IPv6

[Geoff Shang]

On Fri, 4 Feb 2011, Uri Even-Chen wrote:

> Thanks for the links, I listened to the entire lecture. I understand
> that Google and Facebook still haven't enabled IPv6 on their main
> websites.

This appears to be the case.

> http://ipv6.google.com/ doesn't work for me.

Well it only has an IPv6 address, so it won't if you don't have IPv6 
capability.

$ host ipv6.google.com
ipv6.google.com is an alias for ipv6.l.google.com.
ipv6.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1450:8006::63


> So I guess it's too early to enable my websites with IPv6.

It's not an either/or thing.  You can have both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses on 
the same host.

$ host ipv6.he.net
ipv6.he.net has address 66.220.2.75
ipv6.he.net has IPv6 address 2001:470:0:64::2

Anyway, your hosting provider would need to support IPv6 to some extent 
before you could do this.

> By the way, I wonder what Wikipedia will do with IPv6 addresses? Will
> they do the same they are doing with IPv4 (save the IP of the user who
> edited pages)?

I don't see why this would change.

> Will an IPv6 address be permanent for end users, or will it change
> every day? (I think my IP address at home is not permanent).

This would be up to yoru ISP, though it would be easier for them to 
allocate static addresses and even blocks of addresses so that internal 
hosts can have their own address.

But relying on a dynamic IP address for anonymity is not the best 
strategy.  ISPs can be forced to reveal the identity of a person using a 
particular IP address at a given time.  There are other methods like 
anonymous proxies etc which can more effectively help you hide your 
identity, though if you've got nothing to hide then I wouldn't bother.

Geoff.