Comment by telmich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by telmich | Hacker News Reader

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Love the challenge. Let me start by replying to your DMZ comment: with IPv6, you actually have to rethink and with it you can organise the Internet very different from today.

I agree with you that people don't want to maintain complex systems. But then again, running a git server or even cgit, is a matter of little minutes spent, especially if you use ready to deploy toolchains.

I also think you have a point in terms of equilibrium - people are in general more comfortable with something they know. And due to the long history of IPv4 shortage, people are used to having private IPv4 space only.

It is like animals in a zoo - we don't know anymore, how good the life used to be with public IPv4 addresses, we have grown up without them.

What I have seen from many discussions and visits in the last months is that IT startups are now reconsidering and embracing IPv6, because it gives freedom.

I'd also say the approach is not to directly replace facebook & co., but to think completely different. Why do I need a website to write to you? I can write directly to you, if both of us are on an IPv6 network.

Thinking different is the key for decentralisation.

You're missing the point. Even if running a git server is easy, not everyone will bother to maintain it and setup a regular backup process. Also, where do you back that data up to? Some central server or DHT/BitTorrent. Inherently, AWS is popular because companies would rather pay to have someone deal with the headache of managing hardware and infrastructure.

> Why do I need a website to write to you? I can write directly to you, if both of us are on an IPv6 network.

Because I'm not always online and you might not be when I'm.

> Because I'm not always online and you might not be when I'm.

That's a good thing, because maybe I don't want to be able to reached all the time. If you want to, you can add your IPv6 address on your phone, which is virtually always online (I actually do this on my phone).

>If you want to, you can add your IPv6 address on your phone, which is virtually always online (I actually do this on my phone).

Is there a guide on how to do this? How do you manage it? I'd love to self host from a computer just sitting in my house. Way easier than something like a VPS.

>you can add your IPv6 address on your phone

How does one achieve this while a phone is roaming between cell towers and various wifi access points?

With a wireguard based IPv6 VPN for example. It's exactly what you can get on IPv6VPN.ch

Re IPv6, I don’t expect connectivity to suddenly appear. The NATs will be gone, but I bet you that every single home router will get a firewall with a default “block incoming” policy. A new network protocol does not make all the security bugs disappear overnight.

And for users, it does not really matter if they have to visit router admin page to set up NAT port forwarding or open up the port in firewall.

This.

Setup a raspberry pi with an IPTable rule to log and black hole all incoming traffic, then open it up entirely to the internet through your router.

I did this and, after about 48 hours, had a nice long log of bots hammering the server scanning for vulnerabilities on open ports.

I imagine non-technical users (the ones at a high risk of getting malware just browsing online) and wonder if they are truly better off if we open up their computers to the world without first rethinking the security model.

> And for users, it does not really matter if they have to visit router admin page to set up NAT port forwarding or open up the port in firewall.

It matters when port forwarding is impossible because the user lacks a unique IPv4 address. Earth has 7 billion people and 4 billion IPv4 addresses, so carrier grade NAT is inevitable.

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