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by sherburt36 hours ago |
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upvoteby bluGill2 hours ago|
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That would be just as hard to switch to and even more complex. If you think ipv6 is over engineered you haven't had to deal with ipv4. (Source routing is a pain)
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upvoteby inigyou6 hours ago|
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Why one byte? Is that enough bytes? An extra 4 bits each for source and destination? Maxing out at 2^36 addresses? That seems uncomfortably small safety margin.
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upvoteby sherburt36 hours ago|
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I was saying adding a byte to the address so its a 40 bit address which would be two bytes to the header. Obviously it would still have the same issue where hardware and software would be incompatible and would need to be replaced but the same concepts that worked in IPv4 would work in my fake protocol instead of IPv6 where the network needs to be redesigned from the ground up.

Also IPv6 addresses are ugly

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upvoteby inigyou6 hours ago|
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How sure are you that 40 bits is a good number of bits? What's your justification? It takes over 30 years to deploy new bits, so you have to be really sure before you start that effort.
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upvoteby sherburt35 hours ago|
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40 bits would've bought us a lot of time and would've kicked the can down the road several decades. People from the future would be much better equipped to design a new protocol because they understand their needs better.
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upvoteby ralfd5 hours ago|
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> It takes over 30 years

Only because it is overengineered. Parents pragmatic protocol would have been adopted faster

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upvoteby convolvatron5 hours ago|
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this keeps coming up, if you add a byte to ipv4 you still have a transition problem. 5 byte machines can't talk to 4 byte machines. pretty much the only thing that solves is people not liking the :: syntax. the only other change is auto configuration, which...kind of doesn't matter? is that really causing problems?
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upvoteby sherburt32 hours ago|
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I think the addresses are a big issue. The address space is just stupid big, I don't understand why we need to prepare for every grain of sand on Earth having a WiFi chip in it.

Most people can pick up calculating subnets in their head in ipv4 pretty quickly and ipv4 addresses are easy to memorize on accident. My brain turns to mush as soon as I start seeing hexadecimal characters in addresses.

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upvoteby mahboi3 hours ago|
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Yeah but they could've picked something that at least lets the 4 byte host talk to a 5 byte one. Like if I have 8.8.8.8 and they want to give me 8.8.8.8.0, cool. Or make it 8 bytes instead of 5, same thing.
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upvoteby convolvatron3 hours ago|
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well, if you want to add an extra byte you kinda have a problem, since v4 is fixed format and is actually cooked into hardware in a lot of places. so if you want to keep v4 mostly untouched you have to use an option, which is going to be pretty slow on the backbone.

you can send a packet from an extended address host to a vanilla v4 host if you map the address space into a range like you suggest..but that v4 host just has no way of sending a message back..so its kinda useless

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upvoteby mahboi3 hours ago|
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It'd be useless until everyone switches to the 5-byte thing and people can start putting something besides 0 into that last byte. But at least they could turn on v5 or whatever it's called without having to think about it. Right now I could have two hosts that both agree to use ipv6 and it's still hard because you have to reconfigure everything.
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upvoteby TacticalCoder2 hours ago|
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> ... but noooo we need to overengineer ...

We need to pretend we overengineer. But some in the committee made it sure data exfil would be basically impossible to detect / block with IPv6, which all the others, always in love with the most rube-goldberg design possibles, loved the "overengineered" solution.

With rube-goldberg designs, you can then always say stuff like:

"The xz backdoor was TOTALLY unrelated to systemd"

Yet it only concerned distro that shipped with systemd.

Go figure.

It's always "because insert-crazy-non-sensical-hair-pulling-reason-here".

Ah yes, it's because of that. So it's so totally unrelated right?

Except it still only affect distro using systemd.

Or maybe, you know, backdoors and exfils were the plan from the very start.

"The protocol won't work correctly unless you let crazy ping packets doing you-know-what". And nobody is ever going to properly firewall all that.

Overengineering is one thing, yes.

But we know for a fact that there are xxxINTs infiltrating committees and pushing "solutions" that are only solutions to them.

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