Being at the plenary last night, neither the IETF, IAB, nor the IESG issued a formal statement last night. Slashdot may want to go with a more reliable news source.
There was definitly a lot of opposition to the wiretapping proposal, but there was some support for it as well. Recordings of the multicasting of the plenary will be available at imj.gatech.edu. Need the multicast tools to view it.
It's not the bottom 48bits. The 48 bits are used, but break it into 24 and 24, put an 0xfffe between them, and you've got your 64bit identifier. RFC 2373 IP Version 6 Addressing Architecture
The currently proposed IPv6 addressing scheme called EUI-64 does not infringe on privacy issues. It is true that some Ethernet NICs have the ability to change their hardware addresses, some can't. There are also duplicate MAC addresses anyway.
I have not seen much discussion that shows people how much they are giving away already. Just to post this comment I had to give up tons of private information, and Andover now has most of the information people are giving away PC's for. So, it's not like the current situation is so private anyway.
Now, even with the EUI-64.txtaddressing scheme proposed in RFC 2373, does not *require* the use of a hardware address in the lower 64 bits. For "Links without Identifiers" you can use an identifier which is assigned to the node itself. You can give yourself a unique identifier if you choose, which is just what an IPv4 address is supposed to be. And you can bet that Linux and the other free operating systems will give you this ability from userland. I doubt the same thing will be true of other proprietary operating systems, but they might. When using a proprietary operating system without source, you don't have a clue what's happening anyway.
Further exerpts from the RFC: If there is no global interface identifier available for use on the link the implementation needs to create a local scope interface identifier. The only requirement is that it be unique on the link. There are many possible approaches to select a link-unique interface identifier. They include: Manual Configuration Generated Random Number Node Serial Number (or other node-specific token)
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Being at the plenary last night, neither the IETF, IAB, nor the IESG issued a formal statement last night. Slashdot may want to go with a more reliable news source.
There was definitly a lot of opposition to the wiretapping proposal, but there was some support for it as well. Recordings of the multicasting of the plenary will be available at imj.gatech.edu. Need the multicast tools to view it.
It's not the bottom 48bits.
The 48 bits are used, but break it into 24 and 24, put an 0xfffe between them, and you've got your 64bit identifier.
RFC 2373 IP Version 6 Addressing Architecture
The currently proposed IPv6 addressing scheme called EUI-64 does not infringe on privacy issues. It is true that some Ethernet NICs have the ability to change their hardware addresses, some can't. There are also duplicate MAC addresses anyway.
I have not seen much discussion that shows people how much they are giving away already. Just to post this comment I had to give up tons of private information, and Andover now has most of the information people are giving away PC's for. So, it's not like the current situation is so private anyway.
Now, even with the EUI-64.txtaddressing scheme proposed in RFC 2373, does not *require* the use of a hardware address in the lower 64 bits. For "Links without Identifiers" you can use an identifier which is assigned to the node itself. You can give yourself a unique identifier if you choose, which is just what an IPv4 address is supposed to be. And you can bet that Linux and the other free operating systems will give you this ability from userland. I doubt the same thing will be true of other proprietary operating systems, but they might. When using a proprietary operating system without source, you don't have a clue what's happening anyway.
Further exerpts from the RFC:
If there is no global interface identifier available for use on the link the implementation needs to create a local scope interface identifier. The only requirement is that it be unique on the link. There are many possible approaches to select a link-unique interface identifier. They include:
Manual Configuration
Generated Random Number
Node Serial Number (or other node-specific token)
Synthetic Truth: please RTFM!