1. From what I've been reading from Comcast (they're beta testing residential IPv6 now), users will be dynamically assigned a/64. I doubt Comcast is going to poll every assignned/64 to see how many of the 2^64 addresses are in use -- you're pretty much free to do as you like with your block of addresses. The dynamic assignment will be relatively long-term -- about 30 days -- so it should be pretty stable. You just need the assigned network address, and the addresses for DNS, to configure your router. Whether your router is capable of IPv6 is a separate question; but I know my D-Link DIR-615, which has been on the market for several years, allows easy IPv6 configuration. With IPv6, you don't need to port forward, since every node can have a globally unique IP address -- that's the point, really.
2. NAT does not make a good firewall. Firewalls make good firewalls. Most routers, and all modern operating systems, come with firewalls. If you want firewalls, enable them. They generally have sane defaults.
I see a lot of threads rejecting the idea that we should use large scale NAT to manage the transition. Those threads are making one of two, superficially contrary, mistakes: either arguing that IPv4 is fine and we don't need IPv6, or that we should move to IPv6 and drop IPv4 immediately. Both are wrong. Both miss the real issue here.
Both mistakes I outlined above amount to pretending there is no problem. There's a big problem. We're running out of IPv4 addresses. The IPv4 Internet will collapse unless that transition is managed. The real issue is that we must transition from IPv4 to IPv6, but we've delayed far, far too long for this to be handled elegantly. We should have started the transition years ago. Ideally, we should have had a transition period in which each machine had an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address, and once IPv6 was in general use, we would have phased out IPv4 as redundant. Instead, we have few IPv4 addresses left, so we have to have some sort of rationing system.
That's what's being proposed here, and whether this particular rationing system is the way to manage the transition is the relevant question.
A while ago, I decided that insisting on calling the operating system GNU/Linux was not a good idea. As some have pointed out, there are a lot of FLOSS projects that are critical to contemporary Linux, and stringing together a list of those projects would end up with a ridiculous name. Linux is short, clear, memorable, and understood, and it refers to the kernel, the one common component that will be present in any Linux distribution. The "GNU/Linux" argument seems petulant.
On the other hand, some of the arguments I've read against using "GNU/Linux" go too far, in denying that the GNU project has any significance. It is important; Linux couldn't have been created without the GNU tools, and the kernel is licensed under GPL 2.
That's not just some historical accident; as much as Stallman and the FSF can be a petulant pain in the ass, by launching the GNU project to begin with, they made a major breakthrough, on which the entire FLOSS enterprise depends.
I admire Lessig, appreciate his political arguments, and recommend his books to others frequently. However, I've got to say, this seems like an instance of Lessig using a topical event to talk about what he wants to talk about, which is almost completely unrelated to the initial topic.
Also, I can't see the point of praising Zuckerberg so strongly. He designed a social media site that was slightly less crappy than the other competing social media sites that existed when he introduced it. Most of the work of promoting social media sites is done by their users; in the case of Facebook, there's also the constant spam from crappy games by the egregiously manipulative Zynga. There are lots of smart, hard-working, but unscrupulous and greedy entrepreneurs; Zuckerberg is simply luckier than most of them. I don't see how Zuckerberg deserves any praise.
It seems to me it weakens Lessig's message to praise Zuckerberg.
Part of the impact of the mass protests against the Vietnam War is that they implied public support for dissent within the US military. There was an escalating trend among the troops in Vietnam to reject discipline, negotiate or refuse officers, desert, and in some cases, sabotage hardware and assassinate officers who would not back down. The US Army was on the verge of collapse; generals were worried they could not maintain control.
The trouble with mass protests is that they've become rituals, and people have completely forgotten the point of a mass protest: it's supposed to mean that if the government doesn't change policies, the government will be replaced.
When millions march in protest of the Iraq War, then vote for a pro-war Democrat, they may as well have not marched at all.
The WTO protests in the US aren't a good example, as they preceded wide adoption of social media. Organizers did make use of email lists, and so forth. However, there was a significant organizational infrastructure behind the US WTO protests -- many of those organizers considered themselves anarchists, and there was a lot of anarchist influence in the organizing methods chosen, but they involved meetings, committees, and detailed plans. In Seattle, much of the impact was due to the involvement of large labor unions, and they used thoroughly conventional organizing methods.
The "anti-globalization movement" in the US largely disintegrated with the 2000 presidential election, with the bulk of supporters shifting focus to support Democrat Al Gore's candidacy -- despite the lack of even a hint of support for the anti-globalization movement from the Democrats. Other wings of the anti-globalization movement supported the Nader campaign, or abstained from electoral politics. Doubtless a number of current political activist groups can trace their ancestry to the anti-globalization movement, but that movement, as such, broke up.
Elsewhere in the world, particularly in Latin America, the anti-globalization movement had more staying power and achieved more -- note in particular the support for Hugo Chavez, or the Bolivian Water Wars.
Voting for third-party candidates is actually a viable strategy.
The Democrats and Republicans usually craft their campaigns to differ from each other by the minimum possible for there to be a discernible difference. Presidential elections are frequently decided on the basis of a few percentage points.
This means a candidate that has little chance of being elected can actually have a significant influence on the election, if they can attract a few percentage points of votes -- that means one or the other major party candidates will have to adjust their platform to try to draw those voters, or lose the election. Ross Perot (not someone I admire, by the way) had this sort of influence on the Republicans, after he won 8% of the vote in 1996.
They were mercenaries; I could believe they were underprepared for the scale of the conflict. I had the impression that part of the premise for the planned sequel is that the military will be back, so the Na'vi did basically win just a single skirmish, against an opponent that didn't happen to have nukes in orbit.
I had a harder time believing that if a single planet had been discovered, with a fully-developed ecosystem and sentient life, that most of the people involved in the small human outpost would be so blase about it. Most of the scientists, and quite a lot of the corporations, would be dying to get there; if there were only a small outpost, the people there would be the best of the best, and the head of the operation would not be some ninny who is as bored as the manager of a drugstore in a suburban strip mall.
What most bugged me was the bit with Jake becoming the Na'vi champion. Okay, he's a remarkable individual that everyone underestimated, and I could accept that he managed to convince the Na'vi that he had become one of them. But, did he have to suddenly become the god-emperor of the Na'vi? Wouldn't it have been enough for the plot for him to win the trust of the warrior leader and the spiritual leader? Surely they had the motivation and ability to lead a struggle, with Jake's advice and help. Of all the cliches they could have dropped, couldn't they have at least dropped the most offensive one, the "white guy is better at being an Indian than the Indians are / the white guy is worshipped as a god" cliche?
I enjoyed it over all -- it's the best science fiction I've seen in a theater in a while -- but I'm certainly not going to claim it was flawless.
It's money? Does money not matter outside the US? Than why did almost every other country in the world switch to metric, and switch to ISO paper sizes?
How much business does the US miss out on, because it produces commodities in non-standard sizes that aren't used elsewhere? (Not entirely a rhetorical question, by the way.)
It seems to me that the common thread here is that these are classic cases of a gram of prevention being worth a kilogram of cure.
How much money will businesses lose, when they find the prices of IPv4 addresses are skyrocketing, and they need IPv4 addresses to transition to IPv6?
I recall you commented elsewhere that you refuse to see Avatar. I'd heard so much about how terrible it was, that my expectations were very low when I finally went to see it, and so I was actually quite impressed by it. One detail that impressed me was that it was actually science fiction, as in, you could tell that the background details had been worked out, and while there were things the scientists didn't understand, the implication was that they could understand it, given time to do the research. It seemed plausible -- well, except for the floating rocks.
I'm not trying to convince you to go rent Avatar. I just thought it was an indication of a shift towards science fiction that is, in fact, science fiction, not magic space ships.
In addition to murdering Jews, Communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled, the Nazis murdered Social Democrats and trade unionists.
If someone was honestly trying to point out a common theme of "socialism" that united Nazis, social democrats, and Communists, they'd need to come up with another way to explain the difference between the Nazis, who went to great trouble to set up a police state to crush social democrats and Communists, and the social democrats and Communists who were murdered, or went underground and organized armed resistance to the Nazis.
Given that the policies that are objected to by those making the "Nazis are socialists" argument are usually the policies of liberals, social democrats, and (rarely) Communists, the moral and political descendants of the most committed opponents of the Nazis, an honest argument would have to acknowledge that whatever policies are claimed to be in common among these groups are either illusory, or unrelated to the crimes of the Nazis.
In fact, if one notices that the very first thing that the Nazis did, upon securing control of the German state, was to crush social democrats, Communists, and trade unionists, one might conclude that if the Nazis claimed to be socialists, THEY WERE LYING for political reasons.
I know it's shocking to suggest that psychotic genocidal racists might tell lies, but it has to be said.
While it's not a great choice of words, it seems clear to me that dkleinsc is on the side of humanity here.
We're in a sub-thread launched by someone's comment that Jackson, who became president based on his murdering large numbers of people and taking their land, was a good president because there was no national debt during his administration.
There are definitely some people around here who need some god damned humanity slapped into them.
To be fair, part of the reason that people don't understand how routing works is that NAT, and the workarounds and hacks to allow direct peer-to-peer communications through NAT, obscures the design of routing.
Of course, that's why a lot of networking people hope for IPv6 to be a great relief: it's a return to a relatively straightforward model of IP routing from one machine to another.
I've kept seeing it pointed out that any security offered by NAT is a side-effect of its original purpose: sharing a single public IP address among many nodes. That sort of security is better handled by a properly configured firewall, anyway, and routers and modern operating systems ship with firewalls.
I've just been puzzled at the recurring insistence that revealing the number of nodes in a subnet is a security issue. Okay, I've got twelve nodes. What's that tell anyone?
I was visiting my father-in-law in Canada, and we were driving through northern Ontario. I'd gotten used to all the street signs in metric by then, and I was surprised to see an old highway sign with a distance in miles. My father-in-law pointed out that Canada had converted to the metric system in 1977, based upon the US plan to convert to the metric system in 1976.
I worked for a blueprint printing company for several years. One issue that often came up was difficulties in rescaling blueprints for different page sizes, as the arbitrary sheet sizes that were standard each had different ratios of length to width. As a political activist, I also often designed flyers; scaling flyers to half-size always came out ugly. One day, I happened to read up on ISO paper sizes, and how they were all based upon ratios of one to the square root of two, which meant that ratios were uniform and rescaling was easy. Apparently, ISO paper sizes are the standard used everywhere but in the US and a few countries in Latin America; Canada prints in US sizes because of the scale of the US market. The ratio of one to the square root of two was proposed early in the history of printing, centuries ago.
As I understand, all modern operating systems have native support for IPv6, and have had such support for years; part of the impetus is that the US Federal government had, at some point, announced a policy requiring any software it used to support IPv6. From what I can make out, it's the ISPs that are dragging their heels on implementing technology that's been tested and ready to deploy for years.
I can understand hesitancy to deploy radical new ideas. However, I don't understand the hesitancy to deploy ideas that have been tested exhaustively, deployed, and used widely.
Comcast is beta testing IPv6 for residential users. IIRC, you're assigned a/64, and that is the minimum assignment for an end user of IPv6. The host address is 64 bits, conventionally based on your MAC address; there's an RFC for generating a host address that's not based on your MAC address, and therefore more anonymous, and that's implemented by default on Windows 7. You can override the assigned host address, and assign an arbitrary address. A/64 means you've got 2^64 addresses to choose from, which is a bit more than four billion times the address space of the entire IPv4 Internet; that should be enough for most home users.
Comcast will dynamically assign IPv6 addresses, not statically; however, they will have 30-day leases. Dynamic DNS services exist that can cope with addresses that change every few hours, so that shouldn't be much trouble for light-duty Web hosting. My dynamically assigned IPv4 address has been the same for the year or so I've had Comcast.
The beta test seems to be going very slowly, which surprises me, but at least it's going, and that's one of the biggest ISPs in the US, so we'll eventually get IPv6. Meanwhile, there's tunnelbroker.net and sixxs.net.
I keep seeing this mentioned as a security issue. Is there a specific risk in revealing the number of hosts? Or is it just the precautionary principle?
Because it's easier to build and maintain a blog with tools specialized for the purpose.
There's more to the project of developing and maintaining a blog than just typing in the blogger's posts. There's authenticating commenters, and accepting or rejecting their comments -- which is critical, as you've got to inhibit spam comments, and if your blog is at all controversial, you'll likely get trolls that you have to deal with. There are lots of conveniences that have been developed for blogs: creating and maintaining archives of past posts, creating searchable indexes, facilitating the posting of images and videos, and automating a unified look-and-feel for your site.
If you're skilled and experienced enough, you can create all this from scratch, with just a text editor and an ftp client. But, why re-invent the wheel? Hot-rodders start with stock cars, and Web developers can create add-on modules for WordPress or Drupal.
This sort of thing should be obvious: Barack Obama is not the entire US Government, by himself, nor even the entire Federal executive branch. He is the most influential elected official, but he acts under all sorts of constraints, legal and political. I didn't vote for Obama -- I voted for Cynthia McKinney, actually -- but he's the first US president for whom I have some limited respect. I'm dismayed by his policies, but I don't think that he's entirely to blame for it all.
Most importantly, the president is used, metonymically, as the representative of the entire US government. He's the "head of state," which is ultimately a feudal concept in which a particular person is the personification of the nation. When the president is praised or blamed for every action of the Federal government, the real forces and processes in play aren't properly examined.
It may be the case that Obama, personally, doesn't have any particular interest in encryption, and that this policy was crafted by some undersecretary and duly presented as Obama's policy.
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1. From what I've been reading from Comcast (they're beta testing residential IPv6 now), users will be dynamically assigned a /64. I doubt Comcast is going to poll every assignned /64 to see how many of the 2^64 addresses are in use -- you're pretty much free to do as you like with your block of addresses. The dynamic assignment will be relatively long-term -- about 30 days -- so it should be pretty stable. You just need the assigned network address, and the addresses for DNS, to configure your router. Whether your router is capable of IPv6 is a separate question; but I know my D-Link DIR-615, which has been on the market for several years, allows easy IPv6 configuration. With IPv6, you don't need to port forward, since every node can have a globally unique IP address -- that's the point, really.
2. NAT does not make a good firewall. Firewalls make good firewalls. Most routers, and all modern operating systems, come with firewalls. If you want firewalls, enable them. They generally have sane defaults.
I see a lot of threads rejecting the idea that we should use large scale NAT to manage the transition. Those threads are making one of two, superficially contrary, mistakes: either arguing that IPv4 is fine and we don't need IPv6, or that we should move to IPv6 and drop IPv4 immediately. Both are wrong. Both miss the real issue here.
Both mistakes I outlined above amount to pretending there is no problem. There's a big problem. We're running out of IPv4 addresses. The IPv4 Internet will collapse unless that transition is managed. The real issue is that we must transition from IPv4 to IPv6, but we've delayed far, far too long for this to be handled elegantly. We should have started the transition years ago. Ideally, we should have had a transition period in which each machine had an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address, and once IPv6 was in general use, we would have phased out IPv4 as redundant. Instead, we have few IPv4 addresses left, so we have to have some sort of rationing system.
That's what's being proposed here, and whether this particular rationing system is the way to manage the transition is the relevant question.
No, Apple isn't.
A while ago, I decided that insisting on calling the operating system GNU/Linux was not a good idea. As some have pointed out, there are a lot of FLOSS projects that are critical to contemporary Linux, and stringing together a list of those projects would end up with a ridiculous name. Linux is short, clear, memorable, and understood, and it refers to the kernel, the one common component that will be present in any Linux distribution. The "GNU/Linux" argument seems petulant.
On the other hand, some of the arguments I've read against using "GNU/Linux" go too far, in denying that the GNU project has any significance. It is important; Linux couldn't have been created without the GNU tools, and the kernel is licensed under GPL 2.
That's not just some historical accident; as much as Stallman and the FSF can be a petulant pain in the ass, by launching the GNU project to begin with, they made a major breakthrough, on which the entire FLOSS enterprise depends.
I admire Lessig, appreciate his political arguments, and recommend his books to others frequently. However, I've got to say, this seems like an instance of Lessig using a topical event to talk about what he wants to talk about, which is almost completely unrelated to the initial topic.
Also, I can't see the point of praising Zuckerberg so strongly. He designed a social media site that was slightly less crappy than the other competing social media sites that existed when he introduced it. Most of the work of promoting social media sites is done by their users; in the case of Facebook, there's also the constant spam from crappy games by the egregiously manipulative Zynga. There are lots of smart, hard-working, but unscrupulous and greedy entrepreneurs; Zuckerberg is simply luckier than most of them. I don't see how Zuckerberg deserves any praise.
It seems to me it weakens Lessig's message to praise Zuckerberg.
Except that GNU tools, including gcc, were used to create the Linux kernel.
It's a good thing you'll be alive longer than 2038, because we'll need all the help we can get fixing that problem.
Part of the impact of the mass protests against the Vietnam War is that they implied public support for dissent within the US military. There was an escalating trend among the troops in Vietnam to reject discipline, negotiate or refuse officers, desert, and in some cases, sabotage hardware and assassinate officers who would not back down. The US Army was on the verge of collapse; generals were worried they could not maintain control.
The trouble with mass protests is that they've become rituals, and people have completely forgotten the point of a mass protest: it's supposed to mean that if the government doesn't change policies, the government will be replaced.
When millions march in protest of the Iraq War, then vote for a pro-war Democrat, they may as well have not marched at all.
The WTO protests in the US aren't a good example, as they preceded wide adoption of social media. Organizers did make use of email lists, and so forth. However, there was a significant organizational infrastructure behind the US WTO protests -- many of those organizers considered themselves anarchists, and there was a lot of anarchist influence in the organizing methods chosen, but they involved meetings, committees, and detailed plans. In Seattle, much of the impact was due to the involvement of large labor unions, and they used thoroughly conventional organizing methods.
The "anti-globalization movement" in the US largely disintegrated with the 2000 presidential election, with the bulk of supporters shifting focus to support Democrat Al Gore's candidacy -- despite the lack of even a hint of support for the anti-globalization movement from the Democrats. Other wings of the anti-globalization movement supported the Nader campaign, or abstained from electoral politics. Doubtless a number of current political activist groups can trace their ancestry to the anti-globalization movement, but that movement, as such, broke up.
Elsewhere in the world, particularly in Latin America, the anti-globalization movement had more staying power and achieved more -- note in particular the support for Hugo Chavez, or the Bolivian Water Wars.
Voting for third-party candidates is actually a viable strategy.
The Democrats and Republicans usually craft their campaigns to differ from each other by the minimum possible for there to be a discernible difference. Presidential elections are frequently decided on the basis of a few percentage points.
This means a candidate that has little chance of being elected can actually have a significant influence on the election, if they can attract a few percentage points of votes -- that means one or the other major party candidates will have to adjust their platform to try to draw those voters, or lose the election. Ross Perot (not someone I admire, by the way) had this sort of influence on the Republicans, after he won 8% of the vote in 1996.
They were mercenaries; I could believe they were underprepared for the scale of the conflict. I had the impression that part of the premise for the planned sequel is that the military will be back, so the Na'vi did basically win just a single skirmish, against an opponent that didn't happen to have nukes in orbit.
I had a harder time believing that if a single planet had been discovered, with a fully-developed ecosystem and sentient life, that most of the people involved in the small human outpost would be so blase about it. Most of the scientists, and quite a lot of the corporations, would be dying to get there; if there were only a small outpost, the people there would be the best of the best, and the head of the operation would not be some ninny who is as bored as the manager of a drugstore in a suburban strip mall.
What most bugged me was the bit with Jake becoming the Na'vi champion. Okay, he's a remarkable individual that everyone underestimated, and I could accept that he managed to convince the Na'vi that he had become one of them. But, did he have to suddenly become the god-emperor of the Na'vi? Wouldn't it have been enough for the plot for him to win the trust of the warrior leader and the spiritual leader? Surely they had the motivation and ability to lead a struggle, with Jake's advice and help. Of all the cliches they could have dropped, couldn't they have at least dropped the most offensive one, the "white guy is better at being an Indian than the Indians are / the white guy is worshipped as a god" cliche?
I enjoyed it over all -- it's the best science fiction I've seen in a theater in a while -- but I'm certainly not going to claim it was flawless.
It's money? Does money not matter outside the US? Than why did almost every other country in the world switch to metric, and switch to ISO paper sizes?
How much business does the US miss out on, because it produces commodities in non-standard sizes that aren't used elsewhere? (Not entirely a rhetorical question, by the way.)
It seems to me that the common thread here is that these are classic cases of a gram of prevention being worth a kilogram of cure.
How much money will businesses lose, when they find the prices of IPv4 addresses are skyrocketing, and they need IPv4 addresses to transition to IPv6?
How did you get my Memo?
It was in the recycling bin in your cubicle.
I recall you commented elsewhere that you refuse to see Avatar. I'd heard so much about how terrible it was, that my expectations were very low when I finally went to see it, and so I was actually quite impressed by it. One detail that impressed me was that it was actually science fiction, as in, you could tell that the background details had been worked out, and while there were things the scientists didn't understand, the implication was that they could understand it, given time to do the research. It seemed plausible -- well, except for the floating rocks.
I'm not trying to convince you to go rent Avatar. I just thought it was an indication of a shift towards science fiction that is, in fact, science fiction, not magic space ships.
In addition to murdering Jews, Communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled, the Nazis murdered Social Democrats and trade unionists.
If someone was honestly trying to point out a common theme of "socialism" that united Nazis, social democrats, and Communists, they'd need to come up with another way to explain the difference between the Nazis, who went to great trouble to set up a police state to crush social democrats and Communists, and the social democrats and Communists who were murdered, or went underground and organized armed resistance to the Nazis.
Given that the policies that are objected to by those making the "Nazis are socialists" argument are usually the policies of liberals, social democrats, and (rarely) Communists, the moral and political descendants of the most committed opponents of the Nazis, an honest argument would have to acknowledge that whatever policies are claimed to be in common among these groups are either illusory, or unrelated to the crimes of the Nazis.
In fact, if one notices that the very first thing that the Nazis did, upon securing control of the German state, was to crush social democrats, Communists, and trade unionists, one might conclude that if the Nazis claimed to be socialists, THEY WERE LYING for political reasons.
I know it's shocking to suggest that psychotic genocidal racists might tell lies, but it has to be said.
While it's not a great choice of words, it seems clear to me that dkleinsc is on the side of humanity here.
We're in a sub-thread launched by someone's comment that Jackson, who became president based on his murdering large numbers of people and taking their land, was a good president because there was no national debt during his administration.
There are definitely some people around here who need some god damned humanity slapped into them.
You missed the part where Jackson invaded Florida, multiple times, with the open goal of acquiring new territory by force of arms.
To be fair, part of the reason that people don't understand how routing works is that NAT, and the workarounds and hacks to allow direct peer-to-peer communications through NAT, obscures the design of routing.
Of course, that's why a lot of networking people hope for IPv6 to be a great relief: it's a return to a relatively straightforward model of IP routing from one machine to another.
I've kept seeing it pointed out that any security offered by NAT is a side-effect of its original purpose: sharing a single public IP address among many nodes. That sort of security is better handled by a properly configured firewall, anyway, and routers and modern operating systems ship with firewalls.
I've just been puzzled at the recurring insistence that revealing the number of nodes in a subnet is a security issue. Okay, I've got twelve nodes. What's that tell anyone?
I was visiting my father-in-law in Canada, and we were driving through northern Ontario. I'd gotten used to all the street signs in metric by then, and I was surprised to see an old highway sign with a distance in miles. My father-in-law pointed out that Canada had converted to the metric system in 1977, based upon the US plan to convert to the metric system in 1976.
I worked for a blueprint printing company for several years. One issue that often came up was difficulties in rescaling blueprints for different page sizes, as the arbitrary sheet sizes that were standard each had different ratios of length to width. As a political activist, I also often designed flyers; scaling flyers to half-size always came out ugly. One day, I happened to read up on ISO paper sizes, and how they were all based upon ratios of one to the square root of two, which meant that ratios were uniform and rescaling was easy. Apparently, ISO paper sizes are the standard used everywhere but in the US and a few countries in Latin America; Canada prints in US sizes because of the scale of the US market. The ratio of one to the square root of two was proposed early in the history of printing, centuries ago.
As I understand, all modern operating systems have native support for IPv6, and have had such support for years; part of the impetus is that the US Federal government had, at some point, announced a policy requiring any software it used to support IPv6. From what I can make out, it's the ISPs that are dragging their heels on implementing technology that's been tested and ready to deploy for years.
I can understand hesitancy to deploy radical new ideas. However, I don't understand the hesitancy to deploy ideas that have been tested exhaustively, deployed, and used widely.
Dynamic DNS is pretty damned easy to configure.
Comcast is beta testing IPv6 for residential users. IIRC, you're assigned a /64, and that is the minimum assignment for an end user of IPv6. The host address is 64 bits, conventionally based on your MAC address; there's an RFC for generating a host address that's not based on your MAC address, and therefore more anonymous, and that's implemented by default on Windows 7. You can override the assigned host address, and assign an arbitrary address. A /64 means you've got 2^64 addresses to choose from, which is a bit more than four billion times the address space of the entire IPv4 Internet; that should be enough for most home users.
Comcast will dynamically assign IPv6 addresses, not statically; however, they will have 30-day leases. Dynamic DNS services exist that can cope with addresses that change every few hours, so that shouldn't be much trouble for light-duty Web hosting. My dynamically assigned IPv4 address has been the same for the year or so I've had Comcast.
The beta test seems to be going very slowly, which surprises me, but at least it's going, and that's one of the biggest ISPs in the US, so we'll eventually get IPv6. Meanwhile, there's tunnelbroker.net and sixxs.net.
I keep seeing this mentioned as a security issue. Is there a specific risk in revealing the number of hosts? Or is it just the precautionary principle?
Because it's easier to build and maintain a blog with tools specialized for the purpose.
There's more to the project of developing and maintaining a blog than just typing in the blogger's posts. There's authenticating commenters, and accepting or rejecting their comments -- which is critical, as you've got to inhibit spam comments, and if your blog is at all controversial, you'll likely get trolls that you have to deal with. There are lots of conveniences that have been developed for blogs: creating and maintaining archives of past posts, creating searchable indexes, facilitating the posting of images and videos, and automating a unified look-and-feel for your site.
If you're skilled and experienced enough, you can create all this from scratch, with just a text editor and an ftp client. But, why re-invent the wheel? Hot-rodders start with stock cars, and Web developers can create add-on modules for WordPress or Drupal.
You do know those are gone now?
Appearances bothered someone.
This sort of thing should be obvious: Barack Obama is not the entire US Government, by himself, nor even the entire Federal executive branch. He is the most influential elected official, but he acts under all sorts of constraints, legal and political. I didn't vote for Obama -- I voted for Cynthia McKinney, actually -- but he's the first US president for whom I have some limited respect. I'm dismayed by his policies, but I don't think that he's entirely to blame for it all.
Most importantly, the president is used, metonymically, as the representative of the entire US government. He's the "head of state," which is ultimately a feudal concept in which a particular person is the personification of the nation. When the president is praised or blamed for every action of the Federal government, the real forces and processes in play aren't properly examined.
It may be the case that Obama, personally, doesn't have any particular interest in encryption, and that this policy was crafted by some undersecretary and duly presented as Obama's policy.