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IPv6 Interview Questions and critic

  • From: Joe Baptista
  • Date: Tue Aug 27 10:42:23 2002

Hi:

I'm doing an article on IPv6 and am looking for comments - here is a
portion on IPv6 which relates to the privacy issue ... any comments,
crtics or interviews welcomed.

-- snip
As you know IPv6 is a suite of protocols for the network layer of the
Internet which uses IPv4 gateways.  It's purpose is to expand address
space.  At this time IPv6 comes prepackaged with all popular operating
systems. This includes all flavours of unix , windows and Mac OS.

IPv6 is designed to solve many of the problems of the current version of
IPv4 with regard to address depletion. The goal is to use IPv6 to expand
the capabilities of the Internet to enable a variety of valuable
peer-to-peer and mobile applications.  According to many industry pundits
it is the future of networking.

However IPv6 has many privacy issues. IPv6 address space uses an ID
(indentifier) derived from your hardware or phone.  "That allows your
packets to be traced back to your PC or cell-phone" said <censored>.
<censored> fears abuse as a hardware ID wired into the ipv6 protocol can
be used to determine the manufacturer, make and model number, and value
of the hardware equipment being used by the end user.

Ipv6 empowers the business community by providing a means of identifying
and tracking users.  Under Ipv6 users can be tracked and income
demographics determined through hardware identification.

Many members of the networking community have addressed concerns that the
technology could result in potential abuse and <censored> warns users to
think twice before they buy themselves a used Lap-Top computer and inherit
all the prior surfing history of the previous user?

Ipv6 uses 128 bits to provide addressing, routing and identification
information on a computer. The 128-bits are divided into the left-64 and
the right-64.  Ipv6 uses the right 64 bits to store an IEEE defined global
identifier (EUI64). This identifier is composed of company id value
assigned to a manufacturer by the IEEE Registration Authority. The 64-bit
identifier is a concatenation of the 24-bit company_id value and a 40-bit
extension identifier assigned by the organization with that company_id
assignment. The 48-bit MAC address of your network interface card is also
used to make up the EUI64.
-- snip

Cheers Joe Baptista

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