A party can always disclose what's going on in negotiations.

This is generally not done as it is often is a violation of trust, but if there's no good faith there in the first place it's hardly a loss. Negotiations can always be broken off with the reason being "the other side is not negotiating in good faith" without particular negotiated-to-day conditions being released.

How many countries was Iran attacking, or could attack, when they still had their "military" intact (in, say, December 2025)?

It started because Putin wants the 'good old days' of the Soviet Union back, and he does not consider Ukrainians their own people, but just a bunch of folks that have forgotten they are really Russian/Soviet. The 'official' Rusian reason is/was because Ukraine was run by Nazis (never mind that Zelenskyy is Jewish).

Power and influence can be considered two different things.

As for holding sway over Trump: it's often generally anyone that can flatter his ego and/or put money in his pockets. (Or for his swaying himself: whatever will get the most headlines, the most people talking about him.)

Trump is not complicated:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad

This is a myopic view of engagement options. "Understanding Irregular Warfare":

* https://www.army.mil/article/286976/understanding_irregular_...

"Defense Primer: What Is Irregular Warfare?":

* https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF1256...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irregular_military

The Afghan Mujahideen / Taliban didn't need planes, ships, and missile launchers to force the Soviets/Americans out.

* Which doesn't mean much nowadays: see Ukraine, and the perseverance of the Taliban who eventually got their way.

* Are you talking about now? Or last year when everyone was told that the nuclear program was obliterated? If it was then, why was there a second round of attacks in this year? And it's not like the existing stockpiles of enriched uranium vanished.

* As Ukraine has shown, you can have a defence industry in people's basements churning out 4M drones per year that can do a lot of damage.

* Yes, the past leadership was KIA. And new people were put in place who are more hardliner hawks than what was taken out. So how is a more hawk-ish regime a "win" for the US?

* An "impotent attack" that has kept several thousand ships sidelined in the Gulf? That has caused fuel (petrol, diesel, kerosene, LNG) prices skyrocket? That have caused helium (needed in chip manufacturing, MRIs, etc) prices to triple? If that's "impotent" I would hate to see effective.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq had 500,000 troops, for a country smaller in area than Iran and with fewer people.

The current 50,000 US troops isn't going to do much against Iran as a whole.

It gives the parties more room to manoeuvre with regards to the give and take that is often/usually necessary when it comes to negotiating. If you demand X at one point, but revert so you can get Y, then the absolutists will be outraged (either actually or performatively) that you are being "soft" and "weak", etc.

There are a lot of people who think in zero-sum, winner-take-all ways, which is generally not how the world of foreign relations works. And modern-day outrage machine will create more difficult situations if you give here and take there (ignoring the fact that the other side gives there and takes here in return) even though it may be necessary to get a result (even it it's not perfect).

So you just change the version number… like was done with IPv6?

How would this be any different: all hosts, firewalls, routers, etc, would have to be updated… like with IPv6. So would all application code to handle (e.g.) connection logging… like with IPv6.

Like:

> Addresses in this group consist of an 80-bit prefix of zeros, the next 16 bits are ones, and the remaining, least-significant 32 bits contain the IPv4 address. For example, ::ffff:192.0.2.128 represents the IPv4 address 192.0.2.128. A previous format, called "IPv4-compatible IPv6 address", was ::192.0.2.128; however, this method is deprecated.[5]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresse...

This is a privileged view of someone whose ISP has enough money (or was around early enough) to get enough IPv4 addresses to assign one to every customer's WAN interface. Not everyone is so lucky.

A lot of folks get non-publicly-routable 100.64.0.0/10[1] on their WAN interface with no way to do hole punching because they're behind CG-NAT.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_shared_address_space

All of those things exist in IPv6.

And it is physically impossible for DNS to be the same, as you have to create new resource record types ("A" is hard-coded to 32-bits) to support the new longer addresses, and have all user-land code start asking for, using, and understanding the new record replies. Just like with IPv6. A lot of legacy code did not have room in data structures for multiple reply types: sure you'd get the "A" but unless you updated the code to get the "A7" address (for "IPv7" addresses) you could never get to the longer with address… just like IPv6 needed code updates to recognize AAAA, otherwise you were A-only.

Per Google, quite a few countries (including the US) are at >50%:

* https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

Every handset on T-Mobile US's network gets IPv6 (and they're not the only carrier like that):

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6oBCYHzrTA

So I'm not quite sure where "failed" enters the equation.

And what exactly would be different with IPv7? Anything that needs more address bits would have to update DNS to create new resource record types ("A" is hard-coded to 32-bits) to support the new longer addresses, and have all user-land code start asking for, using, and understanding the new record replies. Just like with IPv6. (A lot of legacy code did not have room in data structures for multiple reply types: sure you'd get the "A" but unless you updated the code to get the "A7" address (for "IPv7" addresses) you could never get to the longer with address… just like IPv6 needed code updates to recognize AAAA, otherwise you were A-only.)

You need to update socket APIs to hold new data structures for longer addresses so your app can tell the kernel to send packets to the new addresses. Just like with IPv6.

UTF-7 was possible because there was an out-of-band mechanism to signal its use, "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-7":

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2152

What's the OOB signalling in IP packet transmission between two random nodes on the Internet.

Like

> Addresses in this group consist of an 80-bit prefix of zeros, the next 16 bits are ones, and the remaining, least-significant 32 bits contain the IPv4 address. For example, ::ffff:192.0.2.128 represents the IPv4 address 192.0.2.128. A previous format, called "IPv4-compatible IPv6 address", was ::192.0.2.128; however, this method is deprecated.[5]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresse...

Or:

> For any 32-bit global IPv4 address that is assigned to a host, a 48-bit 6to4 IPv6 prefix can be constructed for use by that host (and if applicable the network behind it) by appending the IPv4 address to 2002::/16.

> For example, the global IPv4 address 192.0.2.4 has the corresponding 6to4 prefix 2002:c000:0204::/48. This gives a prefix length of 48 bits, which leaves room for a 16-bit subnet field and 64 bit host addresses within the subnets.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4

So you have to ship new code to every 'network element' to support your "IPv4+" plan. Just like with IPv6.

So you have to update DNS to create new resource record types ("A" is hard-coded to 32-bits) to support the new longer addresses, and have all user-land code start asking for, using, and understanding the new record replies. Just like with IPv6. (A lot of legacy code did not have room in data structures for multiple reply types: sure you'd get the "A" but unless you updated the code to get the "A+" address (for "IPv4+" addresses) you could never get to the longer with address… just like IPv6 needed code updates to recognize AAAA, otherwise you were A-only.)

You need to update socket APIs to hold new data structures for longer addresses so your app can tell the kernel to send packets to the new addresses. Just like with IPv6. In any 'address extension' plan the legacy code cannot use the new address space; you have to:

* update the IP stack (like with IPv6)

* tell applications about new DNS records (like IPv6)

* set up translation layers for legacy-only code to reach extended-only destination (like IPv6 with DNS64/NAT64, CLAT, etc)

You're updating the exact same code paths in both the "IPv4+" and IPv6 scenarios: dual-stack, DNS, socket address structures, dealing with legacy-only code that is never touched to deal with the larger address space.

Deploying the new "IPv4+" code will take time, there will partial deployment of IPv4+ is no different than having partial deployment of IPv6: you have islands of it and have to fall back to the 'legacy' IPv4-plain protocol when the new protocol fails to connect:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs

"Just adding more bits" means updating a whole bunch of code (routers, firewalls, DNS, APIs, userland, etc) to handle the new data structures. There is no "just": it's the same work for IPv6 as with any other idea.

(This idea of "just add more addresses" comes up in every discussion of IPv6, and people do not bother thinking about what needs to change to "just" do it.)

> If IPv4 were more painfully broken then the switch would have happened long ago.

IPv4 is very painful for people not in the US or Western Europe that (a) were now there early enough to get in on the IPv4 address land rush, or (b) don't have enough money to buy as many IPv4 addresses as they need (assuming someone wants to sell them).

So a lot of areas of the world have switched, it's just that you're perhaps in a privileged demographic and are blind to it.

The difference is that your home router does not get a public IP on its WAN interface, but perhaps the non-publicly-routable 100.64.0.0/10 [1] with CG-NAT.

So if you don't have a public IP address, how exactly are you supposed to forward anything? What is the other end supposed to connect to as an IP address?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_shared_address_space

* https://www.openssh.org/releasenotes.html#10.3

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47678015

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

There just happened to be a whacko that got into the White House, but if ~70k (out of >100M) had gone the other way in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have won and the world would be a different place. (See also ~500 votes in Bush versus Gore.)

I'd be curious to know the 'insurance premium' that was paid by France every year and the total.