[Wikimedia-l] Update on IPv6

[Leslie Carr]

On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 6:13 AM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 8:49 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 2 June 2012 13:44, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>>> On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 7:27 PM, John Du Hart <compwhizii at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> What personal information do you think is contained in an IPv6 address?
>>>
>>> Don't they sometimes contain MAC address information?
>>
>> I don't know, but I wouldn't consider my MAC address to be personal
>> information... you might be able to work out what brand of computer
>> I'm using, but I can live with that.

I think that having a problem with the implementation of IPv6 is about
10 years too late now ;) The IPv4 space is being exhausted, and we're
going to soon run into the opposite problem that IPv4 addresses will
be not identifiable enough as ISP's use NAT.

If someone cares about their mac address information, they can use
privacy extensions - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv6#Privacy .
Considering that in the vast, vast majority of the consumer (versus
production) world, you have to purposefully enable IPv6 (usually with
some sort of tunneling), and that these are turned on in most
operating systems by default, mac addressing is starting to only
become applicable in production environments.

Leslie

-- 
Leslie Carr
Wikimedia Foundation
AS 14907, 43821
http://as14907.peeringdb.com/