Government: We are taking ALL of your little green apples.
Victim: What?!? That’s so unfair! They are mine!
Government: Nope, we are taking them. All of them.
Victim: I shall go to the Press! To the High Court! To….
Government: Oh alright. We’ll only take HALF your little green apples.
Victim: Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you… I’m so grateful!
Government: You’re most welcome.
H L Mencken said “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.”
Censorship is just such a solution. It is invariably proposed by people who have not thought through what their “solution” really means. It is the equivalent of flinging a sheet over unsightly rubbish instead of disposing of it; it sort of works, but it won’t be long before serious flaws in the plan become apparent.
In a previous article, I discussed how IPv6 source address selection worked. Normally it all Just Works, but there are several situations where you may want or need to control the address selection process. In this article, we’ll look at why you might want to control source address selection, and how you can do it.
Source address selection must be very irritated; destination address selection gets all the press coverage.
This article will start to redress the balance, by talking about what source address selection is, why it is needed, and how it works. If you want the nitty-gritty, check out RFC 6724 (which obsoletes RFC 3484).
ULA (Unique Local Addresses, or Unique Local IPv6 Unicast Addresses to give them their full name) are IPv6’s equivalent of IPv4’s “private” addresses.
The idea is to append a random 40 bits to the reserved ULA prefix fd00::/8, thus building a /48 that you can call your own. You can use this /48 wherever and however you like, with the sole proviso that it must not be routed on the public Internet. The ULA space is defined in RFC4192 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4193).