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  • Hacker News
  • This is absurd and I love it.
    by danielrmay
  • There is no "IPv8". Any crackpot can submit an internet-draft to the IETF, and this person happened to call theirs IPv8. If the submitter actually read the draft rather than feeding it to the slop cannon, they would have realized it is also a LLM hallucination that someone uploaded to IETF.
    by TD-Linux
  • The entire point of the experiment was to take this specific, absurd Internet-Draft (which indeed exists as an active submission) and see what happens if someone actually implements it to the letter instead of just hand-waving it away.

    LLMs might be able to hallucinate RFC text, but they certainly can't compile a patched Linux 6.6 kernel with a working AF_INET8 socket family, patch musl/iproute2/frr, spawn a 10-node QEMU mesh, and route 112,000 active FIB entries under live traffic.

    The source code and commit history are right there in the GitLab repos - feel free to pull the kernel tree and run the test suite yourself.

    by turborigby
  • Worse, there is an IPv8, from 1994, the obsolete P internet protocol (PIP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IP_version_numbers
    by RobotToaster
  • OpenPGP key servers are an internet draft, if memory serves. I guess they don't exist either.
    by stackghost
  • I am fairly sure the authors do understand this (see: "Most network engineers would laugh this off as an April Fools RFC written by an enterprise architect on buzzword overdrive."). But since the proposal got a lot of attention, responding to it is a public service. And delegating this to an LLM arguably provides an accurate signal as to how much human attention the original proposal deserved :-P
    by ameliaquining
  • Where is IPv7?
    by nairboon
  • It goes up in powers of two.

    2, 4, 8 then 16.

    Very nice.

    by bana-io
  • It's like how we skipped from Windows 95 to Windows 98
    by hk1337
  • I have that RFC on my iPhone 9
    by xp84
  • Did you implement it, or did Claude implement it?
    by citruscomputing
  • I'm pretty sure an AI wrote all or most of this article.
    by basscomm
  • The "no flag day" is how ipv6 should have been engineered.
    by exabrial
  • IPv6 never had flag days and was specifically designed for gradual deployment. In retrospect, overly conservative "ships in the night" routing increased costs and delayed IPv6 deployment though.
    by wmf
  • It was engineered like that. It was known from the start that having a flag day wasn't possible (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726#section-5.5):

      We believe that it is not possible to have a "flag-day" form of
  transition in which all hosts and routers must change over at
  once. The size, complexity, and distributed administration of the
  Internet make such a cutover impossible.
    And when they picked a design, it indeed didn't have a flag day (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-hinden-ipng-over...):

      IPng is a new version of IP which is designed to be an evolutionary step
  from IPv4.  It is a natural increment to IPv4.  It can be installed as a
  normal software upgrade in internet devices and is interoperable with
  the current IPv4.  Its deployment strategy was designed to not have any
  "flag" days.
    If saying "we can't have/didn't do a flag day" in the design documents, and then not having a flag day, isn't enough to stop you from arguing that v6 should have been engineered without a flag day, I have to wonder what v6 could possibly have done to make you happy with it.
    by Dagger2
  • isn't any ipv6+ supposed to use any string address and no DNS is required at all? :D
    by wbsun
  • Thanks for going through the work of testing this. Better to have the actual results for a joke than to joke about theories :)
    by altairprime
  • Question for someone who knows more about this stuff than I do: Why don't the problems in the "economic collapse" section also apply to IPv6? Or do they, and we've only been saved by lack of adoption?
    by ameliaquining
  • For one thing, RIRs are not businesses. If they have less work to do they can have less staff. Worst case they could receive government funding like in the old days.
    by wmf
  • Thanks for testing, in year 2026, still IPv6 is not fully well utilized homes, corporates especially it is worse at clouds (AWS, GCP) if you not limit north to south, they are not good for east-to-west compared to telco providers. For example, GCP uses IP forwarding for IPv6 real IP address is not allocated at machine. At some of the components which is EKS is not support every case at IPv6.

    So IPv8 can be available around year 2300 I guess :) (i have not inspected v8 RFC yet)

    by ahmetozer
  • If IPv6 were wholeheartedly "adopted" then I and most consumers would not require "dual-stack" at home. Dual-stack is a terrible curse and a hack. IPv4 NAT is likewise a curse and a hack. We are left with these legacy curses only because the world can't seem to adopt IPv6. You don't need to abolish IPv4 to do it, you just need to get AAAA records and support the protocol! If you run a server or a public network, and you're not reachable by IPv6 in 2026, you're part of the problem.

    I would not need "a home LAN" at home; I would not need "Private IP address space"; I would not need NATing router technology; my router software and configuration would be far, far simpler if my devices were able to single-stack. I believe the source of a lot of connectivity errors and difficult Heisenbugs involve dual-stack problems.

    My devices don't need lateral connectivity on the LAN except for the printer. I attempted shutting off IPv4 on the printer and it dropped off entirely. I can't understand that. It doesn't need to reach the outside world for any reason. My Chromebook and Android don't speak to each other, except for Quick Share, which shouldn't require IPv4 addressing.

    Has anyone devised a protocol or scheme by which an IPv6-only device can seamlessly access IPv4-only devices through their ISP and not local support? In other words, opportunistically intercept connection attempts and interpose a tunnel? It seems like this would be a final component to just killing off IPv4, en masse, in people's homes.

    by ButlerianJihad
  • > ...in year 2026, still IPv6 is not fully well utilized...

    Eh. It took quite a long time, but even HN has a v6 address these days:

      $ dig +short news.ycombinator.com ANY
  2606:7100:1:67::26
  209.216.230.207
    by simoncion
  • IPv8 is just a reactionary response to IPv6 not being "IPv4 with larger addresses" like people who know IPv4 well would prefer.

    There would be no reason to adopt it if IPv6 were adopted.

    by clhodapp
  • It's 2026 and we're turning troll/fake spec submissions into actual usable technology. What a time to be alive.

    There's only one thing in the article I disagree with:

    > RIRs (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC) Go Financially Bankrupt

    This is purely an argument of pragmatism, rather than having any technical merit. If a system works, and meaningfully improves over another system, I couldn't care less that people aren't able to effectively monetize it.

    by Magicrafter13
  • RIRs (RIPE NCC, ARIN, APNIC, etc.) are non-profit membership organizations, not commercial entities trying to "monetize" IP addresses.

    Their registration fees directly fund critical global Internet infrastructure: the WHOIS databases, RPKI trust anchors, root DNS servers, and policy governance. If their operational budget collapses by 90%, it's not a loss of "profit" - it means there is literally no one funded to maintain the authoritative registry of who owns which ASN and route origin authorizations.

    And even setting governance and economics aside, the technical failure modes remain fatal: 28-byte header PMTU blackholing, uRPF collisions on multi-homed links, and ASIC slow-path punting on existing linecards.

    by turborigby
  • I think it's kinda cool to see how things would pan out instead of just plain theorycrafting - even if this isn't a serious proposal, it can be a start of one.
    by torginus
  • There's precedent, IP over Avian Carriers was tested back in 2001.
    by lrasinen
  • I appreciate this. IPv8 is a terrible, terrible idea, and it’s good to see someone actually built it out to prove the depths of its terribleness. Well done.
    by kstrauser