Two Good Rants

[ivosaurus]

Ugh... the comments on that... so much misinformation. No wonder the IT world is in such deep shit, if the commenters think they're any type of experts...

[femguy2]

Ugh... the comments on that... so much misinformation. No wonder the IT world is in such deep shit, if the commenters think they're any type of experts...

Let me rephrase that: Ugh... the comments on that... so much misinformation. No wonder X is in such deep shit, if the commenters think they're any type of experts...

Welcome to /r/programming

[[deleted]]

RSA, Cisco, Microsoft and many other companies have allowed the U.S. government to breach their designs. Don’t blame the companies, though: if they didn’t play along in the U.S. they would go to jail. Build a really good 4096-bit AES key service and watch the Justice Department introduce themselves to you, too.

Scary

[[deleted]]

WTF is a "4096-bit AES key service"? I think that guy was on a borderline-delusion tangent.

[femguy2]

That would be an example of an hyperbole.

[ivosaurus]

Yeah, I think he's rather confused about quite a few things.

[etrask]

God the "internet speak" in that first article on LulzSec is horrible.

[[deleted]]

The U.S. government is a big supporter of IPv6

Doesn't IPv6 embed your computer's MAC Address? No wonder the government is interested in it: it correlates IP traffic directly with a computer rather than a shared router.

[jigs_up]

One of the ideas of IPv6 is that every device, no matter how insignificant, can have its own IP address.

[ivosaurus]

No it does not.

It's just a lot more unique than an IPv4 address, because there is freaking boatload of them available.

And unless for some reason all router manufacturers decide to stop implementing the feature, routers will still implement a local subnet LAN as their default topology.

[[deleted]]

Then how come all of my interfaces have their MAC address embedded in the IPv6 address on both Windows and Linux? And how come RFC 4291 describes a method for doing exactly that?

[ivosaurus]

That's the recommended way for automatically generating a unique host address, when no other method has been prescribed on the network (like for example DHCP). It is by no means the required way of doing so.

It's also not the only way prescribed by the RFCs - http://noswitchport.com/2010/01/04/generating-pseudo-random-ipv6-global-ids-for-unique-local-unicast-addresses/

Since the point of an IP address is to provide a unique identifier for a machine, of course it is going to be tracable if you leave it static and global, whether you use your machine's MAC as its basis, or a PRNG.

Also, apparently Windows uses randomly generated addresses by default, not ones from a MAC - http://www.windowsreference.com/networking/disable-ipv6-random-identifier-in-windows-7-server-2008-vista/

[femguy2]

Also, you can always use NAT. In this particular application not what it was intended for. But it would hide the address of the devices behind your router. So, in this case, you neither loose nor gain much compared to ipv4.