dcow
Born on September 26, 2014•8735 Karma
This would fall under patents (design patent at the very least), not copyright.
Furthermore, the English verbiage between the two are literally exactly the same. That's a clear copyright violation.
Both products are so incredibly derivative and boring that I find it very, very hard to care about this "case".
> The IPv6 feature isn’t link-local addresses, it’s being able to specify the interface to bind to as part of the address specification. This lets you demand that your IPv6-based tool use your wired Ethernet connection, for example.
I don’t think a design goal of IPv6 was to enable users to demand which link the kernel uses or open up some rich new world of link local ip services. I think it’s more like “because IPv6 hosts assign everything an address all at once, there’s a new problem when two interfaces use the same link local addresses since we can’t guarantee uniqueness so we have to invent this stupid zone_id convention to work around poor protocol design and implementation”. Design goals are different than constraints.
To explain, IPv6 link local addresses are like using a MAC address to send packets. You wouldn’t ever host services on a LL address and things that do are doing it wrong. Every v6 router should advertise a ULA prefix to all downstream clients. If you want to connect to your router’s web UI you’d use its universal local address—not its link local—and avoid all of these problems. This is exactly why zones were deemed mistake and replaced by ULAs and this was 10 years ago… at least!
Also what gives you the impression that zones were “deemed a mistake”? They may be awkward in URIs but they are very much not a mistake, they are a deliberate part of ensuring that each link has its own link-local subnet without any ambiguity. It solves the problem of what the operating system should do if you need to access a link-local address that shows up via more than one network interface, which is a very real problem with unscoped IPv4 link-local addresses.
Finally, ULAs don’t and were never intended to replace link-local addresses, they serve a different purpose entirely.
Right, but ULAs are the correct answer here because the purpose they serve is exactly the one the article is trying to hack around with link-local addresses. Like most "IPv6 is hard" articles, the main issue with this one is the author simply refusing to learn how IPv6 works or follow best practices.
ULAs are not hard to set up. You just need one device to broadcast Router Advertisements with the "A" flag set and router priority 0. That device may be the same one hosting the service!
> Also what gives you the impression that zones were “deemed a mistake”?
I disagree that zones are a mistake, but a good rule of thumb is that if you're trying to use zones and you're not writing system code, you're probably holding it wrong. Use IPv6 the right way and your life will be so much easier.
> Having services be accessible on a link-local address and then advertising that service via mDNS is a completely legitimate use-case that works extremely well and is extremely common with Apple devices amongst others.
Apple devices actually advertise services to hostnames via mDNS. Hostnames are then resolved to IP addresses, again via mDNS. While link-local address are populated in the host table, so are the routable addresses as well as the ULA-prefixed addresses (if your network uses ULAs).
You could also assign a single address (e.g. fd53::1/128) and advertise the corresponding prefix of fd53::1/128, so you don't even need a whole ULA prefix, just individual addresses. (This is sometimes useful if you use a router you can't configure and it's advertising a DNS server you don't want to use.)
mDNS working on link-local means you can advertise your service over mDNS so no user ever types this shit into their address bar in the first place.
I still maintain that the interface leaking into the address is a bad thing from a design perspective even though I very much appreciate that everything works naturally on v6 LL addresses after applying this one small fix… no user should ever by typing a v6 LL into a browser, and probably every use case you can imagine that isn’t managing network link topology or NDP/bootstrap or running LL name resolution can be solved with ULAs or DNS.
Just give me GUAs and be done with it.
The nice thing about ULAs is that you can have completely static addresses for internal services.
>the spectacle of these two multibillionaires fighting about power and money has distorted and obscured what the law is meant to care about here, which is the public interest
(https://www.ft.com/content/846479c8-4ab0-4812-a1d5-08abdd8b9...)
* it's a bit sarcastic, but tbh it isn't such a bad idea, considering the negative impact that porn has.
That being said, it's my personal opinion that I'd love to simply have my device store a token and send it to any site when requested. I'd then like those sites to give me toggles to remove all non-verified content - and therefore my internet experience could be sans-juvenile squeakers.