On 10/02/2016 12:09, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 5:31 PM, Joe Touch <touch@xxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> >> On 2/9/2016 12:47 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: >>> On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 3:27 PM, Joe Touch <touch@xxxxxxx> wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>> On 2/8/2016 4:47 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: >>>> ... >>>>> Problem is that most of us have ethernet hubs rather than true IP >>>>> switches. If we had real IP everywhere we could deprecate MAC >>>>> addresses. >>>> >>>> Except that we derive self-assigned IPv6 addresses from MAC addresses. No we didn't; they were derived from EUI-64 all along (IEEE MAC being a proper subset of EUI-64 may have confused people). But that's history, since the recommendation is being changed to 64 pseudo-random bits by various recent 6man documents. >>> If we didn't need them to be MAC addresses we could go to EUI-64 and >>> have 16 shiny new bits to play with. >> >> *You* wouldn't get to play with them; MAC vendors would. How would that >> help, given they're already intended to be unique? > > I don't want a unique identifier associated with my machine going on the wire. > > I was one of the first people arguing that WiFi devices should declare > a random MAC address. The idea of putting permanent linkable > information on the wire is an abomination. Maybe, although it does lead to interesting results like Wikipedia blocking the IPv4 addresses of various Swiss civil servants recently. However, IPv6 provided a layer 3 fix for this years ago (at the time of the Intel CPU serial number controversy, iirc). Fixing layer 2 is not our department. Brian