[notproductive]

IPv6 addresses are determined by the computer MAC address, some governments must be excited about this feature.

[nutjob2]

That's entirely misleading.

The MAC address is used if you autoconfigure IPv6, it's not required. Also you can enable privacy by requesting your host to generate a random host identifier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Privacy

[stephen_g]

I believe pretty much every single IP stack implementation uses privacy extensions by default now.

[justincormack]

Actually I don't think that is true yet. FreeBSD does not by default for example.

[politician]

It's not entirely misleading if you can imagine a certain government requiring registration of devices before allowing access to networks like the Internet.

[kiallmacinnes]

I'm not sure I see how IPv6 would really make that any easier? Privicy extensions or not...

Forging a MAC address is trivial.. If that's all you use to enforce the registration, it will be trivial to bypass!

And - if government wants to do this.. There are easier ways.

[DiabloD3]

That is completely false. Most IPv6 in use right now is statically assigned, not automated, and not all automated systems use MAC to make a unique IP.

[justincormack]

I don't think thats true, I think most is automated. There are people like Comcast just allocating ipv6 automatically, that far outnumbers manual setup.

[mikeash]

There's nothing that requires this. IPv6 addresses can be ephemeral and not tied to hardware identifiers.