A CNET article reports that, at a recent forum in London Jim Cicconi, VP of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.
“The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today,” he said. “In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.”
Pulvermedia’s VON TV service will webcast the FCC’s en banc Hearing on Internet Practices at Stanford Law School on Thursday April 17.
The sessions run from (EST) 3pm-5.15pm and 6pm-10pm. Continue reading
In the current P2P world, torrenters and the like are discovering that a recent Windows-update – included in XP service pack 3, and Vista – alters the tcpip.sys file that governs Windows tcp behavior to limit users to just 10 ‘half open‘ connections at any one time. This could be a response to the concerns raised by cable ISP’s like Comcast that’s DOCSIS-based networks break down when clients use over-multitudinous connections. Needless to say, as the word spreads, workarounds to undo MS’s changes are proliferating.
A Mar 17 article in BetaNews notes the aptly-timed announcement that, for the forthcoming Windows 7, Microsoft is contemplating adding such features as metered connections, distributed hash tables, and something called ‘green P2P’. The article notes that Windows Vista already includes an IPv6-based P2P-enabling technology known as Teredo. Continue reading
The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), in cooperation with the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), is conducting a survey to gather data regarding the current and future use of IPv6 throughout the ARIN Region. All organizations in the ARIN region are encouraged to participate in this survey in an effort to establish a comprehensive view of present IPv6 penetration and future plans of IPv6 deployment. Continue reading
On January 29 2008, as part of their Tech Talks series, Google had a conference on the topic of IPv6. Video has now been posted on YouTube. Continue reading
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society have posted a video of a talk at Harvard on Feb 28 by Clay Shirky, author of ‘Here Comes Everybody’ – a new book about the effect of the Internet on group interaction. Shirky’s eruditely outlined theme is that, in ways that are only just becoming apparent, the Internet is revolutionizing the entire human endeavor. Continue reading
On Sunday, 24 February 2008, in what was apparently a politically directed attempt to block YouTube, Pakistan Telecom started an unauthorized announcement of the prefix 208.65.153.0/24 – a YouTube IP – to divert local traffic away from the site. One of Pakistan Telecom’s upstream providers, PCCW Global forwarded this announcement to the rest of the Internet, which resulted in the hijacking of YouTube traffic on a global scale. The RIPE NCC Routing Information Service has published a detailed study on how this came to pass. Continue reading
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) is now underway in San Diego, California.
The NDSS, supported by the Internet Society, now in its 15th year, is one of the longest-running Internet security conferences on the calendar, drawing leading experts, researchers, and technologists from around the globe to share experience and analysis of security issues in networks and distributed systems. Continue reading
At the December 2007 Board of Trustees meeting held in Vancouver, ISOC presented plans for 2008 to 2010. Key to those plans were a series of new, longer term, more strategic activities which will replace the traditional ‘pillar’ model describing activities in Standards, Public Policy, and Education. The new initiatives will focus on ‘Enabling Access‘, ‘InterNetWorks‘, ‘Trust & Identity‘ and ‘Standards & Technology‘. Continue reading
In a recent Slate article Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu suggests that the recent proposal by AT&T to monitor internet traffic for copyright violations is the equivalent of corporate seppuku. Continue reading
The current IPv4 protocol used on the Internet is running out of the addresses needed to accommodate the growing number of users online.
The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the organization responsible for giving out IP addresses in North America, says that 19 percent of the IPv4 addresses are still available, while 68 percent have been allocated and 13 percent are “unavailable,” whatever that could mean. There are 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses, or 2^32. IPv6 has 2^128 addresses, or 16 billion-billion.
There have been efforts to get more mileage out of IPv4 by using tricks like conversions to IPv6 or using duplicate IPv4 addresses within a firewall. This has helped extend the lifespan of IPv4 but it only prolonged the inevitable.
Until now the biggest obstacle to IPv6 has been the fact that IPv6 address information is not included in most of the root DNS servers that power the Internet. DNS (Domain Name Service) is the Internet service that translates domain names such www.example.com into the numeric IP (Internet Protocol) addresses such as 198.105.232.4 that are actually used to connect computers on the Internet.
Starting on February 4th, at least one of those adoption barriers will be addressed as records for IPv6 addresses are added to four of the key root DNS servers. The inclusion of the IPv6 records could make the adoption and operation of IPv6 a more viable option for network operators.
In an interview with ACM Queue, Mary Lou Jepsen, former CTO of the One Laptop Per Child (OLTP) project describes some of the technical challenges to providing Internet connectivity in developing nations:
The whole machine is a different class of computing environment, and it’s aimed at a different set of users. You can’t get there by taking a classic office productivity laptop and cost-reducing it.
It’s pretty hot in much of the developing world, so we’ve designed a laptop that can take extreme heat …. half the kids in the world don’t have electricity at home. Half the kids. Eighty percent of the schools that we’re going into don’t have electricity. So we had to design a laptop that was also the infrastructure. It has mesh networking …. solar repeaters and active antennas …. If one laptop in a village is connected to the Internet, they all are.
There’s truly so little power in the developing world. If a school is wired, it tends to be on a generator, and there’s one 60-watt light bulb per classroom. Generators make really weird power. Usually what comes out of the wall in most countries is 50 or 60 hertz, or somewhere in between. With generators, the frequency of the AC power can go down to 35 hertz. We therefore had to do really interesting power conditioning on the AC adapter. The laptop itself can take between negative 32 volts to 40 volts, and work well with anything from 11 to 18 volts. You can plug a car battery into it. You can plug a solar panel into it. A hand crank can produce enough energy to power the battery for some time, as can a bicycle or a windmill. India has this cow-dung system that creates methane that drives a generator. Even that will work.
Via Slashdot
RTE reports that the Dublin City Council has decided that a plan to provide free wireless broadband throughout the city must be been abandoned because it would be contrary to EU law on state aid. But the Labour Party, which says it originally proposed the idea of a free wi-fi city, has accused the Council of backing down as a result of pressure from the telecommunications industry.
On this side of the pond, San Francisco’s Free the Net project has distributed 40,000 Meraki repeaters to residents, creating a redundant mesh network for free wifi.
From BoingBoing
Tony D’Agata, vice president of federal sales for Sprint told InternetNews.com that Sprint is ramping up some specific IPv6 offerings that are expected to be ready in the second quarter of 2008.
“We are IPv6 enabling our network and actively pursing putting IPv6 on our peerless IP network,” D’Agata said. “We also have plans to implement IPv6 on other assets.” Continue reading
