preface: I was writing an email list reply, when my fantasy went too wild and too far, so far I had no choice other than cut the reploy out and present it here as a fiction piece. Almost none of the things discussed in this fiction piece are fictional, therefore any similarity with objects living or dead is purely coincidental. The context of the discussion is the hosts trying to achieve the privacy by changing the IPv6 addresses arbitrarily and aggressively.
> with PPP there are no MAC addresses, and on pointopoint > links we could use 0:0:0:0:0:1 for the router/RAS and 0:0:0:0:0:2 for > the end device in all cases...
You still have the unique physical identifiers. Which are logged, but you can't change them.
That's my point: It's turtles all the way down but at some point they become part of the fabric.
The good thing is that it's also turtles all the way up.
Give each host a /64 and they can do all the privacy they want.
As a side effect this will allow to unify the mobile and the wireless approaches - because now you can use any of the devices to tether via NDP proxying within that /64!
Or just run a DHCPv6-only and block anything that does not do DHCPv6 and that was not explicitly leased. Then we might as well shift the subnet boundary somewhere further to 112 (okay, let's be generous, 96) and get rid of a bunch of other inconveniences like ndp exhaustion and such. (since this is conveniently 4 bytes of local address, we could just use IPv4 as a link-local transport then, too - and maybe gain some transition-foo in the process because of that)
This means we'll let the apps deal with the "identifier" by having a session layer and the addresses become purely "locators", which change as you move around. While we're there, we can grab another /4, preallocate to each 32-bit AS a /36 - 60 bits worth of subnetting gotta be enough for anyone.
Then we can get rid of having prefixes in the BGP and just do AS-based routing - with all the "hidden" peerings being handled via the private connections. The routing table thus becoming bounded by a very reasonable memory space - and also trivially parallelizable and splittable between multiple devices both from size and forwarding capacity.
And because of course the tunnels are going to result into the changing MTU, we'll dramatically change the approach to PMTUD by just truncating the packets if they do not fit - the application protocols will be designed with this assumption in mind and will be able to make forward progress and learn the path MTU at the same time - all of this at line rate for all intermediate nodes - truncating is simple!
Also, speaking of the application level, the concept of "client-server" will disappear and the users will be interacting with the chunk of code that is dynamically migrated to the location closest to them that is capable of running it and satisfies the pricing/trust/reliability policy (automatically) - the chunk of code specific to servicing them, which retracts into the "home server" once the interaction is done.
So, the DDoS will become pointless because the DDoSers will just get the pieces of the service close to the edges of the internet and will simply get "serviced". Each interaction in this system, including looking at the data, is recorded as another data - so there is a full transparency on everything.
Removing the data is impossible because it is immediately detected by cryptographic means. The people of the earth learn that what they were after is not really the privacy, but the fairness to be treated equally, the freedom to explore the strange and unusual without being judged and labeled, the comfort in knowing that they are meaningful and unique, and the joy of creating and sharing the new - all different concepts, united by one: it is something that can not be solved by shuffling the bits in any way known to a mortal, the changes need to be made on the other side of the wire.
By then, the humanity have both learned to serialize the individual brains into the sequences run inside this fabric and grown the capacity of this fabric big enough to house all of the instances at once, connected and mobile.
And then something might happen that have not been seen before - The Book has been right all the way, but it took this fundamental change to understand what it meant and how it was achievable.
And then - first - there was nothing. It all wrapped around the infinity. But it's been already documented in The Book, there's no reason to panic. The cycle has completed, and will repeat itself again.
../ HEADER.txt 01-Jul-2024 21:41 4823