[clug] IPv6 for home (now aluminium foil hats with bits of baked potato, with an option on electrum and terracotta)

[Scott Ferguson]

On 01/01/12 22:14, Francis James Whittle wrote:
> On Sun, 2012-01-01 at 19:19 +1100, Scott Ferguson wrote:
>> On 01/01/12 18:15, Francis James Whittle wrote:
>>> On Sun, 2012-01-01 at 16:25 +1100, Scott Ferguson wrote:
>> <snipped>
>> 
>>> I use Avahi almost exclusively for local DNS.
>> 
>> If I could figure out how to make Avahi play nicely with DHCP so
>> the PXE server still worked... I guess there's probably a "man"
>> thingie I should squint at.
> 
> Your name resolution and IP address allocation should be
> independent... It's not necessary to use "zeroconf" for allocation to
> use it for resolution.  Blatantly stupid idea in IPv4, really, seeing
> as you can only autoconfigure link-local addresses that way.

Thanks - I did do a little homework (I know, it's uncool). Got
distracted by the google-code hosted Speed project. Very interesting.

<snipped>
> 
> Sounds like the Antithesis of the Internet, that.  Don't want to
> think about it....  One of the major points is that it's so
> decentralised it's unimaginable to shut down.


DARPA thought it was a good idea at the time...

<snipped>

> 
> Let's do some maths here.  Start by assuming everyone lives for 100 
> years.  A reasonably generous average, even in the western world. 
> Exactly 100 years.  36,525 days. Now let's assume that everyone
> "consumes" (for a wide reaching value of consumes), on average, 20
> things a day.

20 - 40, 100. Agreed, it'd need to be a very large factor increase to
make a dent in the number of available local addresses.

> Another generous average, this time overly.  In their lifetime,
> that's 730,500 things. Now, let's say there's an average 6 or so
> people to a subscriber service that has a /64 prefix allocated. 
> That's 4,383,000 things in a /64 prefix.  These things are not all
> there at the same time, new things arrive, old things break, people
> come and go, taking their things with them. Each /64 prefix can
> handle, simultaneously, (2^64 - 2) unique IPv6 addresses ... That's
> in the order of 1.845e19; 4.209e12 (~ 2^41.937 or so) addresses _per
> thing_.  And I'm effectively including clothes and food here.

I suspect the number on permanent/longer life nodes could be larger...
If every electrical item[*1] and tap is a node, plus the water heater,
obviously the coffee roaster/grinder/expresso machine is a node already.

The more I think of possible nodes the bigger the address pool seems.

[*1]This years smart meter will be pretty dumb in two years.

> 
> We really are talking about an outrageously humongous address pool
> here.

Perhaps it was a case of lets think of all the addresses we may possible
need and square it - then square it a couple more times. Or maybe it was
as simple as looking at the high end computers at the time and deciding
that a long time down the track consumer devices will be 128-bit - so
use that as the size of an address.

> 
>> 
>> We've already got IBM building systems to track food from farm to 
>> checkout - the consumer gets that information real-time, the rest
>> of the interested data users have to wait. How long before some
>> genius decides your shopping preferences, eating habits, garbage
>> statistics, etc is marketable.
>> 
> 
> This is already marketable information.

Saleable I don't doubt - but not available. The difference between
purchase and consumption is a huge amount of marketable data. If it's
know that you use exactly four loaves of bread to a tub of margarine I
suspect the tub will get a little bigger - or the loaves smaller (I'm
guessing there's a marketing reason why the number of hotdogs in a pack
doesn't match the number of bun in a bag).
I've seen a large and detailed study of egg and orange juice purchase by
consumers - even with checkout and purchasing data it was fairly flawed
(imprecise stock rotation/wastage/breakage data). By the time consumer
survey data is massaged to make a more complete picture of the retail
side it becomes very unreliable - and slow.
It allowed researchers to determine that people bought more eggs at the
end of the month and before Easter (followed by a drop), and the
knowledge that increases in price led to larger decreases in purchases
than purchases increased when prices dropped by equivalent amounts
(losses loom larger than gains). Sheer guesswork as to when that orange
juice/egg was consumed, by whom and how.

People want to know if you ate more chocolate immediately after a given
event.

> 
>> 
>> Anyway, this aluminium hat is getting hot, and I really don't want
>> to test it's ability to attract lightning during this storm :-)
>> 
> 
> Avoid crinkling — smooth the surface of the hat.  Also helps against 
> microwave radiation.  

I wonder how that works with the radar station nearby....

> Shaping it into a sombrero will deflect almost
> all of the electrical force of any lightning strikes away from you.
> The more sombreros the better, but you should make the bottom one out
> of non-conductive ceramic.

You cunningly avoided telling me whether it would *increase* my chances
of being struck by lightning. :-)

But thanks for the tip[*2] - I'm new at this tin foil hat thing, I
wasn't sure if aluminium was a good substitute.
Do you think the bits of baked potato from last night's barbecue would
help? I'd of thought the being unsalted they'd be reasonably
non-conductive (they're certainly tasty).

Interesting thread, thanks for the stimulation. I'll return the thread
to Mikal - it's the least he deserves for writing the funniest FOSS
related paragraph of 2011.

"Please do my homework for me. I'm obsessed with the desire to
experience animated turtles, but not obsessed enough to have done any
research at all."

Cheers

[*2] most of the "experts" on the subject seem to be a bit insane.