[HerraBRE]

That's not entirely true.

Adding features to operating systems is easy - IPv6 support has been in all the major OSes for years. Getting it out there wasn't that hard but getting people to use it has proven to be a different matter entirely, largely because it is not backwards compatible with IPv4 and because of the resulting chicken-and-egg situation.

With something like this, you could upgrade your OS, then upgrade you router, and see immediate benefit. Or you could skip upgrading your router and use an in-the-cloud provider instead. It's much, much easier.

I think we're going to see people explore application-layer proxying (things like Tor, my http://pagekite.net/, this SOCKS idea) more and more as the IPv4 shortage starts to have an impact. Sure it's less efficient and it may feel messy, but it works surprisingly well.

[throwaway32]

the point of a setup like 6in4 is that you don't need to upgrade your intermediate infrastructure either, you can get ipv6 right now (anyone with an ipv4 address can actually). And it does not have the serious downsides of a socks based approach.

[HerraBRE]

It has the downside that it is pretty much useless. :-)

Until lots of people have IPv6, an IPv6 address doesn't have any benefit. It's a catch-22 situation.

With an IPv4 reverse proxy solution (socks or otherwise), you can run a server right now and it will be visible to everyone, right away.