slashdot wouldn't read the rest of my post if I didn't start with something punny...

Al-Jazeera is a Qatari network, not Iranian. The difference is quite a gulf.

Functionally, companies in the United States block Al-Jazeera. I challenge you to actually watch their CNN-like feed on your local cable station. The best I can do is their half-hour daily news program broadcast alongside BBC America and (that wretched) RT News on KCET in Los Angeles; today I consider Al-Jazeera's reporting premeir among broadcast television.

We at slashdot all know it's easy to intercept and redirect DNS (unless you're in Sweden, those fine adopters of DNSSEC), or insert in a transparent Squid/whatev with a hosts file, but I'm confident at least they're probably not using Websense, years ago I installed the mod_geoip ruleset to deny access to daily updates for requests originating from embargoed nations.

Last time I was in Syria Facebook was blocked at the port 80 level. But ssh forwarding 3128 worked fine, hopefully no one was etherealing 53. Funny it took Syria three years to finally ban iPhones, I lost a brand-new 3G getting out of a taxi in Damascus... the one time I didn't photograph the license plate of the car I was getting into.

Seeing "Persian" instead of "Farsi" struck me as odd, but I suppose I'm the odd one.

html5 geolocation tends to look at the MACs of nearby BSSIDs to assist in the triangulation. It's not just MaxMind-style tables of IP addresses anymore, check out Google Location Services (used by firefox). It combines four elements: IP addresses, Cell Triangulation, nearby access points, and GPS. Blaming wifi for misdirection is plausible, but it also indicates that stolen property was perhaps next-door or across the street.

Right? anyway, thanks you guys. Maybe it's time to work on some AfterStep plugins... brought me here.

I do not miss your point, I make mine that R&D advances best with a common capable foundation. Ethernet addressing is static, yet Ethernet interfaces advance. IPv4 has been static since RFC1918, yet applications on it have evolved. People will find new uses for multicast and peer-to-peer communications in IPv6. The methods behind DNS haven't changed much since the end of the global hosts file, yet new record types like SRV, AAAA, and RRSIG can arise because of the sublime framework that underlies name resolution.

I mention an encouragement for adoption because remaining with IPv4 works against both our interests, yours in the continuing innovation -- we can't have IP-next-next-gen until we have an IPng network that bests the legacy IPv4 -- and mine in restoring the Internet to its peer-to-peer model.

"Privacy Extensions" address your concern about trackable addresses in IPv6. Browser cookies are a much greater threat to personally identifying a unique machine as it moves from location to location but nonetheless Windows by default enables the generation of a random host address and on linux grep sysctl to enable temp_addr.

I had IPv6 BGP with PI space in late 2006, so... uh...

I'll also add two comments concerning stagnation of technology. 1) MAC Addresses haven't changed in a long time. Yet Ethernet continues to advance, from coax to twisted pair, wireless, and fiber and from a bus to hubs then switches and now L3 switches. (although where are my end-to-end Jumbo Frames already?). A capable foundation does not hinder innovation. 2) Globally unique addresses in applications are the key. Returning the Internet to its mid-90s status quo of every host being a unique peer enables technologies that are simply painful to adopt today, like SIP communications or IPsec between islands of NAT. So we have created an inefficient clientA-server-clientB bandage so people can send each other images in IMs or actually use their webcams. Once the software developers (yes, they're part of my presentations) grasp the advantages of IPv6 I can't even imagine the wonderful new ideas they'll deliver.

IPv4 is simply unsustainable: at some point we'll simply run out of ports per IP to use for PAT. IPv6 has enough addresses to last effectively forever, through the lifetimes of people born today. Versus the status quo, where each person on earth has about half of an IP address if you consider the overhead of VLSM, not enough to cover my mobile phone, my SIP phone, my iPod, my iMac, my MacBook, my colocated servers, nevermind all the nerds in India or China... Would people adopt IPv6 faster if they saw it as a matter of social justice and equal access to technology for all the children of the earth?

(P.S. Everyone please hire me and some of my friends to teach IPv6 classes at your organization and organize your deployment. Thanks)

People on earth: Six billion.
IPv4 addresses: Four billion.

Not counting network addresses, broadcast addresses, and all the CIDR things.

Why do I deserve globally routable addresses but other people don't?

NAT is a historical artifact. That a PIX could NAT anything before RFC1918 existed matters in the same classroom where people learn about Classful routing before CIDR. It is more important to note we should already have native IPv6 from carriers. And Slashdot.

I mean, people, hire me and smash and the other under-modded smart people, we'll teach a class Friday, configure your routers on Saturday, check out the hosts on Sunday, and take the phone calls on Monday. This isn't rocket science (except for HSRPv2, so let's all use GLBP instead). Mainly you'll notice... IPv4 still works like it did on Friday. But all your google traffic, software downloads, and dns... IPv6 in the logs now.

conf t
ipv6 unicast-routing
int vlan 666
ipv6 addr 2001:db8:db8:666::1/64
ipv6 router ospf 65066
network 2001:db8:db8::/48

Some devices need:
sdm prefer dual def
wr me
reload

Sooooo haaarrrrrrrdddd omgosh.

yes! NAT is evil.

IPv6 solves problems beyond just the raw number of bits for addressing.

In your example, 48 bits isn't enough space--in a few years we would be doing another next-gen IP, after implementing IPng as the CTOs start panicking. I don't want to deploy a new Internet every two decades, I'd rather get past the flaws in IPv4 once for my lifetime and start thinking about Y2038.

Convention is meant to be broken. But perhaps you ignore that we're speaking about bits, not decimal data. The subnet mask FFFFFF00 I see in ifconfig has the same meaning as /24 or 1111-1111 1111-1111 1111-1111 0000-0000 and we all know that because we're smart enough to read slashdot.

Decimal address can used all you like in IPv6. If you like 208.80.11.254, address your host as 2620:0:c0:1:208:80:11:254 and be happy; meanwhile I'd rather use stateless autoconfiguration or a simple address like n:n:n:1::53 for my nameserver.

Adoption could be less painless if you weren't citing address space that was deprecated and removed from the Internet five years ago. How is the 6bone keeping its memory alive for so long? Use 2001:db8:: for examples, or at least start an address with operational space like 2610. RIP 3ffe, 6/6/6.

Don't point out reality. If people knew Toyota and Ford and GM have been mass-producing electric cars since the mid-1990s, they might start asking why they can't actually purchase a product that was introduced over a dozen years ago. Watch "Who Killed The Electric Car" and count the number of RAV4 EVs you see... a past coworker makes his daily commute in one.

It reminds me of news last year about building charging stations across California, when such facilities have lain abandoned for a decade.

if you can't remember something like 2001:db8::1:53 and 2001:db8::2:53 give up on life. Or replace the network designer with me, and I'll replace the admin that can't understand and adjust to new technology with one who can. I may use 4.2.2.4 frequently but I still remember name servers from a dozen years ago (157.91.1.1 simply makes sense) and I know Websense and Monster both have nameservers on x.y.z.53 because I put them there. The address x:y::z:53 is no more difficult to memorize than x.y.z.53 except for the pen strokes.

Video and slides from this summer's Google IPv6 Implementors Conference are available. Besides the things I knew (Google runs IPv6 inhouse, most providers are whitelisting DNS for AAAA because .5% of users are simply broken in v6) there was a ton of interesting detail on mobile IPv6.

T-Mobile has been supporting dual-stacked v6 on some Nokia models since this summer (there's a group tmoipv6beta) and their guy says interesting things --- He estimates half their traffic will be IPv6 by the end of 2011 simlpy because most of the traffic is to v6 ready content providers like Facebook and Google, the beta is helping to fix sites like Myspace but a prime problem remains hard-coded IPv4 literals in place of hostnames, particularly when embedded within returned data. They've met with vendors to ensure all phones will be IPv6 native within this current product life cycle (two or three years is what I took away).

Verizon exemplifies the massive need for the massive address space of IPv6. They overlap all of the RFC1918 address space at each of forty sites. Can you imagine? And yet a simple /48, even a /56, would end that, nevermind /32s. I mean, with a single /32 an organization has as many free bits as the entire Internet today. And then there's the DoD's /13.

Do I need to draw out the bits? Do I need to explain better that NAT is not a firewall? Please, tell your upstreams you want native IPv6. And meanwhile if you're in LA or NYC talk to me about how to bring your network online.