Everyone here is reading the comments page of a Slashdot article, speculating about what will or won't happen at an upcoming Apple WWDC.

I think we can take 'incredibly dull lives' as a given.

That seems like short-term thinking. A better approach would be to figure out how to do the future-prediction optimizations in ways that malware cannot exploit, so we can reap the benefits of the optimizations.

Hell, what stops one of these rich people from using his money to take care of those who need it now? The only one who tries is Gates, and he gets routinely villified for trying.

NAT gives you partial connectivity, with additional headaches and cost.

The alternative to NAT44 is no connectivity at all, so NAT44 is tolerated.

The alternative to NAT66 is fully working connectivity, so there are very few instances where you'd want to suffer partial connectivity encumbered by NAT if you don't have to.

Exactly, there is NAT66 and it's rarely used - because it breaks things and adds unnecessary complexity/cost.

Poor software is exactly it. For a typical end user network the prefix changes, your machine gets a new autoconfig address, and anything local (if anything) that you access is still accessible via the same mdns hostname. More demanding users can get a static block, or use ULA/LL address space for local use.

Look at the public stats, millions of people are successfully using IPv6 all around the world.

There is legislation for that in several countries already, someone is responsible for the NAT gateway and if they're not keeping adequate logs to be able to pin arbitrary traffic to a specific user then the operator of the gateway is held responsible. Several people went to jail in france over this a couple of years back. It makes it very expensive to operate a NAT gateway because you have to log pretty much everything, and this level of logging is extremely bad for privacy too. If you've already sunk the cost of acquiring and retaining all those logs, you might as well try to recoup some of the costs by data mining it.

If you want to live in a dystopian world where you're only a client, and you're beholden to a small handful of corporations... Welcome to the curated networks of AOL and Compuserve.

Today end to end connectivity is safer than ever, because client operating systems have moved on from the "every listening service enabled by default" of the past. Client devices simply don't have listening services exposed by default.
And you know what's much worse than putting your machine on a connection where inbound traffic is unrestricted? Putting it on a public wifi network where not only is there no restriction whatsoever on what traffic the owner of the network or other users can send to you, but you also have no control over what the owner of the network does to your traffic. He can mitm, attempt ssl interception etc.
And yet people connect to public wifi networks all the time and the world hasn't ended, because current devices don't sit there with 50 unused services listening waiting to be exploited.

How many security breaches of end users occur due to inbound connections to listening services these days? Very few if any, only very niche situations. Virtually all happen via something which the user made an outbound connection to.

Plus by being unable to have inbound connectivity, you now have to rely on third parties for everything. You can't access your devices at home (CCTV, NAS etc) when you're outside unless you have a third party to relay the traffic. Can you trust these third parties? How long will they provide the service? How do you know they wont change the terms? People complain about this kind of enshittification all the time, and a lot of it is driven by widespread NAT preventing self hosting.

You do, there's a mobile ID app too.

The side effect of all these fines is a very low crime rate, a country that's very clean and very safe. And most of these are things that reasonable people would not do anyway.

Similarly most of these things are illegal in other countries too - like drink driving, drugs etc. The only difference is that the punishments are harsher, and the enforcement more rigorous.

I've been to cities where graffiti is everywhere, drugs and drug paraphernalia (needles etc) are all over the place, as is garbage. Quite frankly it's disgusting, and if hefty punishments are the only way to stop it then more countries should copy their example.

It's not a coincidence, but the causation is not direct. It's just that both are driven by another cause. Both funding cuts to research, arbitrary decisions about visas, etc. are driven by xenophobic paranoia.

This *isn't* to claim that there aren't real concerns, but the real concerns are a trivial proportion.

Also cards are convenient from a customer perspective.
Quicker to make payments, provides a log of transactions, no messing with change or having to visit the ATM etc.

The points come from the transaction processing fees...
There is a transaction processing cost with every form of payment - taking cash is not free, taking checks is not free. Cards are generally more efficient because they're fully electronic, so some of the fees can be passed back to the customer.

The alternative would be giving everyone a discount % for card payments relative to other payment methods. If they just lowered the fees to merchants, then merchants would make more margin on card payments.

Have you ever considered that people who can afford to buy up front, still buy on credit if the terms are agreeable (eg interest free for 6 months)?
You pay the same amount, but you pay it later so that money can earn interest for you until then.

A lot of these services are interest free, or provide an initial interest-free period.

I could afford to pay up front, but then someone offers me 6 months interest free? Why wouldn't i take that?
Then the money can sit in a savings account for 6 months earning interest for me.
I end up paying the exact same amount, only 6-12 months later by which time i've earned some free interest on my savings and inflation has made the repayment amount marginally lower.

I've bought a number of things in this way for this reason.

NAT is just a temporary kludge that allowed legacy ip to limp along for longer. It has nothing to do with migration.
The idea is that you'd still have a firewall to control access, but would not need the overhead of NAT.
When IPv6 was designed, it was still possible to get larger blocks of legacy address space and many places operated without NAT, so you could have true dual stack.

In fact most implementations these days are not true dual stack, they provide native v6 and partial legacy ip encumbered by nat.

* Devices adjacent to the WAN interface can typically still route inside (depends on topology of the ISP).
* XSRF can be used to trigger scans through a user browser.
* Similar attacks can be done against other protocols such as SIP or FTP.
* Many strains of malware will automatically scan local legacy address space looking for devices.
* For many ISPs implementing CGNAT you can still scan from one customer to another
* Some NAT gateways use a "full cone" approach, so traffic can still enter from previously uncontacted hosts
* Some ALGs can be triggered to open/forward arbitrary ports

Yes.
1) Consistent address space allowing for simple firewall rules and easier logging.
2) Firewall rules preventing access to devices
3) Huge address spaces that mean the devices would not be discovered even if there were no firewall rules
4) Multiple VLANs segregating devices from one another

Better than broken junk duct taped together with added unnecessary complexity.

With v6 you know the device is addressable, you scan it to make sure its services aren't reachable, and you have different policies per device/vlan as needed.
With legacy ip you assume the device isn't reachable, but it could become accessible in unexpected situations.

XSRF leverages a user browser to target the device... There will typically be users and not just IoT devices on a given network.
For instance i'm aware that a particular (large) ISP ships routers which use the legacy address 192.168.0.1 by default, and which have a vulnerable script on their web interface which allows execution of arbitrary commands. All i need to do is to get their customers to visit an HTML page which includes an IMG tag pointing to http://192.168.0.1/cgi-bin/vul... - when the browser issues a GET request there, the given command is executed as root on the device.
Actually achieving that is easy - embedded images or tags in a forum frequented by such users, emails with an embedded image tag, a site vulnerable to XSS etc.
These same devices also support IPv6, but i have no way to guess the address they will use and the possible address space even knowing the vendor mac address range and EUI-64 is too large to brute force.
Most customers use the default router, in the default configuration.
If i were maliciously inclined im sure i could find other ISPs shipping the same devices too.

Those are probably also practical in parts of Florida, California, and perhaps Texas.

Sorry, but that's not "regardless of the winter". A hard freeze will kill them off. I lived in a place where that was a "once in 20 years" event, but it still happened. (Granted, it never got hot enough for the bananas to fruit.)

This is a strong case for fixing the mechanisms that demand "full time" work, particularly benefits. Need to split especially health insurance off from employment status, one way or another. We need the flexibility to reduce working hours or years without being hit by the limitations of "part time work".

Also a good way to let some folks better assemble a 'full time' work life from multiple 'part time' jobs.

While more drastic measures may be premature, I do think it has always made sense to do something to break that "employer == path to health insurance" BS (as well as other benefits).