understanding the traffic is often of less importance than knowing who is speaking to whom, or even roughly where they are. Traffic analysis can give law enforcement either valuable leads in an investigation or a nice list of dissenters to harass (depending on your perpsective.) Only problem is: they have to get off their lazy arses and do real investigation instead of just waiting for people to incriminate themselves. They (FBI, CIA) have proven to be fully capable of that kind of investigation on numerous occasions -- how is it that we know so much about the 9/11 bombers if law enforcement can't live without all their new powers?
I don't recall what the date was, but there was a recent New York Times article about how a large number of the al kaida members who were arrested/blown up lately were being tracked by anonymous cell phone SIM's and conversing in an unitelligible manner (long silences, vague references to things like "the big guy", etc.)
Traffic analysis uncovered a network of people around the world who called each other, each could then be tracked and investigated by means of human intelligence vs. purely by means of signals intelligence. Both work, one is just more work than the other.
The reason many end-users consider dual-homing is to make sure that their services are available in the event of a failure of one of their Internet connections and under IPv4, BGP is among the least expensive ways to achieve that end.
IPv6 anycast fixes that problem and others without BGP or an AS number. Anycast works similarly to multicast under v4, except that when you address a packet to an anycast address, it is delivered ONLY to the closest host with that address. Because of that, you can have a collection of geographically diverse (for example) web servers on different subnets answering a certain anycast address, each of which will automatically take over for any of the others in the event of the failure of either a network or a host.
As for host-orginated traffic, IPv6 hosts handle multiple IP addresses and gateways very cleanly, so you can literally just bring in some T1's from a couple ISP's and let the hosts discover and use them for outbound connections.
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understanding the traffic is often of less importance than knowing who is speaking to whom, or even roughly where they are. Traffic analysis can give law enforcement either valuable leads in an investigation or a nice list of dissenters to harass (depending on your perpsective.) Only problem is: they have to get off their lazy arses and do real investigation instead of just waiting for people to incriminate themselves. They (FBI, CIA) have proven to be fully capable of that kind of investigation on numerous occasions -- how is it that we know so much about the 9/11 bombers if law enforcement can't live without all their new powers?
I don't recall what the date was, but there was a recent New York Times article about how a large number of the al kaida members who were arrested/blown up lately were being tracked by anonymous cell phone SIM's and conversing in an unitelligible manner (long silences, vague references to things like "the big guy", etc.)
Traffic analysis uncovered a network of people around the world who called each other, each could then be tracked and investigated by means of human intelligence vs. purely by means of signals intelligence. Both work, one is just more work than the other.
The reason many end-users consider dual-homing is to make sure that their services are available in the event of a failure of one of their Internet connections and under IPv4, BGP is among the least expensive ways to achieve that end.
IPv6 anycast fixes that problem and others without BGP or an AS number. Anycast works similarly to multicast under v4, except that when you address a packet to an anycast address, it is delivered ONLY to the closest host with that address. Because of that, you can have a collection of geographically diverse (for example) web servers on different subnets answering a certain anycast address, each of which will automatically take over for any of the others in the event of the failure of either a network or a host.
As for host-orginated traffic, IPv6 hosts handle multiple IP addresses and gateways very cleanly, so you can literally just bring in some T1's from a couple ISP's and let the hosts discover and use them for outbound connections.