More on Difficulties Transitioning to IPv6

Transitioning to a next-generation Internet could be akin to changing the engines on a moving airplane.

Routers and other networking devices will likely need replacing; personal computers could be in store for software upgrades. Headaches could arise given the fact that it won't be possible to simply shut down the entire network for maintenance, with companies, groups and individuals depending on it every day. more»

Spamhaus Policy Block List Update

Recently, I wrote about the Spamhaus Policy Block List (PBL), suggesting senders encourage their network/connectivity service providers (whomever they lease or purchase IP addresses from) to list their illegitimate email-sending IPs as a step towards improving the overall email stream on the internet. The initial PBL was seeded with listings from the Dynablock NJABL ("Not Just Another Bogus List"), which at the time of the cut-over was at more than 1.9 million entries... more»

IP Address Confusion Results in Wrong Family Raiding

...IP addresses are not consistently reliable means of identifying users. Law enforcement officials and a family in Gretna, Virginia and learned that lesson the hard way after their home was searched by a law enforcement team that included Miami Heat center Shaquille O'Neal, according to a law enforcement official. more»

IANA Up For Grabs?

The US government wants to hear from organizations interested in running some of the internet's key resources, including the master lists of IP address space and domain names.

The Department of Commerce last week published a request for information, a step before potentially putting a contract out to bidding, soliciting interest from anybody interested in taking over the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. more»

Why NAT Isn't As Bad As You Thought

Please do sit down. Should the shock cause you to suddenly lose consciousness, I hereby disclaim all responsibility for any subsequent loss or injury. I'm about to defend the anthrax of the Internet: NAT. Network Address Translation is a hack to enable private IP addresses on one side of a router (inside your network) to talk to public IP addresses on the other side (on the Internet, outside your network). It really doesn't matter how it works. The consequence is that unless the router is specifically configured, outsiders can't get in uninvited. So those on the inside can't, by default, act as servers of any service to the outside world. more»

URLs, IP Numbers, and Speech

There's a great fight going on right now in Philadelphia...The case is about a Pennsylvania statute [PDF] that mandates that Pennsylvania ISPs remove access to sites that the AG believes contain child pornography. Now, child pornography is abhorrent and any ISP will cooperate in taking down such sites that it is hosting. But the problem is that in complying with the statute with respect to sites the ISPs don't themselves host, ISPs are (rationally) using either IP blocking ("null routing") or "domain poisoning" techniques, both of which (particularly the IP number blocking) result in rendering inaccessible millions of perfectly legal sites. more»

How Did IPv6 Come About, Anyway?

This is a special two-part series article providing a distinct and critical perspective on Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) and the underlying realities of its deployment. The first part gives a closer look at how IPv6 came about and the second part exposes the myths.

In January 1983, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) experienced a "flag day," and the Network Control Protocol, NCP, was turned off, and TCP/IP was turned on. Although there are, no doubt, some who would like to see a similar flag day where the world turns off its use of IPv4 and switches over to IPv6, such a scenario is a wild-eyed fantasy. Obviously, the Internet is now way too big for coordinated flag days. The transition of IPv6 into a mainstream deployed technology for the global Internet will take some years, and for many there is still a lingering doubt that it will happen at all. more»

Summit to Focus on Knowledge Sharing for IPv6 Deployment

The IPv6 Forum, the North American IPv6 Task Force, and Charmed Technology, Inc. today announced that the U.S. IPv6 Summit 2003 will be held December 8 - 11, 2003 in Arlington, VA, at the Doubletree Crystal City. The U.S. IPv6 Summit 2003 will focus on deployment, technical depth of key IPv6 features, and applications or services of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).  more»