On Jun 25, 2014, at 8:23 PM, Martin Rex <mrex(_at_)sap(_dot_)com> wrote:
Mark Andrews wrote:
Why would any private individual want to get an IPv6 address?
With DHCP IPv4 + NAT (on your Home router) and even more so with CGN,
you may have at least a vague chance that your ID doesn't stick out
of every IP datagram like a sore thumb. With IPv6, you're stripped
naked for traffic analysis by every governmental agency worldwide, no matter
how strong you encrypt your traffic.
Because with CGN, DS-Lite and NAT64 you have a third class IPv4
internet. You can't run any services what so ever.
The majority of home users actually do not want and do not need to
run any service in the first place.
I think it’s more correct to say that the majority of home users have learned
to make do without running services.
I have a desktop computer at home with about a terabyte of free disk space and
a connected printer. That computer can easily run services with protocols such
as SMTP+IMAP, NFS, IPP and VoIP. In fact, OS vendors like Apple and Microsoft
could include these services very easily and with little need to configure
anything.
And yet these home users use cloud services for all of these things. Why?
Because getting to those home servers is such a hassle when they’re behind NAT.
Sure, there are ways to print on my home printer. But those ways always boil
down to printing to a cloud service, with the hope printer occasionally pulling
print jobs from the cloud. That’s an awkward way to get around the limitation.
So we’ve been using Gmail and Gdrive and iCloud and DropBox and a bunch or
others for so long, that we feel as though that’s the right way for things. It
sure is convenient, but it’s not the only way.
We can speculate about whether cloud services for consumers would have taken
off if IPv6 had taken off in ’98 and NATs quietly died. I tend to think that
the risk of losing everything would have led to where we are today anyway, at
least for mail and file storage. Usable backups have only been in mainstream
operating system for the last few years. It’s all speculation, but we shouldn’t
assume that consumers would not do something else if it was technically
feasible.
Yoav