge router, except for IPv6, rather than IPv4. Remember that IPv6 is still IP, just with larger addresses.
It's recommended that you generate your ULA subnet rather than selecting one by hand, but absolutely nothing stops you from choosing fd::/64. If you're statically assigning addresses to your LAN hosts, then your router could be -say- fd::1 and you count up from there. Also note that DHCP exists for IPv6 [0] and is used by every non-toy OS out there except for Android.
> I'm hoping I can keep using IPv4 until IPv8 or IPv4.5 or whatever comes next...
IPvnext is not happening in either of our lifetimes. You're either going to have to buy edge gear that's set up with a "reject or drop unsolicited inbound forwarding traffic" firewall, or learn how to set it up yourself. Either path is not hard. Well, I guess there's secret option #3: "Die without doing either.". That's also not hard.
[0] It has been around for nearly twenty-three years.
Even that is only a partial solution - UPNP hole punching exploits holes in this logic to allow peer-to-peer traffic into a network which otherwise has a default-deny ACL.
Luckily, common EU home routers have firewalls, even for IPv6. And it's so much easier to punch holes on purpose! Instead of messing with port forwarding and internal and external IP addresses, you can just say "this device is a server, please allow traffic on port 80 and 443, thank you"
Don't bring technology to a political fight, the hoarders've got more tech than you, "wait and see" is what a bag of sand does at the gun range.
China already de-facto owns half of Africa so it's natural they would prey on their scarce IP resources as well.
When you see AI scraping at a massive scale originating from $AFRICAN_COUNTRY IP space, and that country's GDP is smaller than Rhode Island, you sure as shit know someone else is behind it.
In the case of China, I believe it's government or CCP-controlled entities, and the end-game is something more nefarious.
For India, IMO it's private industry. They're just trying to make a buck.
In the case of IP address purchases, these are publicly tied to specific public and private entities and can be easily queried through the regional registries. These private entities are frequently the same kind of shell company you'll get with hiding shady financial details.
And, I'd say, the US is known to do this. I'll lead with 'Project Azorian' to back it up.
Almost all the Indian subreddits are against the current government. You will be banned from a subreddit even if you rightly speak in support of current government on Reddit.
It's hard to take your rest of your comment seriously if you are blatantly dishonest about this.
In China, there is no meaningful difference between the party and any Chinese company. Companies are seed funded by the state and carry the will of the state. There is no "come back with a court order" in China. And even if there was, the courts are also just another arm of the party.
For websites and services I don’t care. Some hosting platforms publish via CNAME, and some via A and AAAA records. Most seem to use a mix of v4 and v6 addressing.
The falling price of IPv4 addresses looks to me like we’ve made it to other side of the IPv6 rollout: demand for IPv4 is falling faster than supply now. Not clear if those prices are adjusted for inflation; the post-COVID spike looks like a lot of other nominal price graphs. If not, then the recent price drop is even more dramatic than it appears.
Perhaps in the long run, IPv4 becomes an artisanal choice for uses that depend on stable IP reputation: email sending, primarily. And everyone else relies on TLS for reputation signals, not caring about the IP address.
its correct in other tables.
1. My AppleTV began stuttering during playback.
2. My old iMac began crashing every time it connected to the wifi.
At least the iMac has an option to disable IPv6. The AppleTV has no such option so I had to do it in the router.
However, there are network upstarts like Jio (India) which made huge v6 investments from day one which use 464xlat for subscribers to access v4-only resources.
That's my point; why is it still difficult? What exactly are the pain points for a fully commercialized native IPV6-only business, and why do we think it will be easier to maintain the status quo?
It's obvious to anyone that looks at the two formats that any kind of hacky workaround like NAT gateways will be preferable indefinitely to actually adopting the monstrosity that is IPv6.
- TURN and STUN trivially bypass this side-effect, and a side effect of that is a third party has to often be involved, which can be collecting data later leaked or used against you.
- The monstrosity of NAT is that it's the core thing that drives centralization - because of NAT any two Internet hosts generally have to involve a third party to communicate, a third party which again, can be collecting data later leaked or used against you.
If you don't care about the security implications of the above, then you don't really care about the "firewall" either.
[0]: `<meta content="initial-scale=1,width=device-width" name="viewport">`
IPv6 has failed at being better, being accessible, or both. Rather than punish people for failing to adopt something that isn't better or easy to get, either improve IPv6 so that it's actually attractive or admit defeat and start work on the next version that people will genuinely want.
The moment you start thinking "Let's make what people have now worse until they move to this other thing they don't want" its an admission that whatever you're pushing people to is shit.
I don't agree that it has. IPv6 is clearly better (no collisions between address space and thus no NAT requirement), and it's perfectly accessible to anyone who actually tries. I'm not by any means a top tier network guy but even to me IPv6 is dead easy to setup. The problem with the v6 transition is that people have very inaccurate views on one or both of those points (usually they falsely believe NAT provides security benefits, or they falsely believe IPv6 is a difficult thing to implement). I'm not sure how to fix this widespread misinformation but that is the problem from what I've seen.
Maybe one day in the distant future, IPv4 collisions/shortages will be an actual problem for most people. If that happens, those people will naturally make the switch. Until then, why would they?
It turns out a bunch of people actually like NAT. They like it so much that they pushed for solutions like NAT66 so that they can keep it even after switching to IPv6.
If IPv6 offered substantially better security/privacy, speeds, reliability, or introduced some new killer feature people didn't even know they wanted until they learned about it there wouldn't be any reason to try to force people to move to v6. Because it doesn't do any of that, and most people are happy with IPv4, they'll stick with what has been working for them.
I think there needs to be a push for IPv6-first networks for companies. ISPs in the US are pretty good about IPv6. But network engineers learned IPv4, and don't want to change what works, so companies lag behind. Changing existing networks is hard, but IPv6 is good candidate for new networks. This includes writing docs and eventually the education so IPv6 is the default.
And I have the same texture too! I hadn't observed it until your message
I have it both under Firefox or Chromium, and whether my tabs are vertical or not. It's just the website's background.
[0] Yes, I am aware that that's simply not possible for most folks. I used to be most folks, so I definitely know.
In either case, if you end up with internet resources you can trawl through sites like https://bgp.services/ to find a cheap VPS provider near you that supports peering. I run my own AS and advertise 3 network blocks (2 IPv4 + 1 IPv6) out of 2 different DCs for several hundred $ per year all in all (including renewal fees, VPS, taxes, etc).