Re: The Internet and the Law, the Economist, 13-19 January 2001

| Sean, re the IPv6 myth propagated in this article, see
| http://playground.sun.com/ipng/specs/ipv6-address-privacy.html

Yes, this solves the lower-8-bytes in a notional 8+8, in the
sense that it is an identifier of "who", but the draft in question
does not seem to deal with the nature of the "where" part of a
notional 8+8 address.   That is, if some set of bits uniquely
identify an always-on residential computer (or some other device
fixed in the topology), the randomization of the lower 8 bytes 
as in §3.2.1 of draft-ietf-ipng-addrconf-privacy-04.txt 
does not really help, since only one device anywhere will
be using the pattern in that host's top 64 bits.

Three obvious approaches come to mind: change one's relationship
to the global topology using virtual connections (i.e., tunneling),
change the entire topology's numbering (i.e., global DHCP-like
address leasing even for the biggest ISPs) or use 1:1 NAT at network
boundaries, such that a block of N addresses is directly translated
into an equal-sized block of N addresses expressed with a different
bit pattern.  All of these effectively divorce the topological
address from the identity, in the sense that getpeername(2) might
return two distinct results, viz. where (from the packet header)
or who (from some other protocol).  All three also break the
permanence or globalness or both of an IPv6 address to host mapping.

I will say however that I concur with the comment in §4 ibid., "The
desires of protecting individual privacy vs. the desire to effectively
maintain and debug a network can conflict with each other."   It will
be interesting to see how the IPv6 architecture will evolve now
that these issues are being given more attention, given that some
architectures will have greater conflict than others.

        Sean.