IPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember

(sentence2ipv6.tib3rius.com)

40 points | by LorenDB 3 hours ago

20 comments

  • 1970-01-01 2 hours ago
    If you're remembering your IPv6 address you're doing IPv6 wrong. In fact, it's good practice to always use a temporary IPv6 address.

    https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8981#name-problem-s...

    • idiotsecant 1 hour ago
      Yet another reason why ipv6 will never happen
      • sholladay 1 hour ago
        I think the Matter standard is going to cause IPv6 adoption to increase significantly in the coming years. People will demand it, without even knowing what Matter or IPv6 are. They just want to be able to turn their lights off from their phone without any extra hardware or software.
        • spaqin 56 minutes ago
          They've had years to demand it, I don't see why it would suddenly change. Most users who buy "smart" appliances are not power users, don't set everything up themselves and just rely on manufacturer's servers anyway and don't need a direct connection - and are okay with it.
      • iknowstuff 1 hour ago
        it already happened.

        also I sure as hell dont remember my ipv4 address

        • RulerOf 1 hour ago
          I don't remember my ipv4 addresses either, but I recognize them as mine when I see them.

          I've never recognized an IPv6 address or prefix used in my networks.

          • jorvi 49 minutes ago
            You can set your ULA to something like "fddd:192:168::/48" and then on your vlan you prefix hint, say, "66". Now, any device on that vlan will be addressable by "fddd:192:168:66::$host". For example, your gateway ('router') for that vlan would be "fddd:192:168:66::1".

            If you want to be really wonky you can script DHCPv6 to statically assign ULA IPv6 leases that match the IPv4, and expire them when the IPv4 lease expires, but like said upthread, addressing hosts via IPv6 is the wrong way to go about it. On your lan, you really want to be doing ".local" / ".lan" / ".home".

        • apitman 1 hour ago
          Adoption has been flat under 50% for a year now.
          • msla 39 minutes ago
            A bit less than 50% of the whole Internet.

            Wow. That's so amazingly unpopular. Why anyone bothers talking about something untold millions of people use every day is beyond me.

          • umanwizard 33 minutes ago
            It’s not flat: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

            You have to take into account seasonal trends. The summer is always higher, so yes, we’re currently below last summer, but we are above last April 1st, and this summer will be higher than last summer.

      • umanwizard 35 minutes ago
        I’m always bemused when I read comments like this. Regardless of whether you think IPv6 is good or bad, it is happening. IPv6 traffic to Google goes up by a few percentage points a year, steadily, and is at around 50% now.
  • ssl-3 2 hours ago
    I tried it. Maybe it's easier to speak than hexadecimal is.

    But I'm not sure that "How morally the enviable assistances categorize the insistent iodine beyond new time where new systems stalk" has the same memorable quality as "correct horse battery staple" does.

  • apitman 1 hour ago
    Being essentially impossible to memorize is one of the worst attributes of IPv6. I memorize and manually type IPv4 addresses all the time and it's super useful.
    • RiverCrochet 32 minutes ago
      DNS, Avahi are super usefuler.
    • umanwizard 32 minutes ago
      What would have been your solution to needing more bits? More information is always going to be harder to remember.
      • anonym29 27 minutes ago
        Adding two extra bits to each octet, making each octet range from a still memorable 0-1023 rather than 0-255, would result in an addressing scheme 256x larger than all of IPv4 combined. The entire internet works fine even when IPv4 was nominally exhausted. NAT and CGNAT are not sins, they're not crimes, and there's no rational reason to be as disgusted with them as IPv6 fans are. Even then, IPv4 exhaustion wasn't really a true technical problem in the first place, it was an allocation problem. There are huge /8 blocks of public IPv4 space that remain almost entirely unused to this day.

        The reason I'm an IPv4 advocate in the IPv4/IPv6 war is that the problem was "we're out of address", not "your thermostat should be natively routable from every single smartphone on the planet by default and inbound firewalls should become everyone's responsibility to configure for every device they own".

        CGNAT is a feature, not a bug. Blending in with the crowd with a dynamic WAN IP is a helpful boost to privacy, even if not a one-stop solution. IPv6 giving everyone a globally unique, stable address by default is a regression in everyone's default privacy, and effectively a death sentence for the privacy of non-technical users who aren't capable of configuring privacy extensions. It's a wet dream for shady data brokers, intelligence agencies, organized crime, and script kiddies alike - all adversaries / attackers in threat modelling scenarios.

        IPv6 adds configuration surface I don't want. Privacy extensions, temporary addresses, RA flags, NDP, DHCPv6 vs SLAAC — these are problems I don't have with IPv4. More features means more opportunities to footgun with misconfigurations, being forced to waste my time learning and understanding the nuances of each (in again, what amounts to system I want nothing to do with).

        "Reaching your own stuff" is already a solved problem, too. Tailscale/Headscale gives you authenticated, encrypted, NAT-traversing connectivity. It's better than being globally routable. It's also opt-in for anyone who wants it, and not forced on anyone, unlike the IPv6 transition.

  • Gathering6678 1 hour ago
    It reminds me of what3words, using three words to describe any location on earth. I really hoped that could catch on.
    • wzdd 50 minutes ago
      Kind of like what3words, except what3words uses three words which you stand a chance of remembering, whereas this produced, for an address similar to mine, "Miniature nerves eulogize gaily inside erect lion yet able stables hiss the conclusive consultation."
    • katbyte 1 hour ago
      what3words Is terrible and search and rescue teams are actively against people using it.
      • Gathering6678 48 minutes ago
        Care to elaborate why? I'm just curious since I didn't know (1) there was actually any kind of serious usage, or (2) there was pushback from rescue team...
        • ryankrage77 39 minutes ago
          W3W is very aggressive about protecting their IP, they don't want it to be a standard anyone can use like lat/long.

          They advertise it as being useful for search/rescue as you can provide a precise location over an unclear voice channel. They conveniently ignore that speaking numbers is clearer than speaking random words.

          I'm sure there's more I'm unaware of.

  • Waterluvian 2 hours ago
    Something that I think was probably once obvious to me but I rediscovered recently is just how intensely wired for song the brain is. If you want to memorize anything, doing it as a song makes it far easier.

    I’d really love to see things like this generate little jingles along with the sentence. :)

    • vunderba 2 hours ago
      There actually was an attempt on HN a little while back to use GenAI to convert facts, flashcards, lists, etc. into automated melodic mnemonics. The biggest issue in that particular case was that it was also generating the motif from scratch.

      At least for me, part of the reason I can still sing the countries of the world is because the original Animaniacs song was set to a tune that was already familiar: “Jarabe Tapatío” (aka the Mexican Hat Dance).

    • Terr_ 2 hours ago
      It's huge when you consider all the data humans have stored and transferred orally over the millennia.

      Music, meter, and rhyme are all (among other things) algorithms for indexing and error-correction, tools very suitable to the squishy hardware.

  • buttocks 1 hour ago
    The new times take now beneath the new time while new times take the new year.

    Or more concisely, localhost.

    • wowczarek 50 minutes ago
      Commented with the same without reading through the comments first; now deleted.

      That is a lot of words for ::1.

      Edit: there was another one below, haha :)

  • al_borland 1 hour ago
    What is the use-case for this? I’m trying to think of an IPv6 address I would need to remember, and then when I’d have access to this site without having access to a text file where I could have noted the address down. I’m coming up empty.
    • boston_clone 1 hour ago
      it may more likely have something to do with the date of April Fools :) seems it got more than a few folks here haha
  • RedShift1 2 hours ago
    I don't understand how the mapping works. An address has 8 parts and produces 16 words, so each part consists of 2 words. If we take the example 2a02, that gets encoded to "how atop", but I don't see how that text helps me that "how atop" means 2a02? Am I suppose to memorize both? How does that help?
    • spprashant 2 hours ago
      You are not supposed worry about the mapping. You trust the website to help decode it. You just remember the sentence. It's a little like what3words for coordinates.

      The rationale being you are more likely to remember grammatical cogent sentence, than a random string of alphanumeric characters. Although I will agree that the generated sentences don't seem easy to remember. So I doubt it's utility.

  • Bratmon 2 hours ago
    The new times take now beneath the new time while new times take the new time.
  • OJFord 2 hours ago
    The first (of two) examples encodes to:

    > How now the smart flies take the new time beyond new time where new times come.

    ..Nice idea, but it may need some more thought. (Even more so as 2001:db8::1 is much easier to remember than that!) (I wrote that parenthetical from memory on edit, vs. had to copy-paste the sentence when it was my intention to comment on it within seconds.)

  • vel0city 2 hours ago
    So just imagine if there was a service that could translate any words you wanted into the IP address instead of relying on some website to generate jibberish. Wouldn't that be cool to use instead? Some kind of name system? Based around domains of authority?
  • amstan 37 minutes ago
    Ah yes, because "How now the smart flies take the new time beyond new time where new times come." is so much easier to remember than "2001:db8::1".
  • Singletail 2 hours ago
    I'm old. I can't remember breakfast.
  • Uptrenda 1 hour ago
    We kind of had the same idea for ECDSA public keys (an imagined solution to zokos triangle -- human readable and decentralized) as well as private keys (BIP39 brain wallets). Honestly it still falls short of truly name-based though.
  • re 2 hours ago
    Not too sure of the utility of this. It's not an easy sentence to remember, because while grammatical, it's nonsense—it would take some effort. So if I'm trying to memorize a static IP, setting up a DNS name is likely to be easier. And also if I'm going to be using this to memorize IPs I'd like the algorithm to be open source.

    All that being said, I think it's a neat idea and a cool tool!

  • blurrybird 50 minutes ago
    Mine comes with a swear!

    […] thaw the new case beyond pure mass where flagrant toys fucken.

  • emilfihlman 2 hours ago
    Just proves that 16 bytes was too much, and we should have just gone 8 bytes.
    • apitman 1 hour ago
      I'm fine with 16 but they should have only used the bytes as they were needed, at least for 5 and 6 byte addresses, so those who desire short addresses could buy them.
  • paulsutter 1 hour ago
    ipv6 is for faceless hordes of cellphones, which could just as easily be NAT

    despite being an ipv6 skeptic, i’ve been thinking to try using ipv6 for our new company network, but make the addresses purely readable

    • RiverCrochet 31 minutes ago
      There's another way to make addresses purely readable that's been around longer than NAT: DNS.