back to article China showing signs of brewing IPv6 eruption

APNIC, the Asia-Pacific’s regional Internet address registry, has noticed a sharp uptick in IPv6 use by China Telecom, the nation’s top provider of internet services. While rivals China Unicom and China Mobile dominate mobile internet connections, more than 150 million subscribers rely on China Telecom for wireline services …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    and?

    If they move exclusively to IPv6, my ipv4 hosts will be safe again.

    1. John Sager

      Re: and?

      I doubt it. There will be translation to allow V6 hosts to talk to V4 endpoints. You may hope that this would bar spam etc but that would be optimistic.

    2. DS999 Silver badge

      Re: and?

      Much more of the spam/hacking comes from Russia and Ukraine than China. Or from the US, for that matter.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: and?

        Agreed. For a couple of sites I have blocked all traffic from Russia, US and Ukraine and it saves a hell of a lot of attacks, bots and other dubious traffic. Those geo-blocks are never 100% complete but if they prevent 90% of attacks that means a massive relief to the servers.

        1. grof

          Re: and?

          "I have blocked all traffic from Russia, US and Ukraine" .... says the guy who doesn't want to do business or communicate with important countries

  2. Khaptain Silver badge

    Privacy anyone?

    There is also another very important function , at least for the party leaders, in using status IP addresses and it has nothing to do with IT.

    We will eventually also move to Ipv6 I just don't know when, its been in the pipeline for quite some time already.... Its like a silver bullet thats actually made of jigsaw pieces, you want to be the one that puts in the last piece but don't want to deal with the preparation...

    1. Nanashi

      Re: Privacy anyone?

      Not privacy, no. v6 (at least with privacy extensions on, the default in most OSs) is no worse than v4 for privacy.

      ISP logging knows who you are either way and it makes no difference whatsoever to account-based tracking (remember this is China where you often have to tie accounts to your real-world identity -- how is v6 supposed to cause any privacy issues compared to that?).

      1. Tom Chiverton 1

        Re: Privacy anyone?

        Because v6 isn't meant to be NATd so all the devices in the house no longer get lumped in to a single IP. Advertisers wet dream...

        1. Arthur the cat Silver badge

          Re: Privacy anyone?

          Because v6 isn't meant to be NATd so all the devices in the house no longer get lumped in to a single IP.

          Instead, with IPv6 RFC 4941 privacy addresses enabled, all the devices in the house get lumped in to a single /64.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Privacy anyone?

            But how does your average end user check if he/she/it isn't directly communing with the Universe at large? Any HOWTOs on this (please, no Youtube videos, I don't want to waste 10 minutes -of which at least 10% is ads- having something explained that would fit on a single sheet of A4)?

        2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

          Re: Privacy anyone?

          Not really, the privacy extensions make it very difficult to tie a particular address to a particular machine.

        3. P. Lee

          Re: Privacy anyone?

          ... and you can still NAT if you want to - though it makes little sense.

          Despite all the VPN vendor's marketing about Google knowing lots about you, so hide your IP, that really isn't a thing. They are unlikely to care at all about your IP as they work far higher up the stack. noscript is probably a more useful tool and not doing dumb things like using gmail or 8.8.8.8 for dns.

          The real security reason to use a VPN is to block casual government snooping - internet connection records - that ISP's in many western countries have to log, and to bypass any stupid DNS blocking they may have put in place.

          A major benefit of IPv6 is static addresses so that proper DNS can be a thing. That means you can do SAML with your own domain to interact with third parties, have proper certificates even for internal systems like a local firewall admin server, your router etc.

        4. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Privacy anyone?

          so...you think advertisers depend upon your IP address to track you???

  3. Tonguemyanus420

    Who gives a wet shit about a country that's a top 10 human rights violator?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I agree with the second half of your sentence but we ignore them at our peril.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @Tonguemyanus420 - Since you don't care,

      why do you care ?

    3. P. Lee

      Perhaps because that huge market pushes western corporations to cater for IPv6 which means we get to use the nice new toys too.

  4. AdrianMontagu

    IPV6- Choice of Base System

    Why on earth did they use Hex.

    It is easy to use Decimal / Binary

    It must put a lot of people off

    1. stiine Silver badge

      Re: IPV6- Choice of Base System

      because the early use of 0-65535 instead of 0-255 for each octet was difficult to read aloud.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: IPV6- Choice of Base System

      I always thought decimal was a bit of a pain when slicing bytes for subnets. Much easier to use hex. Not that I expect IPv6 to have that problem though.

    3. Arthur the cat Silver badge

      Re: IPV6- Choice of Base System

      Why on earth did they use Hex.

      There's nothing to stop you treating each component as if they're decimal numbers, you simply get 10,000 values per component rather than 65,536. For example, my primary mail server lives at IPv6 address ${PFX}::25. The fact that that address really has 37 decimal in its bottom 16 bits is irrelevant - the 25 has mnemonic value in my config, even if it's actually hex. The IPv6 address space is so huge that limiting yourself to using only 1/1845th of it isn't a problem.

    4. martinusher Silver badge

      Re: IPV6- Choice of Base System

      Addresses are patterns, not values, so hexadecimal numbers are an obvious choice. Binary is too long winded, Octal doen't make sense outside of a 12/24 bit environment and decimal is meaningless (if you want a good example of why decimal is dificult to work with look at a PowerPC processor instruction set manual).

    5. AdrianMontagu

      Re: IPV6- Choice of Base System

      What I meant was that it was easier to process:-

      192.168.192.168.192.168 etc

      and work it out to

      11000000 10101000 etc

      than

      C0:A8: ... ... etc

      to calculate this to

      11000000 10101000 in your head

      I know that there are some of you that can work out hex to binary in your head but I definitely have problems with it !

      1. ian 22

        Re: IPV6- Choice of Base System

        Hex to binary isn’t hard, it just takes a bit of practice.

    6. grof

      Re: IPV6- Choice of Base System

      hex is more compact and is a more direct correlation to binary

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why is this news?

    Isn't IPV6 uptake an aspiration for the West as well?

    1. Yes Me Silver badge

      Re: Why is this news?

      The difference is, whatever you may think about the Chinese system of government, when they decide to do something, they do it.

      IPv6 became US govt policy on September 28, 2010 (Memo "Transition to IPv6" from Vivek Kundra, Federal Chief Information Officer). Yes, it's an aspiration.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Why is this news?

        OK, so again, why is it news?

        Isn't it a good that they are taking the initiative despite some in the West dragging their feet?

      2. ian 22

        Re: Why is this news?

        I seem to recall the US policy to convert to Metric. How is that going?

  6. Adam Inistrator

    IPV6 stamped on you at birth

    Tin foil I hear you say ...

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