Yeah when I point my phone at something I want it to tell me how far away it is and the surface temperature and all sorts of good things!

But bikes don't cause much wear-and-tear on the roads or emit toxins into the air.

That's a very strange definition of backup. Sounds more like you're talking about an offline backup. Typically backup systems are connected to the system that made them so they can be restored easily.

My (not very smart - no apps) TV can't even handle viewing the channel listings on broadcast for too long before it freezes/crashes/sound stops working. I can't imagine it would do very well if it had to handle more than 30 channels.

Routers are all so different- sometimes it's "port forwarding", sometimes "virtual servers", sometimes "gaming/applications" or something different entirely, not to mention different languages. With UPnP at least I can tell people "ok click around advanced settings until you see "UPnP", then make that enable" and that will sometimes work. It was a real pain to implement since as you said the documentation is terrible.

Current solution is to send the local ip, ip4 and ip6 of the server to the client, and they try connecting to all of those before more complicated stuff with ports has to happen. Even then there are problems with mobile and third-world country ISPs that issue a different IP per connection because they're doing NAT with multiple IP4s.

I finally got one with a chip, but it's chip and SIGN, not chip and PIN so that kind of defeats the purpose and makes it useless in other countries.

Probably had a crappy old computer with 100 MB of storage space so everyone needed to use POP3 and store it locally on their computer.

But isn't the point of putting the information up to inform the people that wouldn't know what's false? Making the assumption that putting information up is useful, you're not gaining the use out of that if you put false information up.

But then you're also making facebook useless for you/your friends.

You could just stop using it in which case they wouldn't be able to collect data as easily and you wouldn't have to do the extra work.

Maybe I can, anyone who's tried to manage p2p connections knows that the general public has a lot of trouble with this or can't do it - sometimes due to multiple layers of NAT. UPnP doesn't help either because it's not enabled.

You might be interested in the added protection of a firewall then where you could block unsolicited connections.

It's starting to fly already! Lots of ISPs have the equipment when they upgrade and it's a good alternative to multi-level NAT. Sure makes p2p connections easy.

What about a smart fridge that keeps track of what food you have? That'd be useful to access while at the grocery store. (I know, I know...:you damn kids with all your technology..."). There are lots of devices that would be nice to access remotely but can't because of NAT.

Basically if you can port forward, you can configure a firewall in the same way for the technology adverse folk.

Well at least some distributors have stopped providing them.

I recently switched from FiOS to Comcast and was pleasantly surprised to see my router giving out IPv6 addresses to all the computers on the network. Somewhat surprising that Verizon doesn't support it even though they have the newer networking technology.

Probably because the hardware in (almost) every routing device needs to be updated to support it. Even if you went with a simple expansion of IPv4 it wouldn't be simple because a router that's looking for a 4 byte address isn't going to know what to do with an 8 byte address. Might as well go with a 16 byte address while we're updating everything.

The transition to IPv6 is happening already. Lots of people have it without even knowing and newer consumer hardware is able to support IPv6 without any issues. It's already getting to the point where some ISPs are NATing their users for IPv4, but giving them IPv6 addresses. Some are even doing strange things like converting IPv4 traffic to IPv6 if an AAAA record is available for a site.

First, $1 is pretty cheap, especially for a large organization with lots of IPs

The bigger problem is: How do people give back IPs? Say 4 people give back their spare IPs to the ISP. The ISP now has 4 extras randomly distributed in a block that they could give out if needed, but that just means complicated routing if they want to return them to the general pool.

In the amount of time a system could be created to take them back, and convince all the corporations/organizations to return them, they'll be exhausted almost instantly and we're back to still needing IPv6 but we wasted all this time recovering IPs.