Only 16% of IT professionals consider IPv4 address depletion "a huge concern that has or will soon force us to migrate to IPv6," according to a BT INS survey of 310 IT professionals that was conducted in December 2007. A whopping 26% of IT professionals felt IPv4 address depletion was "no concern.'' more»
ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) has released a report [PDF] describing the technical aspects of fast flux hosting and fast flux service networks. From the report: "Fast flux" is an evasion technique that cyber-criminals and Internet miscreants use to evade identification and to frustrate law enforcement and anticrime efforts aimed at locating and shutting down web sites used for illegal purposes. more»
Germany's data protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others comply with EU privacy law. He told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP address "then it has to be regarded as personal data." more»
NIC Mexico, manager of the country code top-level domain .MX and registrar of IP addressees to Internet users in Mexico, says in a report today that lifetime for IPv4 addresses is projected to finish on 1/1/11 after which all the new IP addresses will be allocated on IPv6. 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»
Government and university researchers have been exploring ways to redesign the Internet from scratch. Some of the challenges that led researchers to start thinking of clean-slate approaches... Researchers are questioning whether all devices truly need addresses. Perhaps sensors in a home could talk to one another locally and relay the most important data through a gateway bearing an address. This way, routers wouldn't have to keep track of every single sensor, improving efficiency. more»
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»
The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) has announced [PDF] that it has prevailed in a lawsuit that challenged ARIN's ability to allocate Internet Protocol (IP) number resources fairly. The lawsuit was brought by an individual - Gary Kremen - who sought to have a netblock of IP addresses transferred to him without agreeing to ARIN's standard terms and conditions.
"Today's victory is significant for consumers who rely on the Internet to operate efficiently and effectively," said ARIN President and CEO Raymond Plzak. more»
...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»
China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has published a set of regulations that govern email services and include several provisions intended to cut down on the amount of spam that Chinese Internet users find in their in-box.
The new rules go into effect on March 30. As expected, the regulations require e-mail advertisements to include "AD" or the equivalent in Chinese characters (guang gao) in the subject header. They also require email service providers to register the IP addresses of their mail servers with the authorities. more»
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»
