News of 2016

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SixXS wishes everybody a happy and fruitful 2016!

IPv6 is growing out of it's teeny years, and is already a European Adult (18+) and almost of drinking age even in the USA (21+, for most states)

SixXS will be doing Call-Your-ISP-For-IPv6 actions through 2016. January 2016 is the first month: call your ISP and ask where your native IPv6 is!

For more details about the Call-Your-ISP-For-IPv6 action, please read our News article about "Call Your ISP for IPv6!".

As in all other years, in case of questions, comments or problems don't hesitate to contact us.

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We are receiving a lot of good feedback from around the Internet regarding our "Call Your ISP for IPv6!" action.

Because of that we are extending the "Call Your ISP for IPv6" action for another month.

We do have to note one negative and important comment: threatening support personnel at ISPs does not make them become more enthusiastic about IPv6 deployment. If they state there are no plans, they are not to blame as they do not make the decisions, but their management clearly has made a decision against or is still simply just living in the stone age under a big rock. Hence, thank them for taking note of IPv6 and asking their management about it and tell them you are taking your money elsewhere. Canceling subscriptions and noting that it is because of lack of IPv6 will make management take note of IPv6.

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SixXS users have started a "I Called my ISP Wiki" page in the wiki.

Please contribute to it to share your findings wether your ISP has arrived in 2016 or has been ignoring IPv6 for the last two decades.

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We have been receiving more feedback from around the Internet regarding our "Call Your ISP for IPv6!" action.

A few gems:

• Unitymedia "1% of business customers ask for IPv6 it is not economical to support that" -- noting that they are forcing DS-Lite upon their regular customers and using the freed IPv4 addresses for their business customers and charging those customers heavily for IPv4 addresses.
• VividWireless "There are no plans to support IPv6 for the short-to-medium term, I expect this will change as older IPv4-only gear is gradually retired" -- this while they knew IPv6 was coming for 20 years already, obviously they totally missed all the conferences and other events about IPv6 transition and to start buying IPv6 enabled gear a decade go: thus call them!
• Ziggo "They say they will roll out 'later this year' but they have been saying that for more than five years." -- Ziggo is part of Unitymedia mentioned above.
• Brighthouse "Brighthouse Networks Sales does not know what ipv6 is or for that matter what ipv4 is, tech support says there will be no support ipv6 for the long term."

Thus please keep on CALLing your ISPs, calls create a support cost, when the support cost gets high, they might finally realize that IPv6 is actually needed. We will be making a related announcement to our existing users per email soon.

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SixXS Website is now reachable over HTTP/2.

Since its inception in the early 90s, HTTP has not had any really large update to the protocol. Although it works very well in most cases, there are certainly some downsides to this protocol, specifically when it comes to pipelining and efficiency in transport. HTTP/2 has been around for a while now and it seemed about time for us to enable it.

As of today, the NGINX servers that provide our frontends have been configured to also serve HTTP/2 in addition to the HTTP/1.1 transports. This is enabled in most major browsers and will allow for a more efficient use of our website. Enjoy!

In case of questions, comments or problems don't hesitate to contact us.

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On April 1st we sent out a large mailing, copied below, to all active users of SixXS. That date should really raise some suspicions. Various newsoutlets, e.g. the very well respected German Magazin Heise picked up on it, even though it was only distributed through email directly to users.

The mailing was sent out primarily to shake up the tiny world of SixXS users a bit that they have been using non-native IPv6 connectivity and that as IPv6 is 20 years old already as per RFC1883 (indeed, not 4 years old like Vodafone seems to believe even though have had IPv6 since at least 2005), they really need to Call Your ISP for IPv6 so that you get native IPv6 and are not relying on a 3rd party for connectivity.

You should of course have been doing that ever since you found out about IPv6. Indeed, market forces are important there, but remember: you get what you pay for. Thus if your ISP does not provide native IPv6 today, maybe time to leave them for another provider. There are even commercial VPN providers who can provide you with this kind of connectivity. And indeed, do contact your government if there is only one ISP in your neighborhood as monopolies are forbidden in most of the civilized world.

Our primary message is thus indeed that: Call Your ISP for IPv6.

SixXS has been providing IPv6 connectivity for almost 16 years already and we really cannot keep on doing that for 'just fun'. The cost of time is a very important factor in running any kind of free service. This while time is the most important thing in life. And while we have quite a good deal of fun and have learned lots while running SixXS, at one point we really run completely out of time for running this service. Please remind yourself, that after 15+ years a lot of things have changed.

Next to that the machines hosting the PoPs will also die of old age as some have really been running for well over a decade! Do give a very warm thank you for all the ISPs who have and are donating the hardware and connectivity and man power for operating the PoPs, it is something a lot of people seem to forget: actual people and companies have spend time and resources on that. This while your ISP, using your money, did not do a thing.

On the subject of Rate Limiting: this was the 1st of April part of the mailing. SixXS is not going to enable any additional ratelimiting. All the ratelimiting has been in place since the first day that SixXS started, and there is nothing we can change about that.

This will be easier to understand when referencing our FAQ: The tunnel is slow. Indeed, there are physical and other natural ratelimits in every single network in the world. Most PoPs have a 100mbit or 1GE interface, a few a nice 10GE interface one. When SixXS started a full 100mbit was a lot of capacity. Now, you likely have 200 mbit or even 1GE interfaces at home. As the PoPs are shared infrastructures with 1000s of users on them, and next to that the network between your host and the PoP and then the PoP and your destination are involved there will be natural ratelimiting as there just won't fit more through the pipe.

This should also be one of the primary reasons why you should have been calling your ISP: you are paying them for connectivity, with a certain bandwidth.

But if you go through a PoP, you are sharing bandwidth with a lot of other people. And thus, you will be naturally ratelimited by the network.

A copy of the mailing we sent out:

Subject: [SixXS] Call your ISP for IPv6!

Dear Full Name,

Today is the day: it is time to call your ISP and ask for native IPv6![1]

You have been using SixXS as an IPv6 connectivity provider, and clearly
did not yet call your ISP to ask them for native IPv6. Or you did, but
they did not really get the message yet or did not provide reverse or
static addresses: Call them again for native IPv6!

Over 20 years ago RFC1883[2], the RFC that formally defined IPv6, was
published by the IETF[3]. From 1996 till 2006 the 6bone[4] existed and
functioned as a testing ground for IPv6. Per 2006, which is now a decade
ago, IPv6 has been available worldwide in production from a large variety
of ISPs.

During the last decade, IPv4 address space has also run out at most of
the RIRs and most of the large Internet properties have enabled IPv6 on
their services.

SixXS has been in existence since 2001-ish[5] and over the last 15 years we
have been providing connectivity to people around the world.

Unfortunately it seems a large number of ISPs think that our service is
a free pass for them to not deploy IPv6, as they direct their (paying)
customers who want IPv6 to our service.

With IPv6 being 20 years old now, IPv4 addresses being out, and no movement
happening, we started our "Call your ISP for IPv6 action" in December 2015[6].
We are now fully stopping accepting signups and tunnel & subnet requests.
We'll also be starting to ratelimit IPv4 speeds on the PoPs to make sure
that you notice that the freebie that is SixXS will not stay around forever.

Please really start calling your ISP, which you should have done so repeatedly
already during the time that you had IPv6 by SixXS and not from your ISP.

We hope, that by people calling their ISPs, the number one support ticket
at these ISPs will be "I want IPv6" and that these ISPs who have typically
not moved a finger yet in the last two decades to deploy or even test IPv6,
will be finally putting IPv6 on their roadmaps

Greets,
 Jeroen Massar, SixXS

The (IPv)6 linked footnotes:
[1] https://www.sixxs.net/wiki/Call_Your_ISP
[2] RFC1883: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1883
[3] IETF: https://www.ietf.org
[4] 6bone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6bone
[5] https://www.sixxs.net/about/history/
[6] https://www.sixxs.net/news/2015/#callyourispforipv6-1201

Please keep on contributing to Call Your ISP for IPv6 - The Wiki

If you have funny stories and a Twitter account, don't hesitate to spam them on Social Media, which is what companies tend to look at. We try to retweet as many as possible funny ones. Actually it is almost sad to see what some of the uninformed responses are.

Nevertheless, we hope that everybody has success in getting native IPv6!

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Recently the European Commission has vetted new Net Neutrality laws that prohibit ISPs from blocking access to network prefixes, be that IPv4 or IPv6.

As many ISPs still do not provide native IPv6 to their paying customers, this provides an extra reason for them to finally start deploying IPv6: their customers cannot fully reach www.europa.eu (2a01:7080::/32) where their rights are shown.

Since we started our Call Your ISP action, quite a few angry ISPs have contacted us stating that it is 'unfair' that we tell their customers to call them, typically stating that they 'did not have enough time to prepare'; this while IPv6 is over 20 years old.

We thus call upon you again, our dear users of the Internet, to keep on calling your ISPs to get Native IPv6 directly from them. The more of you actually call, the more the ISPs will realize that this is what you as their customers require from them.

And as a bonus when you are in the European Union, do clarify them that it is now the law to provide unfiltered Internet Access, and without IPv6 you are missing out on a large chunk of that Internet they are supposed to provide access to.

We also keep suggesting to people to change ISP to ISPs who did invest in deploying IPv6. Voting with your money is the most important way to signal that you are not happy with the service you are paying for.

For the many unfortunate people who have only monopolistic ISPs: do call your government officials and inform them that monopolies are not legal in many countries and that they need to open the markets and cables to allow other competitors to exist and not to allow single global corporations to buy out all the small ISPs. Only fair business practices allow a healthy Internet. Thus call upon the people who can make a change: the ISPs and your government.

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Almost another 7 months gone already again in the transition to IPv6 since we stopped accepting signups and new tunnel/subnet requests. Find below some choice comments we have seen on the subject of not being able to get IPv6 from ISPs that people pay for proper Internet connectivity.

Do not hesitate to tweet more yourself, of course @'ing the ISP you are trying to reach and adding a #GetIPv6 hashtag. You did Call Your ISP for Native IPv6 somewhere in the last decade right?

• "My ISP is providing native IPv6, but at the moment only with their cable modems. With my own modem can't configure it" #GetIPv6 #NativeIPv6
• "My new router natively supports SIXXS, but @ZiggoWebcare clearly has no intention of supporting v6 any time soon :(" #GetIPv6 #Monopolies
• "The Golden Rule applies: He who has the gold, makes the rules. @TWC_Help has the gold and makes the rules Thus no IPv6 for me" #GetIPv6
• "If I have a 200Mbps fibre optic connection will I still achieve at least 100Mbps over the tunnel?" #GetIPv6 Really, get native IPv6! #2016!
• "I was advised by @Telekom_hilft to use your service to get fixed IPv6 prefixes" #GetIPv6 #VoteWithYourMoney
• "The IPv6 rollout in my cable region will be postponed without further notice if the problems with some modems are not resolved" #GetIPv6
• "My ISP has native IPv6. I use it regularly. However, it's not a static address" #GetIPv6 #VoteWithYourMoney
• "@upcatb2b_status do not have a plan for business IPv6. (Bizarre, as they provide IPv6 via DS-Lite to private customers.)" #GetIPv6
• "My ISP (@Orange_France ) is supposed having started this year (!) to deploy IPv6 for fiber and VDSL customers" #GetIPv6 #20YearTransition
• "I have asked my ISP to provider native IPv6 but @Telekom_hilft is not willing to provider IPv6 to customers" #GetIPv6 #VoteWithYourMoney
• "I have asked my provider for an update on their IPv6 deployment, but they have no plans yet" #GetIPv6 #20YearsTransition
• "They can give me an IPv6 address, but they don't provide it as full dualstack, only as DS-lite." #GetIPv6 #VoteWithYourMoney
• "A provider for a colocated machine provides IPv6, but gave me just ONE address and refused to route a subnet" #GetIPv6 #VoteWithYourMoney
• "My ISP is in the progress of getting IPv6 but not right now" #GetIPv6 #VoteWithYourMoney and pay an ISP that delivers the service you want
• "My ISP don't offer IPv6: they wish they could, but they are a Cable reseller and would need upstream control" #GetIPv6 #20YearsTransition
• "@TWC_Help _does_ provide me with a /64 but the prefix is theoretically dynamic & I have no control over reverse DNS for addresses" #GetIPv6
• "Been bugging my ISP for 5 years, they think it's not really necessary, they've started building huge proxy servers to share IPv4" #GetIPv6
• "The only reason I'm [sic] can't use it is because I'm [sic] waiting for a software update on my router." Just wait a bit longer... #GetIPv6

Please, do Call Your ISP, maybe they can still get you IPv6 before Christmas, the one in the year 2016 that is, not 2116...

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Especially for our Belgian users, but in general to every user: Don't forget to properly encrypt your traffic.

A Belgium court has fined Skype for not handing over crypted communications (and for them ignoring the law claiming by simply claiming they are based in Luxembourg and thus do not fall under Belgian Law... nice try there) this effectively could lead to the practice of users and companies being liable in not decrypting traffic when the government asks for it. See the article in The Standaard (Belgian Newspaper in Dutch) or the summary by Sven Slootweg's Github Gist for more details.

We thus like to remind people that standard IPv6 tunnels (proto-41 based) but also heartbeat (which uses proto-41) and also AYIYA (UDP based) do not encrypt anything. As such, if an adversary, be that of criminal nature or of government nature, is able to sniff any Internet traffic, they will be able to see not only who you are talking too (based on IP addresses) but also the contents of your packets and unless there is proper crypto there just read along.

Thus be vigilant, use TLS, use HTTPS, use SSL and use SSH where possible.

That said, we fortunately have not been ever asked yet to sniff any of our users. Thus, please dear users, keep it that way for as long as this project still exists.

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As SSL Certificates expire once in a while, we have renewed the certificate for another 2 years.

Indeed, unlike what rumors are being spread we are not shutting down completely yet.

But do Call Your ISP as while the website and services will remain running for at least that period, we cannot guarantee that for any of the PoPs that are sponsored by ISPs that are now carrying (and thus paying for) your traffic instead of your own ISP that you are paying but does not bother with IPv6.

If your ISP still does not have IPv6 in 2016, you really should consider changing ISP.

IPv6 is 20 years old, SixXS had her sweet 16 birthday party already, thus, really, way past time your own ISP is providing native IPv6: Call Them! or Move to another ISP for Native IPv6!

The new SSL certificate fingerprints are:
SHA1: C2 C7 3C 7D 93 14 C9 8B 36 67 5A FC 71 81 FF 90 6A D5 F1 54
SHA256: BA DB D6 CA C5 86 53 2A F4 13 32 9C 51 A0 A6 8E 60 34 E2 12 F8 FF 98 F0 0B 1B 3A FE 19 BA 53 83
We also sent out these fingerprints out over Twitter as an extra method for you to verify them and that we really updated the certificate.

Note that this wilcard certificate is only for *.sixxs.net and sixxs.net itself. As wildcard certificates do not cover for instance www.ipv6.sixxs.net.

The SixXS website can, as before, be reached with this new certificate as:

• www.sixxs.net - Dual Stack IPv6 + IPv4
• ipv6.sixxs.net - IPv6 only
• ipv4.sixxs.net - IPv4 only

Thanks again to Massar Networking for sponsoring the 2-year wildcard SSL certificate.

Indeed we have resorted to using a CSS'd version of the good old <blink> tag, maybe that gets the attention of people and get them to finally Call Their ISPs...

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With the upcoming various festivities, we would like to wish to everybody a magnificent healthy and happy coming year and many more after.

We of course also wish that everybody's ISPs finally start providing Native IPv6! (Call Your ISP for X-mas for a friendly reminder?)

We also like to take the moment to point out a presentation given by the lovely Orla McGann from HEAnet who have been hosting the HEAnet iedub01 PoP for, nigh on, 15 years: since the start of SixXS. In her fairytale she discusses HEAnet getting IPv6 from 6bone, then from RIPE, arranging Transit and setting up the SixXS PoP. As she states though, PoPs won't be there forever: next year will be another year that ISPs need to be called so that the finally start providing IPv6 instead of depending on Tunnel Brokers.

Video: iNOG::A - Orla McGann/HEAnet - An Irish IPv6 Fairytale (slide about SixXS @ 22:20)
Slides: iNOG::A - Orla McGann/HEAnet - An Irish IPv6 Fairytale (slide #12)

As an additional bonus: don't hesitate to read Orla's Masters Thesis on IPv6 Packet Filtering.