Intellectual property and computer law barrister Peter Dengate-Thrush has been elected as new Chairman of the Board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The former chairman of InternetNZ, the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) registry for New Zealand (.nz), and cofounder of the Association of Asian Pacific ccTLDs, succeeds the legendary Vinton Cerf... more»
When a network is subject to a rapid increase in traffic perhaps combined with a rapid decrease in capacity (for example due to a fire or a natural disaster), there is a risk of congestion collapse. In a congestion collapse, the remaining capacity is so overloaded with access attempts that virtually no traffic gets through. In the case of telephony, everyone attempts to call their family and friends in a disaster area. The long standing telephony approach is to restrict new call attempts upstream of the congested area... This limits the amount of new traffic to that which the network can handle. Thus, if only 30% capacity is available, at least the network handles 30% of the calls, not 3% or zero... more»
InformationWeek reports that the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) has called for a faster migration to the new Internet Protocol, IPv6. "We must prepare for IPv4's depletion, and ARIN's resolution to encourage that migration to IPv6 may be the impetus for more organizations to start the planning process," said John Curran, chairman of ARIN's Board of Trustees, in a statement. more»
This week, experts sent two drafts to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) proposing different ways of fixing a problem in the way that Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) allows the source of network data to determine its path through the network. The drafts recommend that the IPv6 feature should either be eliminated or, at the very least, disabled by default. more»
The transition of government networks to the next-generation Internet Protocol has gained traction over the last year, according to a recent survey of government and industry officials.
Almost half of the respondents from civilian agencies and nearly two-thirds of those in the Defense Department said that IPv6 is important in supporting their IT goals. Money for the transition is slowly moving into the funding pipeline. Federal spending on IPv6-enabled products and services is expected to hit $27 billion this year, climbing to $60 billion by 2011. more»
An independent security researcher showed off an early version of a tool for creating covert channels that, he claims, can pass undetected through most firewalls and intrusion detection systems.
Joe Klein, network security expert, North American IPv6 Task Force The tool, dubbed VoodooNet or v00d00n3t, uses the ability of most computers to encapsulate next-generation network traffic, known as Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), inside of today's network communications standard, or IPv4. more»
The market is still guessing about Google's continued purchases of "dark fiber" and what that will mean to the Internet. Yet another explanation was floated at a recent IT conference: IPv6, the next-generation Internet standard.
During a debate on the adoption of Internet Protocol Version 6 at the Burton Group's annual Catalyst conference in San Francisco, Alex Lightman, CEO of IP telephony vendor Innofone.com, offered a new reason for Google's expenditures on dark fiber. His observation came during a dialogue on Internet addressing and the lack of support by service providers for IPv6. He is worried that the United States is focused on the present and is not addressing future needs. more»
Timothy D. Morgan's recent paper titled, "IPv6 Address Cookies", seeks to apply the fundamental shift in resource availability brought about by the vastly increased Internet address space in IPv6 to develop a novel, lower cost solution to mitigating spoofed attacks. "Spoofed denial of service attacks have plagued the Internet for a number of years, and show no signs of abating. Research into mitigation techniques has apparently not led to a financially viable solution, and new attacks have been discovered in the wild without being widely anticipated". The following provides an introduction to this paper. more»
It's become a familiar pattern in online security. A groundbreaking way to communicate emerges, spreads like wildfire, and then hackers find a way to use it to their advantage. Security companies react--but not before the problem has succeeded in wreaking havoc. It happened with e-mail and is happening now with instant messaging and mobile devices.
The next area that could be targeted: Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, which lets people make low-priced phone calls using the same technology that delivers e-mail. And the results could be just as damaging, if not worse, than with other technologies, some security experts warn. more»
Internet telephony is still not mature enough a platform to support business communications, according to senior security professionals.
In a debate at the Infosecurity conference in London last Wednesday, an audience of security and IT pros voted that Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) wasn't able to support mission critical communications at the moment. Banking security professionals argued that the expense of implementing current VoIP solutions coupled with the risk of security holes and network downtime did not make IP telephony an attractive business proposition. more»
Many communications networks are constructed for a single form of communication, and are ill suited to being used for any other form. Although the Internet is also a specialized network in terms of supporting digital communications, its relatively unique flexibility lies in its ability to digitally encode a very diverse set of communications formats, and then support their interaction over the Internet. In this way many communications networks can be mapped into an Internet application and in so doing become just another distributed application overlayed on the Internet. From this admittedly Internet-centric perspective, voice is just another Internet application. And for the growing population of Voice over IP (VoIP) users, this is indeed the case... more»
In this article, published in the Federal Communications Law Journal (FCLJ), the authors (Reed E. Hundt and Gregory L. Rosston) have proposed sweeping changes to the current telecommunications regulatory regime. With impending reform in telecommunications laws, the authors argue that an important first step is the creation of a bipartisan, independent commission to examine and recommend implementation of more market-oriented communications policy. The following excerpt from the article looks into service competition with respect to VoIP... more»
Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) promises to deliver connectivity features in Windows Vista not possible with today's Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4).
Sinead O'Donovan, product unit manger for networking at Microsoft, said "When we looked at key applications such as MSN Messenger, we learned that developers needed to do too many tricks to get them to work over NAT." more»
From a notorious striptease by Internet pioneer Vint Cerf to a fist-pumping, table-jumping brawl about cryptography policy, the Internet's premier standards-setting body has had its share of big moments. This week, the IETF celebrates another one when it turns 20. The IETF is an egalitarian, all-volunteer group consisting of network engineers from Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, AT&T and other leading vendors. It has created many of the underlying standards that make the Internet work, including fundamental routing, e-mail, directory services and telephony protocols. more»
Faced with increasing demand for Internet protocol addresses, better quality of service and security, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) today recommended a transition from the existing version of internet protocol (IPv4) to the next-generation IPv6 platform.
The regulator has proposed the setting up of a National Internet Registry (NIR) in the country, within the framework of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), and the Regional Internet Registry, utilizing the existing set-up of National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI). Currently all users in India buy their Internet protocol addresses from the APNIC. more»
