How do creators/maintainers of these non-renewable resources such as IPv4 addresses, computer ports, wireless spectrum, etc. keep making the same mistake of allocating such a high percentage of the space to specific players, leaving the scraps for the most numerous users? Is it just greed, or not good forward thinking?
We engineers have accepted the available private address space <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network> but just think about how intuitive it is to an outsider? We make millions of people memorize 192.168.X.X to setup their home routers instead of the common sense letting the millions use the 1/8 privately? Just my opinion, but perhaps holding us back from IPv6 deployment is UI people don't see how an ordinary user would be able to remember a full "fd00::" address for day-to-day home networking or typing into their iPhone.
I don't have as much knowledge in computer ports background story, but last I checked <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbe...> it's full of defunct, barely-used single players hogging up the coveted lower numbers, again leaving the millions to deal with possibly stepping on others' toes by using them "unofficially" and causing "pollution".
Last example is thinking about how many billions of wifi and cellular devices are forced into the tiniest slivers of the spectrum <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/United_S...>. The engineers working so hard to cram even more signals into the 2.4GHz and 5GHz slivers need someone who is going to look up and realize it's time to expand the walls of the box they are trapped in. The only firm allocations should be for physics constraints, such as weather radar, but also means Wifi 6 should be a non-start due to not penetrating concrete, one of the most common materials of home construction.
Given these examples, the argument I'm trying to make is I find it insulting to consider the fact that people used the 1/8 block "pollution". It's the natural human guess at usable example numbers and the like, and much in the same way that repeated "human-error" in accidents is being re-argued as "engineering-error", I find the misallocation of the 1/8 block to be directly the fault of the RFC creators for not giving it to the people.
Long term, IPv4 allocation won't matter and it's too late to fix that problem
Port numbers are kinda obsolete on the internet since everyone uses port 443 to bypass middleboxes that block all the other ports in the name of "security". Hardcoding a number for each protocol instead of including IP+port in DNS responses was a stupid mistake
All consumer devices being forced to share ISM bands is BS, but let's be real even if more spectrum was opened up back in the 2000s, a lot of devices would still use the same range of frequencies because they wanna use the same cheap ICs and antennas
Good wifi performance requires an AP in every room. The lack of 6ghz penetration is great for high-end setups because it eliminates the hidden node problem
"SRV" records include the port in DNS responses. They've been available for almost 30 years. Unfortunately, outside of a few protocols (SIP, XMPP, etc.) they never caught on.
Your argument is that someone should have tried to predict what random numbers people who didn’t read the spec would choose, and reserve those? That seems…quixotic. Would you reserve other numbers in this scheme, like all
possible birthdays, just in case?
I would argue that if anyone had considered the possibility of people randomly choosing 1/8 addresses, the error was in reserving 1/8 in the first place. This only happened because there were no consequences to making up addresses.
We engineers have accepted the available private address space <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network> but just think about how intuitive it is to an outsider? We make millions of people memorize 192.168.X.X to setup their home routers instead of the common sense letting the millions use the 1/8 privately? Just my opinion, but perhaps holding us back from IPv6 deployment is UI people don't see how an ordinary user would be able to remember a full "fd00::" address for day-to-day home networking or typing into their iPhone.
I don't have as much knowledge in computer ports background story, but last I checked <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbe...> it's full of defunct, barely-used single players hogging up the coveted lower numbers, again leaving the millions to deal with possibly stepping on others' toes by using them "unofficially" and causing "pollution".
Last example is thinking about how many billions of wifi and cellular devices are forced into the tiniest slivers of the spectrum <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/United_S...>. The engineers working so hard to cram even more signals into the 2.4GHz and 5GHz slivers need someone who is going to look up and realize it's time to expand the walls of the box they are trapped in. The only firm allocations should be for physics constraints, such as weather radar, but also means Wifi 6 should be a non-start due to not penetrating concrete, one of the most common materials of home construction.
Given these examples, the argument I'm trying to make is I find it insulting to consider the fact that people used the 1/8 block "pollution". It's the natural human guess at usable example numbers and the like, and much in the same way that repeated "human-error" in accidents is being re-argued as "engineering-error", I find the misallocation of the 1/8 block to be directly the fault of the RFC creators for not giving it to the people.