Is Shareaza ready for Ipv6?

[skyfire000]

Now there 's no unassigned ipv4 address available .

So should Shareaza to support ipv6 soon, cause another cilent of BT utorrent has already support ipv6 , and due to my test ,my ipv4 only has 500kbs but the bandwidth of ipv6 can reach 10Mbps , so the ipv6 is really have a good future.

I can use the ipv6 cause I 'm in university , but people outside the university can still use Ipv6 whether there ISP supports or not, there is many free ISTAP to let users access IPv6 network. And Ipv6 really have benefits on speed & privacy.

The sooner Shareaza support Ipv6 the better.

[ailurophobe]

At the moment, most of the 'net seems to be in the supported but not used by default camp. Universities are probably different, but my ISP for example, uses a teredo proxy to supply IPv6 and does not offer an IPv6 DNS at all. The reason for this is because most of the web either does not have IPv6, or it doesn't work as well as IPv4 does, so ISPs and OS vendors do not want people using IPv6 if IPv4 is available. So it looks like the transition to IPv6 is going to be quite slow, and even after IPv4 addresses run out people will probably get shared IPv4 addresses from ISP level NAT instead of having to go IPv6 only. (And even a relatively simple NAT system can stretch available addresses by few orders of magnitude.)

I agree we should support it, by the way. Just saying that it seems IPv4 is going to be with us longer than many hoped and there is no real rush.

EDIT: Obligatory nitpicking. IANA has no unallocated addresses, regional registries still do. And when the regional registries run out, it will still take some time before the ISPs run out. If they start transitioning to shared addresses, possibly a long time.

[zygote1]

[ailurophobe]

That depends... Making NATs work nice is difficult, but it is still something you can do. Moving to IPv6 in contrast is something you hope everybody else is doing. Sure you can add support, but it still won't really work right until enough other people you connect to and have no control over have also transitioned over.

That said, ISPs still have addresses (although LTE will eat them up fast once it takes off), so ISP level NAT is not really an urgent issue. Just saying that if the IPv6 transition keeps being slow, that is what I think we will see.

[zygote1]

[ailurophobe]

I was not so much thinking about forwarding although that is possible nowadays since ISPs are starting to give users remotely managed routers with limited user control. Modern routers handle port triggering correctly even for UDP and applications are much less sensitive to NAT than they used to be. Lots of applications protocols have specific systems for working thru NAT when just a few years ago being behind NAT was, like you said, the death of everything other than browsing.

LTE = Long Term Evolution. Think 4G. It is specifically designed for fast internet, so every LTE device that is on is also connected to the internet and has an IP address.

[zygote1]

The problem with ISP NAT isn't just technical. It's also that it gives the ISPs just the kind of excuse they need to violate neutrality against most kinds of non-HTTP traffic and claim it's for legitimate network management reasons. Not to mention better enforce their intentional price discrimination between "consumer" and "business" connections, the main difference with the latter being that the terms of service allow operating your own servers. So the fancier NAT features you describe may well be enabled for a particular customer only if they pay he extra fees for a "business" account.

Of course, the real solution to all of this is better competition. As long as most customers get their internet through a monopoly or a small oligopoly of big telco/cable/cellco providers, they'll engage in customer-hostile behavior and enact customer-hostile policies which technological advance will only make it easier for them to enforce against even the tech-savvier consumers.

Alternatively, if a VPN service of some kind became big, popular, and cheap enough, it could force ISPs to accept their proper roles as dumb pipes by making it literally impossible for them to know what was in customers' traffic or even where it was going and coming from. (If it didn't become popular enough, they could block encrypted VPN traffic for non-business-account-holders and get away with it, of course, and if VPN services remained difficult to use and expensive the customer wouldn't save anything by using them instead of, say, swallowing their telco's long distance fees instead of using VPN-tunneled VOIP, or whatever.)

Achieving that requires two things: making a VPN service with such low costs that it's very cheap or preferably even free without being unprofitable, and is easy to set up and has no geographic or other use restrictions (regarding both user location and remote connection endpoints). Free is possible, if supported by e.g. NXDOMAIN redirection ads and other similar methods (and they'll have clickstream data too).

The second thing is getting lots of people to use it. A big privacy scare (somewhat ironically, since the VPN provider will have access to the clickstream endpoint knowledge that ISPs currently do -- but not the contents) could perhaps accomplish that; or a popular enough application being deliberately degraded by enough ISPs (VOIP being a leading candidate there).

[ailurophobe]

Can't really argue with any of that. Unfortunately what is reasonable "network management" is not really dependent on what kinds of hardware is used, current hardware is already quite powerful, but rather what the politicians are willing to accept. And politicians seem to be rather clueless I am afraid. They worry about hypothetical over-regulation or inflated in significance piracy problem and totally ignore the free market, privacy, or freedom of speech aspects that naturally follow from "management" without strict and enforced limits.

That said, this problem is probably at least partially self-fixing; politicians are bad at thinking ahead the consequences of their decisions or indecisions, but they will eventually react when the problems start becoming apparent. And at least here in Europe where politicians are not actually scared of regulating, businesses will try not to do anything that will force the politicians to acknowledge that there is a problem that requires government regulation. So actual abuse should be limited.

[skyfire000]

[skyfire000]

And as you know it's not only BT or ED2K thing , Shareaza is not function when dealing IPV6 HTTP&FTP.