Why doesn’t every computer have 256 char domain name, along with a private key to prove it is the sole owner of the address?
Edits: For those technically inclined: Stuff like DHCP seems unnecessary if every device has a serial number based address that’s known not to collide. It seems way more simple and faster than leasing dynamic addresses. On top of that with VOIP I can get phone calls even without cell service, even behind a NAT. Why is the network designed in such a way where that is possible, but I can’t buy a static address that will persist across networks endpoint changes (e.g. laptop connecting to a new unconfigured wifi connection) such that I can initiate a connection to my laptop while it is behind a NAT.
- Yes, it would be a privacy nightmare, I want to know why it didnt turn out that way
- When I say phone number, I mean including area/country code
- AFAIK IP addresses (even static public ones) are not equivlent to phone numbers. I don’t get a new phone number every time I connect to a new cell tower. Even if a static IP is assigned to a device, my understanding is that connecting the device to a new uncontrolled WiFi, especially a router with a NAT, will make it so that people who try to connect to the static IP will simply fail.
- No, MAC addresses are not equivalent phone numbers. 1. Phone numbers have one unique owner, MAC addresses can have many owners because they can be changed at any time to any thing on most laptops. 2. A message can’t be sent directly to a MAC address in the same way as a phone number
- Yes, IMEI is unique, but my laptop doesn’t have one and even if it did its not the same as an eSim or sim card. We can send a message to an activated Sim, we can’t send a message to an IMEI or serial number
They do, it’s called an IP address.
Phones get numbers assigned to them by a cell service provider, in order to communicate on their network, which is basically the exact process for computers and IP addresses.
If you’re asking about the equivalent of like a SIM card, in the computer/internet world, that’s handled at higher layers, by digital certificates. And again, the process is almost exactly the same, except they don’t (usually) get put on physical chips.
Except you can spoof an IP address or get another one from the ISP just by asking. You can spoof a MAC address too.
Intel introduced unique processor id’s back in the late 90s.
Cell phones don’t get a new phone number every time they switch cell towers, so why do laptops.
Its not like I can write down the IP address of my friends laptop so I can send it a message once he gets to a new city. Right?
Laptops don’t get a new IP address every time they switch from one AP to another in the same network either. Your cell phone will get a new IP address if it switches to a different cell network.
I can get VOIP calls behind a NAT without cell service. I’m asking how is that possible. Is the router somehow part of the same AP as cell service?
Main difference there being that switching cities means probably switching ISPs. You can absolutely carry over your IP address when you move between the same provider, if that’s part of your service plan, and that may well happen with some ISPs even without it being part of your plan. There just isn’t really much of a need for people to carry a static IP, except for some businesses, and I’d say the main reason is that people don’t visit websites by memorizing and typing in an IP. They do memorize and type in phone numbers.
I can send a message to the IP address but AFAIK the message won’t get to him because he will almost certainly have a new address when he connects to the airport WiFi in the new city.
IP address is really the best comparison here. Some computers share an IP just like entire call centers may share the same phone number. And neither IP addresses and packets nor phone numbers are properly authenticated without additional enforcement systems.
Internal networks exist for computers and phones. It’s a nice parallel.
Sure they can. If you put a network behind a router they will share an egress/ingress IP. And there are certain high availability setups where computers share IPs in the same subnet for hot/standby failover.
a) what the hell is ipv32?
b) it’s astounding how many upvotes some of these nonsensical answers have
- Yeah I was lazy with saying ipv32 just to mean something excessively long. I didnt want to say ipv6, since I kinda think it needs to at least be 64bits (edit: ipv6 is actually 128bits), and really for a public-private key pair it should be larger, so more like 512 to avoid anything like the v4 v6 cacatestrophe again in 20 years with post quantum forms of asymetric key challenges. But I didnt feel like writing all that out.
- I’m with you. I knew I’d get people not reading and say “that’s the ip address”, but MAC address? 🤦♂️
IPv6 has a maximum number of addresses of 2^64, or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616. Enough addresses that all 9 billion people on earth could each own 2 billion unique address. A theoretical IPv32 is wholly unnecessary for a very very long time.
I was wrong, I didnt realize ipv6 was 128bit. Still stuff like IPFS and git hashes are larger than 128bit to prevent collisions so there is a precedence for using larger address spaces when not having address reuse.
That’s what the serial numbers on the parts themselves are.
Every land-line phone I’ve had didn’t carry it’s number with it. The number is assigned to a fixed, immovable address. Back then it was part of a physical switching system - in the switching center, shafts would move up and down and rotate to connect one circuit to another. These were circuit-switched networks. (These were eventually replaced by digital switches).
The only number that’s static on my cell phone is the EID, because it’s necessary with a mobile device connecting to a radio-based network. The system needs to know how to route a connection whenever the phone moves - “which tower is it on” - which is handled by the device registering with the tower, the network then updates it’s database. The phone number with a cell phone is specifically for routing user connections (essentially tells the system what subscriber is associated with a given endpoint - your phone).
None of this is required for internet connections, as you get connectivity via a router which is the Internet-facing address for other devices to see. Things were established this way initially because there’s no need for an endpoint device to be directly exposed (plus hardware and software capabilities at the time).
Also, I hope to never see the day when all consumer endpoint devices are directly on the internet. That’s a bad idea in so many ways (and why I argue IPv6 is generally useless for endpoint consumer devices). IP6 is great for plenty of other reasons.
no need for an endpoint to be directly exposed
If I were an engineer in the past, trying to send a message back to an endpoint (e.g. a server response) I would’ve reached for everything having a static IP, same as the EID system with phones, instead of the DHCP multi-tier NAT type system with temp addresses.
I’m all but certain they didnt do it for privacy reasons at the time.
Well, endpoints then were largely mainframe type systems, long before PCs existed, let alone network-capable PCs and http. So it was a different idea than what we have today.
Before internet, you could connect two physically disparate systems using point-to-point, permanently switched connections (so it always consumed a potential connection even when no data was being transmitted). If you had Point A connected to Point B, you need a third connection to comm with Point C. The idea was, if B already had a connection to C, why not share that bandwidth/connection so A only needed one connection? And then apply a data-switching concept (e.g. Packet switching), instead of circuit-switching.
We were still using P-to-P connections in the late 90’s because internet capabilites weren’t quite up to what some systems needed for latency, timing, and bandwidth.
At first, just getting two endpoint mainframes connected was a big deal, and individual user devices wasn’t much of a thought, yet. Most stuff was still mainframe based, so having those connected was sufficient for user communication/data sharing anyway. Since user connectivity wasn’t the main concern - moving data from one system to another was, say an entity has 2 locations, and needs to sync the systems in those two locations. So you either use a circuit-switched P-to-P, with downtime for users when sync is happening, or send physical tapes (magnetic or even punched paper tapes) cross-country to move data, with that data being out-of-sync and requiring manual updates to re-sync.
Routing was necessary primarily for backbone transit, secondarily for organizations with multiple systems, hence the IP Classful approach.
DHCP is a local network requirement - ask any Admin about static IP addresses - that’s a nightmare. I don’t even like it at home with a handful of devices.
NAT is a result of the limited IP address space, not DHCP - there’s simply not enough addresses in 32bits for every local device to have a public IP (nor would you want this), plus having multiple services behind a router using local addressing. Even with static local addresses, you’d need NAT.
Also, look at the time - if you had a LAN in the late 80’s, it was something like Banyan Vines or Netware IPX (neither of which was routable originally), for local comms between local systems. Any internet/external network requirements were for (again) moving data between disparate locations. The idea that a workstation needed specific internet/non-local access to (what?) really didn’t make sense. It would comm with a local data source (mainframe/IBM 360, etc), and that system would manage retrieving or syncing data from elsewhere. A workstation was largely a dumb terminal before PCs (other than actual “workstations” which is a different animal) .
UDID is kind-of what you’re talking about, but not an exact analogue.
