A case could be made that sharing an IP address is like sharing a cell phone number, only that you don't get to make the decision directly. By choosing a provider that has not enough IP addresses to hand out/ hasn't implemented IPv6 and using a site that doesn't use IPv6 either, you make the decision indirectly. (Else you would most likely end up communicating with it over IPv6.) You can also use a VPN to somewhere with a static IPv4 for a few dollars a month.
I know, the reality is most of the world is just stuck with IPv4 in some capacity. It is probably good that using IPv4 starts to hurt else we will never migrate. Btw. HackerNews is stuck with IPv4 only in 2021 still...
> It is probably good that using IPv4 starts to hurt else we will never migrate.
Not sure what you meant by this comment. The kid whose life is ruined won’t know what this is. The people who care about ipv4 vs v6 is unlikely to act based on this incident.
I was replaying to a different anecdote. The kid is another casualty of us engineers and managers not doing our job in migrating to IPv6 in the last ~20 years or so. The world IPv6 launch was actually 10 years ago, there was plenty time to migrate.
The kid might actually do quite ok as I have suggested in other comments. Really depends on the family and its personality.
You are completely right of course. Even if the victim was ok and doing quite alright, the injustice doesn't disappear. I tried to suggest, the punishment of 3 months of no school might be perceived as pseudo-punishment (or maybe even a liberation?) under such circumstance as a nearly abusive school administration.
Of course, we will never see the full picture. I can imagine, having a kid at home puts more stress on the parents that otherwise might rely on the school for something approaching day care/ basically "storage" for human beings. I find just the thought of something like this distasteful but that might be the reality in many families.
The punishment was too extreme. That’s a separate issue from whether using matching IP address is sufficient for enforcement (I believe it is). And let’s be real, cheaters rarely fess. Almost every gamer banned for cheating cries out at the unfairness of it all and denies ever cheating. Given that, it’s important to have a good appeal process and to make sure the punishment is appropriate considering the level of evidence. A full expulsion based solely on a matching IP address is excessive. But a 3 day suspension probably would be fine.
I know, the reality is most of the world is just stuck with IPv4 in some capacity. It is probably good that using IPv4 starts to hurt else we will never migrate. Btw. HackerNews is stuck with IPv4 only in 2021 still...