 which is just basically a GUI front end for open, oh crap, what's the open router firmware? Tomato, whatever. WRT? Yeah, open WRT, yeah. But it doesn't, and it's most recent incarnation still doesn't support IPv6. Open WRT doesn't? No, open WRT does, but open Gargoyle doesn't. I could do it if I hacked, if I went command line on it. Why Gargoyle? But I don't know every time I do that. Hmm? Open Gargoyle. It's like Gargoyle. It's not Gargoyle, like the thing, yeah. Yeah, no, I know, but it's like, I don't know, it's serving. It's like a demonish, monsterish thing. Yeah, but Gargoyles aren't evil. I don't know why people assume that. They're hideous, but they're designed to be hideous to horde off evil spirits, right? Isn't that what they're found on the side of Gothic churches? Yeah, but still. Does that mean I'm an evil spirit because I'm warded off by Gargoyle? It's a fair question. I'm worried now. Yeah. Next step to your reasoning, Roger. Depends on your, depends on your, your response to my reply. It's like, yeah, maybe, right. Yeah. No, the correct response should have, it would have been like, not necessarily it wards off evil spirits, but not all things or people that are warded off by the Gargoyle are evil spirits. What's that logical leap? Like the non-transitive thing? Not transitive, but what is it called? People, you're clever. Jumping into conclusions. No, when you say one thing implies another, but the opposite isn't necessarily true. Oh, I know what you're talking about. The converse is not true, is that? Yes, but isn't there a term for that? I'm sure there is. A term for that fallacy or something? It's called TTL. Chatroom. On your logic. The chatroom will know. I thought you were going to start making sin-act jokes about the Gargoyle. I had no idea I had to prepare for the show by giving some research about the cathedral. Yeah, I apologize for that. You never know. It's the fallacies. I just like it. It's been really solid firmware. Like I've been, I've managed to keep my router up without having it do anything to it for a year and a half. I don't know. I think this colluding with Gargoyle is a suspect. Well, you know what? It's because- It's because of our show, Roger. I'm sorry. We got to start the regular show here. Fighting. You guys ready? Yep. I was born ready. Yes, I know you were. Here we go. Daily Tech News Show is powered by its audience, not outside organizations. To find out how you can help power the show, visit dailytechnewshow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, January 31st, 2017. I'm Tom Merritt joining me today. Mr. Patrick Beja, as he does most Tuesdays. How are you, Patrick? I am doing excellent today, Tom. I'm full of energy and ready to discuss network things. Yes. Very excited on the recommendation of Rich Strafilino to have Ethan Banks, co-founder of Packet Pushers on the show. Welcome, Ethan. Thank you for joining us. I am glad to be here. I don't know if I can match Patrick's dynamic enthusiasm, but I am also happy to be here and talk network things, indeed, because that's where it's at, people. Yes, network things are definitely where it's at. We're going to talk about IPv6. Patrick, you were the one who was wanting to find out more about this, right? Yes, because there are so many questions like, will I be able to remember the IPv6 address or what happened to IPv5 and all of those? How do I give it to a CAD driver? All of these things and more will be debunked and we'll understand more about IPv6 in a few moments, but let's start with our top stories. Nintendo reported its first quarterly profit in a year, 32.3 billion yen, lifted mostly by mobile game revenue. However, that first quarterly profit was still down 3.7 percent over the last quarterly profit, which was a year ago. Weak console software sales led to a reduction of Nintendo's full-year profit outlook by one-third to 20 billion yen. Remember, their fiscal year ends in March. Nintendo earned 5 billion yen from Pokemon Go. Not bad. That's just their cut, remember. They don't actually operate Pokemon Go directly. And reported 78 million downloads for Super Mario run worldwide, with more than 5 percent paying to unlock the game. In total game sales were up 20 percent on the year. The mobile version of Animal Crossing has also been delayed until the next fiscal year. So the earliest you would get that would be in April. They want to focus on the launch of Mobile Fire Emblem, which Patrick, that launch, Mobile Fire Emblem Heroes launches February 2nd. So that's two days from now. Yeah, you know, it's so a couple of things. First of all, you remember when I said Pokemon Go, that's going to be a hot thing for like two days, and it's not going to make money for Nintendo, like a significant amount. Well, okay, let's pretend I didn't say that. And the other thing, Nintendo, you know, it's in an interesting position. They're always making money on everything they're doing. They're going to be, they're not going to have any loss leading, even with the Switch. And they're doing a different business model with Fire Emblem Heroes. They're going free to play, which is obviously different from Super Mario Run, which was free to try and then pay to play. So they're trying different things. They are firing on all cylinders and as tepid as I was with the announcement of the Switch, I have to admit that they're not doing as badly as I would have thought they would have been. Ethan, what do you think of Nintendo from where you sit? So it's the Switch that has caught my interest most recently with the announcement of that platform because is it, if it's trumpeted as a platform that can indeed Switch, now it's mobile and now it's part of your TV, the specs are wrong for that platforms. I just don't see how that can sell well. And, you know, ultimately they really should have a console that can compete with the big boys. And I don't think they have that right now. They, the problem is they can't really compete with the big boys. They're not going to catch up to Sony or even Microsoft for that matter. But I agree with you. It's a very strange strategy. I mean, it's, it could happen that this weird thing is going to catch people's imagination. But yeah, as I've said before, I'm like, I'm rooting for Nintendo, but just because I'm a fan, not necessarily because I believe, I mean, even for the last leading thing, it might make more sense to make it cheaper, make it an almost an impulse buy, and then flood the market and make up money on games like everyone else does. But Nintendo has a, you know, staunch principle that they're going to make money on every single thing they're selling. It's good because they're making money, but are they limiting this themselves somehow? The unabashed disappointment that has been the Wii U has obviously hurt them, but not hurt them enough. They're able to make it up on game titles so far. They need the switch though to bounce them back. And Ethan, I agree with you. It's not obvious when you look at that thing that it is the thing that is going to bounce, let them bounce back. Uber announced a deal Tuesday with Daimler to incorporate autonomous Mercedes Benz cars into its fleet. Daimler will own and manage the cars and develop their autonomous functions. Uber uses Volvo's and Ford's in Pennsylvania and Arizona for its own tests, but those cars are owned and developed by Uber. So this is really interesting. I don't know if a lot of people really understood that this was Uber's plan. They're developing their own technology for use in the cars, while they're also saying we would like the Uber platform to be open to you to put your autonomous technology on it. So what's happening with Daimler here is at some point in the future, and we don't know when in the coming years, Daimler will put a bunch of self-driving Mercedes Benz on the road, their technology, not Uber's, and they will use the Uber platform. It's as if Daimler is the Uber driver, right? And they are just putting a bunch of their fleet out on the road. Ethan, what do you make of this? Well, I wonder if the fact that Uber is averaging so much cash is making them turn to partners for some of their technology rather than trying to develop it all on house. I mean, they're losing billions still, even though they're such a big name now and so well-recognized and growing so rapidly. Cash management has got to be a priority for them. And so I'm supposing here that Mercedes Benz, who's got a lot of strong and leading technology, Tesla's certainly not the only game in town when it comes to autonomous driving, that maybe they've gotten alignment here that's going to save them some money in the long run. You know, I think they have the platform and they might be thinking we need to have something autonomous that works. We don't care who makes it. We don't care if we have to make it. We need to be in that game because this is going to be ideal for the business we have. So I'm wondering if this isn't them trying everything they can and they'll stick with what sticks. It's going to be interesting to see how they can still claim or pretend that they are just a service company and they don't actually are a transportation company once they have fully autonomous cars. Well, when they don't own the Mercedes, it makes it easier to make that argument. And they would like to get other manufacturers on board to do this as well. They would like Toyota to come and put their autonomous cars on this platform. I mean, the Uber self-driving technology is essentially their Surface Pro and they want Toyota's HP and Demler's Dell to be working on their platform. They want to be Microsoft Azure. They want to own the platform that everybody else is operating their autonomous cars on. It works out for Microsoft. Ethan, you look skeptical. It's too hard to read what Uber is going to do because there's so much controversy surrounding that company just generally now. I mean, you can look at if they have a strategy of autonomous self-driving cars, then what happens to the drivers at the root of that for Uber? That's yet another controversial thing that makes it a little hard to predict exactly what Uber is going to land because they are politically sensitive to how people react to them and their decisions. Although they are also often very insensitive, especially when it comes to their drivers sometimes. So wouldn't shock me if we had a controversy around that. I mean, come on. Once they have autonomous cars that work, there's going to be a transition period, but unless you want the special valet service with the person that comes and opens your door when you get in because you want to impress your date, I don't really think they're going to keep them around. But we'll see. Who knows? Uber White Glove service. Slack announced Slack Enterprise Grid designed to scale its service to companies with tens of thousands of employees. Companies can create an unlimited number of workspaces. So instead of creating your Slack team, and then you're like, everybody into the pool, all 10,000 of you, you can have one for marketing, you can have one for HR, but it's still operated under a unified login system through your company. Users can talk across teams, they can share channels, and then there's an administrative layer for the company to operate it. Slack also has FINRA and HIPAA certifications for use by financial and medical organizations. That's a big deal. They also integrate with eDiscovery, data loss prevention, and off-site backup providers. And they've got IBM PayPal and Capital One, among others on board, trying out Slack Enterprise Grid right now. This is a big step for Slack in trying to make sure that they get the big fish, right? Slack continues to be clever, and they have a level of business savvy that honestly, I didn't think they would have, and I don't think most startups like this, hot startups, usually show. Slack has figured out growth here, I think, and that's the thing that they need. I mean, they've got the momentum, they've got the name, they've eclipsed competitors like HipChat. I guess you could argue that point, but I would say that they have. Slack is just so hot right now, and then they take this step to really go after enterprises, large enterprises, in a grown-up way that people who are used to operating in those large enterprises, they seem to understand the way they think and the way the vision needs to be done and the way security needs to be handled and compliance for their very rich messaging app, man, they just nailed it. It's like someone must be sitting on their board as my guest here counseling them on how to present their tool in a way that is going to be attractive to large enterprises and give them an excuse to consume Slack, and I don't see how they can, nothing strikes me in that announcement as wrong. All of that sounds right to me, like this is all the right thing and it's going to be very attractive to large enterprises. Any CTO that has looked at this in the past and say it's a nice toy, but it won't scale to our needs, now has almost all their objections met, right? On the other hand, Slack has got to be displacing huge competitors. You've got, Cisco's got a big collaboration suite that's in that space and obviously Microsoft does as well and Alvaya and so, you know, it's still, Slack has to get it right if they're going to displace. Yeah, because their impediment is, okay, but you're still new. You're a new thing that we have to work on and get everyone to use and that's always a tall order. I think they're making things so friction-free that it can, an argument can be made that you can replace things. I mean, there are counterarguments, of course, but it's very simple. It remains to be seen how well it works in practice, but Slack is really good at onboarding people. And so I would assume they're going to have their best, their best efforts in enterprise grid as well. I'm in about 10 different teams right now because of that ease of use, so. Yeah, same. All right, people, I have bad news. After almost two years of trials, Walmart announced its ending, its $49 a year Amazon Prime competitor, shipping pass. But Patrick, I just found out it existed. They will now offer standard free two-day shipping on more than two million items with a minimum purchase price of 35 bucks. Existing Walmart shipping pass members will receive a refund of the $49 fees. Wow, there's just so many things about this that I note. One is Walmart was the unassailable retail leader, and now Walmart is trying to play catch up with Amazon by underpricing them. So this is so not what Amazon Prime is. I mean, beyond the fact that Amazon Prime has grown almost uncontrollably to include so many different things, even for the shipping, it's about getting the thing in most cities the next day, sometimes even in the evening, not two-day shipping. And it's for tiny items that you think you might, you can go to the store for, but you won't bother because you're going to get it immediately, and it's going to cost you 10 bucks or whatever. This Walmart free two-day shipping thing is just a standard relatively accessible shipping option, but it does not compete with Amazon Prime at all anymore. At least that's the way I see it. Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, it was a minimum purchase price of $35 to get the free two-day shipping, you know, depending on what you're buying. I mean, I don't, I go to Walmart typically for consumables. That's why I'm there, you know, small purchases and so on. It would actually be hard for me to go to Walmart online and come up with $35 worth of things I want to get for free shipping. On the other hand, those sorts of consumable items tend to be very pricey if you're trying to purchase them through Amazon Prime, which I do. It's interesting that Walmart gave up on this because maybe they'd put a little more effort into advertising themselves as an online presence and make the experience more comparable to Amazon. They might have had some headway. It's just the Amazon experience is so good that, you know, you went up to Walmart online a couple of times and just kind of gave up on the whole thing. I think it's, I don't know, I'm not sure that Walmart gave enough effort because Patrick, as you were joking, I didn't even hurt a shipping pass until this story. So it's also, I think the infrastructure of Amazon and their warehousing and, you know, shipping procedures are so beyond anything we've seen anywhere else, you know, the mere, the choice that you have, the choices that you have when you go to Amazon and it's, I'm sure technically there's a know-how there that is almost impossible to replicate or that would take 10 years to replicate and maybe Walmart has looked at this and thought, you know, kind of like Nintendo looking at Sony and Microsoft thinking, we're not going to be able to compete with them anyway. So let's stop trying and let's do what we do best, which is different. Well, and that's what's stunning to me is this is Walmart saying, we can't compete with you. Walmart doesn't say we can't compete with anyone. Walmart drives other people out of business. And so that's huge. I mean, don't forget, Walmart owns Voodoo. They've got their own video arm. They can go up against Amazon Prime Video. There are many ways they could approach this and try to take on Amazon. And this $49 a year Amazon Prime competitor was one way, like, hey, we're doing it, but it's cheaper. And the fact that they've decided, you know what? We just can't get the uptake. Let's shift to what Ethan's talking about and be the place where you can get the toothbrush heads for your electric toothbrush and bulk toilet paper for cheaper than you can get it on Amazon. It's more of a Sam's strategy, I guess, than a Walmart strategy. An artificial intelligence developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon called Libratus, remember that, it'll soon be running the world, beat four of the world's best professional poker players in a 20-day, 120,000 hand heads up, no limit, Texas Hold'em competition at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. The program would analyze holes in its strategy every day in order to adapt for the next day's play, just like you would if you're a part of this. Libratus was up $1,766,250 in chips by the end of the experiment. It apparently learned to bluff. However, the AI didn't get to keep any of its money. The losing humans got to split a pot of $200,000 based on their performance. This is, I think, a huge deal, because to my knowledge, I might be wrong, but it's the first time that an AI has beaten humans at a game, which is not 90% mechanical. Even though there can be bluffing in strategies in chess and Go, it's absolutely conceivable that if you do what the computer does, which is analyze every possible move, you're going to figure out the most probable way to win. As we well know, in poker, especially Texas Hold'em, or maybe less than in other types, but anyway, in poker, there is bluffing. There is reading your opponent. So this spells trouble for us, me, humans, in the face of our AI. I'm already looking at poker. There's no way I'm taking on this AI. All right, game hardware maker Razer announced it acquired Android phone maker next bit on January 27th. Next bit made the Robin smartphone, which offered a unique way of merging cloud and internal storage. Next bit will remain largely independent, operating as a standalone business under its own management and stay in its existing San Francisco headquarters. Yeah, that Robin phone, if I remember right, the whole point of it was to smoothly integrate local and cloud storage and you didn't have to worry about it. And that was the big sale, that integration in between the two. But I don't think the uptake was huge on that, was it? It had a very loyal but small following. Yeah. Yeah, and now with iCloud services integrated on your iPhone, for example, some of that value proposition for the Robin, I think fades a bit. Well, integration is a smooth thing. Smart sync is a similar thing too. Yeah, I think the Robin had apps even that were cloud synced, not just data. But yeah, it comes with drawbacks. But for me, the interesting thing is what is Razer doing? Not in a derogatory way, but more surprising. Because they have, I own a bunch of Razer equipment. They do gaming hardware, as we mentioned. And they have, you can feel that they want to be more than just that. They're doing computers now, a bunch of different things. They have this very sleek marketing. We want to be almost like they're chasing Apple in a way that is interesting, like premium feel to everything they do. And it feels like they don't just want to be the people who do the keyboards that light up and the mice that show green and red and other colors. They want to do more. I'm not sure, you know, Robin is going to stay independent. Are they just going to start manufacturing smartphones, Razer smartphones? Or are they going to stay Robin smartphones? Why would Razer purchase a small smartphone manufacturer and leave it completely independent? It's a strange move. My guess is Razer doesn't want to get into making smartphones. They want Robin to continue to do that. They know Robin has a very rabid fan base and they want to keep that fan base happy. And so they'll put a little Razer marketing oomph behind Robin maybe and hopefully get those phones a little more uptake. But they really want that technology. I agree. It's got to be some uptake of the technology that they're going to be integrating. That's got to be the interesting. The most interesting bit for them. Yeah. So keep those Robin phones going to the fans as sort of a boutique business so that you can take that technology and keep developing it and put it into Razer products. Why keep it going though? It's not their core business. It seems like it would be a distraction to some extent. I'm not sure they're making enough money to make up for the whole thing. I don't know. It's maybe it makes sense, but... All right. Maybe some roadmap product that's going to make sense to us. Yeah, that's true too. Six months from now comes out. Yeah, they did mention they have some things coming down the pike. Finish it off real quickly here. CNBC has the details of Apple's earnings report for Q1 2017. Earnings calls later today, but they earned $3.36 per share versus $3.21 cents expected. So they beat that. Got revenue of $78.4 billion versus $77.25 expected. Beat that. $3.28 per cent. They were up over earnings per share last year, and they were up over revenue last year. iPhone sales were $77.42 million with revenue of $53 billion. Services, which is iCloud, App Store, etc., $6.91 billion. And they gave guidance for Q2 of earnings per share of $2.08 with revenue of $53.79 billion. Shares of Apple rose more than 6% over the past three months amid the holiday shopping season and following the release of the iPhone 7, the new MacBook Pro and the AirPods. So we'll get more from Apple when they have their earnings call, but that is a positive earnings report for Apple at this point. Well, I think it's a little bit unexpected, too. The iPhone 7 was not anticipated to do overly well. It wasn't that big of an exciting increase over the 6 and the 6s, which you can still buy. So I'd be curious to know if the numbers get broken down. How much of the $53 billion in phone sales is attributable to the iPhone 7? The MacBook Pro certainly hasn't... Controversial platform. It has its contractors, I've heard. Yeah, yeah. And AirPods are selling better than I thought from all the numbers I've read. So that was... I've heard mixed feelings about it from some friends of mine, but Patrick, I think you're with me. I think the AirPods are great because they fit my ears. I think it's usually if they don't fit your ears, you kind of hate them because there's nothing you can do about it. But if they stay in your ears, I find them really elegant. Yeah, there is a lot of... I mean, the AirPods themselves are kind of pedestrian, but the clever design and engineering in the case is what puts them over maybe other wireless headphones. Well, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in less than 10 minutes, go check out our sister show, DailyTechHeadlines.com, and that's a look at our top stories. All right. So most of you know this, but for those who don't, an IP address is the way a device is identified on the internet. Now you've seen the four numbers separated by dots. Either while you're setting up your router or looking at your friends, there's no place like 127.0.0.1 t-shirt, but you know that. You're like, that's an IP address. You may also recall hearing on this show or a show I did in a previous life that we're running out of IPv4 addresses. That's the one with the four numbers separated by dots. There's only 4.3 billion of those. We've got twice that many people. A lot of us have way more than one device, even if there's plenty of people who don't have a device. So we need more addresses. And even with routers and network address translation, a new system had to be developed. That system you've heard of, it's called IPv6. It's a group of eight four hexadecimal digit numbers separated by colons. It's not interoperable with IPv4, however. So there is a transition underway. It can't exist at the same time. That transition is impacting very important things like playing video games. So thankfully, Ethan is here to help us understand it. Ethan, first of all, what are the benefits to a general consumer? But beyond the 15 bajillion addresses that it's going to have, what are the benefits of IPv6? Beyond having the 15 bajillion addresses. Well, okay, in a certain sense, there isn't much tangible benefit for consumers. But bear with me here. I'm going to explain this. Addressing is largely transparent to most of us, right? We don't really know or care about the IPv4 addresses that are assigned to our gear. We care about whether or not we can access the internet resource that we're trying to access, whatever the underlying addressing system might be. Okay. So from that very general standpoint, it's kind of like, who cares? But for the more tech savvy among us, which I know there's a lot in this crowd, IPv6 does really bring a lot of things more to us than just the 15 billion addresses. For example, most of us have home gear that is obscured by NAT. We hide behind some kind of network address translation, and that makes us feel secure. We got all these addresses that are hidden behind a single address. That feels like anonymity, and we kind of like that. That's a good thing. But private address space that 10.192.168, a few other different addresses that we'll use, they're all hidden behind that single address. And those features of NAT and private address space, they weren't created because of security and to make us feel better. They were created as a stop gap because we were running out of IPv4 addresses. That's really why they were there. Not everybody that thinks that a layer of indirection is a way to make us more secure. So IPv6 then gives us back address uniqueness that we can assign for our hosts and our apps going forward. And that's a huge benefit here. You guys, I got more I wrote out. Are you saying it's more secure to not have a network address translator? Or I don't see how this would be a benefit. It's more practical. So there's a few things here. We'll go back to the security bit in a minute. But let's talk about NAT. Let's focus on that just for a second because NAT breaks things. NAT breaks applications. Most applications, a lot of applications have a workaround that they do work with. Now we know that because that's the world we live in, right? But some applications very definitely break. And then carriers have adopted something called carrier grade NAT, where your address isn't just being translated once. It's being translated twice, once at your gateway router, and then once within the carriers system at carrier grade NAT. And it works mostly for the outbound client side traffic that most of us have coming in from our homes. But it sucks when it's inbound server side traffic. Your gaming or it's a voice app you're trying to use and it's going through all these NAT, that's terrible. So IPv6 gets us to a place where those problems that come and go because of NAT can disappear for all. And again, go ahead. So okay, it gets me a few milliseconds more in my games that I can understand. So okay, another question. Can IPv4 and IPv6 coexist on the internet in general? I'm sure it can. But what about my home? Can some devices be IPv4, others IPv6? Or if I do the switch, then everything has to be, if my router is IPv6, then it has to be for every device I own. Yeah, so IPv4 and IPv6 only host. If they're running one or the other, no, they wouldn't talk to each other without some kind of a translation. And there's schemes where you can translate a v4 to a v6 address and back. There's devices that can act as a proxy. So you're a v6 client and you want to talk to a v4 host. There's a box that could sit in the middle and be a proxy for you. But those sorts of schemes, you don't really see those deployed at home typically. That's an enterprise thing or a service provider thing for the most part. And so the real answer to your question about coexistence is certainly for the global internet and really everywhere, you do something called dual stacking where you're running both the IPv4 and the IPv6 stack. And that's normal. And it's been the normal way of things for a long time now. So not only is coexistence peaceful, it's very real. That's normal for the internet. So let's talk about a specific host like an iPhone or a laptop or something. How does it deal with IPv4 and IPv6? Typically dual stacked. So you could on your iPhone, you could go to the app store and go to download the Hurricane Electric HE.net application. It's free. And that tool will tell you the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses that are loaded on your phone. I'm a Verizon wireless customer. And I have definitely have both addresses living there. Some IPv4 that I've assigned from the house, from my home router. Some are IPv6 addresses that Verizon has shared with me, given assigned to my phone. And on your Mac, if you're running Mac OS, you could type IF config and get a report of your interfaces. You're going to see IPv4 and IPv6 assigned to your different interfaces. So same thing with Windows, IP config, etc. So they do coexist. So my computer, my Windows PC or Mac has both an IPv6 and IPv4 address. How does each application decide what tunnel they're going to go through? Or is that even how it works? Right, right. So IPv6 gets interesting because even if you don't have IPv6 service from your ISP, you're going to have some IPv6 address that's been assigned locally by the local operating system. And you have different classes of IPv6 addresses. Some of them are locally significant only. They don't work outside your house. You can only talk to other things in your house with them. Others are globally routable, meaning they can interact with the global internet, which is the kind of an address you would get from your ISP. And so as far as choosing what gets used, there's been a lot of work done so that operating systems know I'm going to try to use IPv6. And if it doesn't work, I'm going to then switch to IPv4 and use that instead. And so it'll make an attempt one way or the other. And there's a number of different mechanisms that support this. One is DNS. So you go to www.google.com. You do a DNS lookup, a domain name system lookup, to translate that hostname that you type into your browser's address bar into an IP address. Now, an attempt will be made to see if there's a v6 address available for that. And if there is, and you've got a v6 stack running, your browser will try to connect on v6. Your browser will also try to connect on v4 at the same time. And there's diagnosing that's happening in the background to determine which is a viable connection for your browser, v6 or v4. And it will give you the connection that is going to work the best, preferring v6 if it's available. Now, does my router need to support one or the other, or does that matter if it's all just passing through it? Your router will need to support IPv6. Yeah, which most residential gateways, most home routers, are definitely going to support that nowadays. Now, you probably have to turn it on, though, as in you as the consumer are going to need to go into the configuration of that device and check the box that says, I want IPv6 support. And also your ISP is going to need to support it as well. You know, you can turn it on, but if your ISP is not serving you an IPv6 address, you could turn it on, try to send IPv6 traffic down to your internet service device. It's just going to get dropped. You won't get any answer back. So go ahead. Oh, go ahead. Well, for the most part, it really is that simple. You know, there are v6 discovery processes. So your IPv6 capable systems at home, your phone and your Mac and your Windows box are going to be able to pick up a globally routable v6 address from your internet gateway. And and that's all automatic. You don't even there is such a thing as DHCP for IPv6. But in many cases, you don't even need to run a DHCP server for v6. The network neighbor discovery and router advertisement processes will handle address assignment for you. So as an expert, would you recommend because obviously the router, if it's not IPv6, the box hasn't been checked, then your your home is not going to be IPv6 running IPv6, right? You'll be running it internally, but you won't be connected to the internet. Right, right. So as an expert, would you recommend people go ahead and do that? Is there any immediate benefits or any immediate downside to running, you know, to enabling because that's the the gateway quite literally. If you enable it, then all of your devices will be able to connect via IPv6. Should we do it? Is there any super benefit? Is there any hidden drawbacks? So should you do it? So I would say it is the right thing to do at this point. We are way past the deployment phase of IPv6 on the global internet. The global internet runs v6. There are regional ISP exceptions like my little ISP that I get cable service from is not offering IPv6 to me yet as a consumer. And maybe there's many folks that are in that boat, but most have IPv6 and you can run it. And the global internet is running it. You could say the global internet is heading in an IPv6 direction, but I think that's an understatement. Honestly, the global internet is an IPv6 internet and the amount of IPv6 traffic on the global internet has been climbing dramatically in the last few years. The last stat that I remember, and this is going back a few months now, is something over 30% of the world's internet traffic is IPv6, not IPv4. And so it's not like it's a new thing. We're there. Another point worth making. If you were to look at the internet standards, there's standards documents that are published by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the IETF, that establish how all of these addressing systems and so on are supposed to work. The first IPv6 draft that begins to describe it goes back to 1995. So this is not new technology. We're into over 20 years of IPv6, having had time to bake and be tweaked and tested and understood. It's not like it's this new thing and oh gosh, it's so risky if we turn it on because it might blow up. We're past that part. It's just turn it on. We're ready to go with it. And mechanisms for living in an IPv4 and IPv6 world is so normal. All the mechanisms are there and well established to make it easy to do it. So there isn't really a downside that I can think of. And on the other hand, neither is there a huge upside either. It's not like I turned on IPv6 and my Internet got so much faster. I mean, I don't think most people are going to experience that to be honest. It is sort of a seamless transition, right? It's just happening for most people if you're involved in the industry. You nailed it. And I think mobile phone providers are the classic example. Most people, if you dig in and look at what's been assigned to your phone, you've been using v6 on that phone every time you're on LTE. You know, when you're off Wi-Fi and you're talking to the carrier directly, you've probably been on the IPv6 Internet. That is where a significant amount of the growth has been. And you didn't know it happened. And you didn't need to know what happened. It just worked. Is there a situation where we have to start getting the word out to people like, hey, you've got to turn on your v6 or you've got to upgrade your router if your router's ancient? Or is it that kind of equipment just naturally obsolesce itself before that happens? No, I think there is a get the word out kind of effort, which a show like this would be doing because, again, it's not, by default, turned on in most residential routers as far as I know. I mean, I guess that's subjective. But more typically, it's we've got the ability, but you've got to turn on as opposed to out of the box, it's definitely going to do IPv4. And so that's, you know, you could look at the manufacturers and go, hey, guys, you should be enabling IPv6 out of the out of the gate. And they've been holding back on that somewhat. And so there is some education and that that people need to be aware that this is a feature that they're going to want to turn on at some point. But I tend to think that's going to really fall to the local ISPs, folks that are servicing residences and let people know, hey, we've just enabled this new capability. And for you to take advantage of it, we need you to do, you know, this and mostly tell me if I'm wrong, mostly you want people to switch over to IPv6 so that everybody can just stop dealing with IPv4, right? Well, so that that is an interesting question. Because the world is not preparing for a transition from IPv4 to IPv6 as such. It really is more about coexistence for the long term. Networking technology is so intertwined with IPv4. And so many applications have been written with IPv4 in mind. And there's so many, so much presupposition that IPv4 is there that it's never going to go away. I say never, maybe for a long time, it's never, it's not going to go away. And we're going to be in this dual stacked coexistent world for for quite some time, just of necessity. You know, so I don't, you know, I don't see IPv4 disappearing. You're being a good citizen if you switched. You are definitely being a good citizen. It's the right thing to do. There are performance benefits and security benefits and some details that we didn't really get into that are desirable from a networking perspective to move to IPv6. Having unique addresses is a desirable thing for security, I think. Which actually, let me dive into that for a second, if you don't mind. Yeah, sure. Because one of the pieces of FUD is that, hey, network address translation stops the ISP from being able to know what devices I've good hooked up. If I'm IPv6, can they know everything? Can they charge me per device, et cetera, et cetera? So I would argue that we want them to know everything from a certain point of view. And that point of view is this. We've got a lot of devices on our networks that are insecure. And then the internet, because of that global networking capability, is means that everybody can be a victim of everybody else. And so if you've got, say, an Internet of Things device, you've got a, you know, a thermostat in your house or a garage door opener, or, you know, fill in the blank with whatever it is, it probably came shipped to your house not very secure. And IoT devices have been used in a number of attacks now, well documented, and we know what happened. And it was this particular IoT device and operating system that was compromised because they're very poorly secured. Well, wouldn't it be nice if it had that IoT device that was so easily compromised had a unique IPv6 address that you could point to and go, look, we detected this bad traffic coming from your network from this address. And you can go, oh, that address is, belongs to this particular device. Rather than it being obscure and go, we know it came from your network, but we don't know what happened. You know, another viewpoint would be bandwidth management. So the ISPs, they're metering all our bandwidth, right? They know how much of their pipe that we're using in the course of a month. And if we're going back to them and go, I have no idea why two terabytes of data were used on the network, and they can say, well, it's from this address. And, you know, we could, in theory, check that back to, huh, looks like my kid watches a lot more YouTube than I thought, you know, and it's not just me a half hour a day on the Roku kind of thing. You know, so that's, I think there's some advantages that come into it. I don't want to give them that much power over me. I just like to have them see that one IP address and that's it. That is a fair argument, Tom. I won't say that you don't have a point because you do. And it's not like you can't do NAT with IPv6. There are mechanisms to do that. But I think, you know, on the whole, you know, if you look at security benefits, if you look at applications that are no longer broken because they're no longer being NATed on the whole, doing away with NAT is a benefit, is a strength. You know, security by obscurity, sure, it's another layer. It is another element that, you know, gives you some security, ensure it hides you a little bit from your ISP. But just my personal opinion, when you look at the balance of having a known address, I think that's better, you know, on the whole. And I don't really think ISPs are going to charge you based on the number of devices because they're going to charge you for bandwidth. That's what they care about. I don't think that they care about the number of devices nearly as much as they care about the amount of bandwidth. I wouldn't let anything pass as they're self-charging. Yeah, I hear you. Hey, if you want to dig into this more, you got to check out packetpushers.net. I know Ethan's going to write up some more thoughts on this and put them online at his website as well. So be sure to follow up there. And thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit and submit stories and votes on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. A couple of emails before we get out of here. First, Jerry from Strangely Warm Michigan writes, I love all of your shows and I'm a long-time listener. I just want to drop a quick note on the Nintendo Switch. Your guests have commented on the price and how close it is to more powerful systems as the Xbox and PlayStation. I'm not saying any of you are wrong. As a matter of fact, I agree. However, as a parent with a son that is interested in getting a Nintendo 3DS, which starts at $199, the Switch seems like a far more functional system for just a little bit more. Especially when you consider that you can do a search on Amazon and easily find Nintendo 3DS systems that are $300 or more. Since it has been around so long, there's no way of knowing how long it will be before they update it or come out with something new. Fair enough. However, those more expensive systems are different ones. The 2DS is, I think, 100 bucks. At least it is 100 euros in Europe. You can get access to that library of games more easily. Also, it's not just about the price. It's also about the launch lineup and the power of the system and the autonomy when it's on battery. It's a bunch of factors. But I guess if you look at it like that, yes, you could say it's only 50% more, but I wouldn't look at it like that personally. All depends on where you're sitting. Then Trenton wrote in to say, I had to write in and say I've had my Google Home go off on at least 20 occasions when it heard something other than the trigger word on the telly. And he put a clip that we'll link to in the show notes of a version of The Office, an episode of The Office. Setting it off just because it sounded similar to what the trigger word for Google is. And I'm not going to say because I don't want to trigger everybody's Google Homes. But we were speculating that we hear more about Amazon voice services getting set off by podcast and such. And he's saying, hey, it happens to my Google Home as well. Do you have this problem, Ethan, where if you say the name that shall not be named, you set off all your listeners' devices? I will call Apple on the carpet for Siri and go, I can't get Siri to wake up half the time when I want her to. And for whatever reason. But no, I haven't got that specific complaint yet. Although that story does keep cropping up with the assistant that shall remain nameless. The reality is that all of those assistants, in order to get real wide adoption, need to recognize the voice of their user, their master's voice. And Siri does that. And Siri does, it does. Oh, there you go. It does look okay, but apparently not great. Well, Ethan Banks, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today and help explain about IPv6. Let folks know what you're up to, where they can find what you're up to, and all that good stuff. Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at ECBanks. That's where I hang out the most. The packetpushers.net is where I do most of my podcasting. There's several podcasts that I'm on regularly. If you're an enterprise IT nerd, you're into networking or data center design. We've got a bunch of shows for you there. And also, I do a fun show that's kind of like this one, Tom, Citizens of Tech. You can find that show at well, citizensoftech.com, or on Twitter. And anything else you want to know about me, you can find it at ethansibanks.com. Go check it out, folks. Patrick Beja, any last words from you before we're out of here? Well, you mentioned the Phileas Club yesterday when you were saying that we don't talk about politics too much on this show, except when it pertains to tech, of course. But we do have other avenues where we discuss these kinds of things. And the latest episode of the Phileas Club was recorded on Saturday. And we had a really interesting discussion about the Trump administration and the way it's heading. It might surprise you. It's not necessarily as one-sided as one might think. And I'm also probably going to be recording another episode very soon in a few days, because what has happened since Saturday, you know, I need to talk about this to someone, and that someone is everyone. So I'll be recording another one with other guests. I hope you enjoy that. But as always, that show is focused on trying to, I don't want to say stay neutral, but stay reasonable. And that's something we sorely lack in our political climate. So go check it out. It's at FrenchSpin.com. It's called the Phileas Club. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Ah, that was so good, Ethan. Thank you so much. Yeah, it was fun. Thanks for having me on. I'm glad you had fun. I hope we at least help people understand a little bit more. Yeah, just for a sake of time, there were so many things that I could have gotten into that I didn't that I had written up and so I will, I'll get that published and get you a link, what you know when that's done. That would be great. It's great to have you on. I do have one question. I'm not sure, I don't know if it's a one you can answer quickly, but is there more processing? Like, does it, does attacks of process or more to resolve IPv6 addresses versus IPv4? So the resolution process is the same. You're querying DNS and you're getting back just a different type of record. You're getting back a quad A record instead of a regular A type record. So it's identical in that sense. And then for network devices that are forwarding IPv6, it's actually less intensive because there is, there's a checksum process that happens in IPv4 that the IPv6 creators did away with since checksumming happens at other layers of the network stack. So it's like, it's kind of redundant to put it in IPv6. They took it out. You actually get slightly less processor overhead. I mean, it's a nominal change. It's very small, but there it is. Okay. No, that's good to know. I suppose I've been curious if required more under the limit. So I actually would like to know, I didn't ask during the show to not make it longer, but what happened to IPv5? Oh, there is, there is an obscure bit of data on it. I've forgotten the story. There is a story as you can Google that. It's like Windows 10 on that. They just thought Windows 9 didn't sound cool enough. So they were like, you know what, 6 is so much better than 5. There actually was a thing that came up and trying to find my co-writers. Here it is, ethereummind.com here. That we should do a series like in search of for internet tech. So it was defined as, basically it was an idea that came and went and it just disappeared. It was defined and there was no uptake on it and it just continued. There's some bullet points and not much there. Is there a window I could paste that in? Let's see. It's interesting how that happened. Hangouts, hangouts, screen share, chat, chat. There you go. There you go. Click on that and it'll tell you the story. ethereummind is my co-host and business partner over at Packet Pushers. That's Greg Farrow's site. He did that little write-up that explains what happened to it. It was a thing and that's his next. We have another one already starting to be worked on. I guess if it takes. This is because of the old article. No, there's nothing else that's coming out. Let's get through the titles while we wait for. Breaking, Walmart is not Amazon. Silicon Valley, hold them. IPv6 of one, half a dozen of the other. That's my favorite so far. Slick, Slack, Friction Free, Casting a Wider Network. Wait a minute. Did we use that one? These are all titles, Ethan, that have been submitted by the audience during the show in the chat. And they vote on them. Yeah, I'm with you. I got to come up with titles all the time, but I've never crowdsourced them. Oh, we do it every day. IPv3ly, Nintendo, Upwardly Mobile, Nintendo, Rosen, The Bank, 2, 4, 6, 8, IPv, which one to hate? Oh, why hate? That's harsh. I hate, Joe Mon. I like dual stack my Mac. IPv6, what's that IPv4? I'm not sure I get that one. IPv6, what's that for? Except IPv4. There's no place like 127.001. What's home in IPv6? Oh, gosh, there's another t-shirt for that. Yeah, I've seen it. I don't remember what it is either. See, that's what I don't like about that IPv6. It was a big t-shirt that pushed for IPv6, actually. Yeah, it's like TVs. You don't buy enough new ones fast enough so they need to come up with new t-shirts. It's all zeros and a one. That's what it is. So that would be commonly rendered as colon, colon, one. There's no place like colon, colon, one. It's fairly elegant, actually. Yeah, when you see two colons back to back, implied in that is that it's all zeros in between those two colons to fill in the requirement of the 128-bit address space. Right, right. It's compression algorithm. Colon, colon, one. That's not bad. You know what? You might have just sold me on IPv6 after all. What's funny is I've put IPv6 in my own world kind of on hold waiting for my ISP to get it together. Yeah, right. That's crazy. You know, the service I didn't mention, but Hurricane Electric also has something called the tunnel broker service where you can stand up a v6 tunnel from inside your network to them and have IPv6 service to the internet through the tunnel. So it's pretty latent and slow compared to what you'd have natively. But I spent a lot of time with that hours just working with different things, testing different things and so on. What would be the advantage though to do that? Mostly for education. You want to get up on IPv6 and understand and learn and so on and get familiar with networking and test different services of your own with IPv6, make sure they're compatible and they take you through that whole process. They've got a whole education process and kind of a simplistic certification you can get from them. You know, you're an IPv6 master or whatever they call it. I've forgotten now. Different phases that you go through as you complete certain IPv6 tasks. And it costs you nothing. They just, they launched that years ago as a way to encourage IPv6 adoption and take away the fud, the scare factor. So. Scare. Well, I like IPv6 and one half dozen of the other and it's leading in the votes there. Oh, but there's no place like Cullen Cullen one is starting to get up there. Let's give it a go. I don't need to pick. Yeah, I'm still I don't want to influence. I don't want to stuff the ballot, but I mean, it would be really cool if there's no place like Cullen Cullen one got it. But I'm just saying. When you show titles, campaign reform now. Hey, I'm going by the existing rules. Okay. You can't just pick up the rules as you go. It just jumped ahead. Oh, it's a tie. It's a tie. Damn it. We don't want the supreme Tom of the United States. We have to decide. Yes. Thank you, chat room. Captain Jack 913. Wow. This is the most exciting title race we've had a long time. You know what, Tom? You know what it is? It's just campaigning, being on the ground, delivering your message to your community. And exactly, you need to show that you're genuine. And I think that the voters reacted to my enthusiasm. We have an October surprise too. Peds says we used the other title already, IPv601, a half dozen of the other. Wow, there you go. What sort of podcast world do you want to live in, Tom? I'm sorry. He's saying there's no place like 127.0.0.1. Oh, crap. Crap. Well, transition from that. So I think that the kind of world we want to live in is the one where we can reference our own great DTNS history and make it live. And update it for the future. And update our hearts. Yeah. Okay. I don't know. You can do what you want. You're the boss. I'm going to go with there's no place like Cologne.0.1. Yes. Yes. My dear constituents, we have prevailed. It's also shorter. That is something many people say about me as well. Mighty but short. Effective. Make titles great again. I love it. Yes, we have. Finally. IP size matters. Well, Ethan, if you need to go, I don't know if we made that clear and I apologize, but we just kind of hang out. I'm going to take off. I'm going to grab my son and we're going to head to the gym and do our thing. Excellent. This was fun. If you need to fill in once I'm going to hang around or comment on network stuff, happy to do it. Just I will probably take you up on that. Let's see if we can get it on the schedule. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks, guys. I'm checking out. Take care, Ethan. All right. But that was the most fun IPv6 effort. Episode I've ever done. I just saw ice cream bars. You what? IPv6. You what? No, ice cream like ice cream novelties. I'm sure there's something that you can do with. Are you trying to make an ice cream joke on IPv6? Well, I'm thinking like you could there has to be some sort of, you know, thing cross overlapping thing that you could do. And just sell lots more ice cream. I don't know. I just wanted an ice cream bar really. That makes more sense. Now we get it. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, they're so good. Do you guys, ice cream novelties are so sold in France, I'm sure, or in Finland, even? No, Roger. In France, we have proper ice cream. We have real ice cream. We go to the Île Saint-Louis and we go to Bertillon and we get a real ice cream. Okay. It's from the novelties. They wrap the refrigeration coils around the cow's udder. So it comes out rich, the original soft serve. Exactly. You know, choco tacos are sorry, bad weave in the chat rooms and I want a choco taco. And I remember grabbing one maybe a couple of months ago before I moved, maybe three months ago. And it was a pretty stale. It's pretty stale. I was expecting the taco to be a little more crunchy instead of just chewy, like a drumstick. Sounds like you got an old one when tacos are chewy. Well, it's not really a taco. It's an ice cream that's shaped like a taco in the outside. Waffle cone is like the tortilla. You're making me hungry. Oh, maybe they should have ice cream baguettes. Nachos. Ice cream nachos. Ice cream nachos. It could be orange. Oh, so that's it. You would take like the waffle cone, you cut into little triangles, and then you cover it with orange sherbet or like orange cream, ice cream or something. I don't know. This is getting a little bit confusing. Roger just really wants some ice cream. Yeah, I don't know why I eat ice cream, but I really want a drumstick. Just hearing IP all hour made you want ice cream. Is that what it is? Probably. I see. I'm the newest. All right. Well, thanks everybody for watching. I hope you had a good time. We'll be back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Please join us then.