[TriLUG] Adding to the list of topics: IPv6

[Magnus]

On Thursday, January 22, 2004, at 01:22  AM, William Sutton wrote:

> I'm still not sure I want my appliances logging in and telling the
> manufacturer who-knows-what,

And when the right (or rather wrong) people start catching onto this 
potential for finding out even more about you, IPv6 and 
ethernet-enabled appliances will become a reality.

Imagine your fridge has 802.11g, IPv6 and an RFID scanner built in.  
Sure, it tells you when you've only got a few beers left in the fridge 
and adds beer to your shopping list.  But it also phones back to 
Frigidaire and tells them what brand of beer you prefer, your rate of 
consumption, and what other foods you commonly commonly pull from the 
fridge at the same time as the beer.  That information becomes very 
valuable to interested third parties in the direct marketing industry, 
and Frigidaire (as an example... not saying they do this or plan to do 
this) has a nice fat revenue stream coming to them every quarter to buy 
your personal data.

> but under the supposition that they do, I'm
> curious:  Why not have your appliances NAT'd behind the router for your
> house?

There is nothing keeping you from doing that.  Of course NAT makes it 
harder to directly connect to your toaster oven from outside of your 
home without going through a proxy.

> Maybe I'm missing the point here, but it still seems to me that we're
> better served by not putting everything on a real, publicly 
> accessible, IP
> address.

I'm one of those rare people you'll find that never saw the need for a 
cell phone.  I also prefer my appliances dumbed down, thank you very 
much.  The benefits are gimmicky enough to get trendy people to buy 
when the prices come down, but the real reason your next bread machine 
will have an IP address isn't for *your* benefit.

The only way my fridge would have an IP address is if I had complete 
control over what connections were being made and it was there purely 
for my benefit.  I wouldn't mind having OpenNMS poll my fridge and 
alert me if the temperature exceeded desirable thresholds.  That's 
about the only thing I'd use an IP address on a fridge for, and that 
doesn't need IPv6.  And even then it is too gimmicky to be practical.

--

C. Magnus Hedemark
http://trilug.org/~chrish
"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink 
what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not." - Mark Twain
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