Posts

Showing posts from January, 2012

Dictionary Needed: IPv4-IPv6, French-English

I was fiddling with a London Underground ticket machine to purchase a "tube" (subway) ticket upon my arrival here today, and a couple on the next machine over starting asking me questions...in French. Through gestures and pointing to the ticket machine screen display, I figured out that while the screen stated the Oyster card they wished to purchase covered the tram and bus, it did not mention use on the tube. I was experiencing some screen information shortcomings myself in desiring to purchase a zones 1-3 ticket, but only 1-1, 1-2 and 1-4 were offered. So given my prior research on the Oyster card and the incompleteness of our respective ticket machine user interfaces, I assured them that they Oyster card would work for the tube as well. But this experience struck me later in the day in that we were only able to successfully communicate when we supplemented our verbal attempts at communication with gestures and visual clues. Had they rang me on my phone and asked me the s

Combat DNS Hijacking

Dark Reading reported this morning that the ufc.com, coach.com and coachfactory.com domains were hijacked using DNS attacks earlier this week. The attack was performed by hacking the DNS servers authoritative for these zones and re-pointing web addresses to the attacker's site. Anyone attempting to access UFC's or Coach's websites was unwittingly directed to the imposter's site. Apparently these domains were targeted due to their organizations' support of SOPA/PIPA anti-piracy bills. The attack was detected by a sudden large influx of web traffic at the attacker's hosting provider. Administrators monitoring the attacked domains' web resources would have noticed a corresponding drop in traffic, which is one way to detect such an attack. Had these zones been signed via DNSSEC, perhaps this attack impact would have been minimized. This would have been the case if a) the attacker was unable to "re-sign" each zone after modifying it, which would have

Happy Chinese New Year! Half a Billion Internet Users!

Global Times, a leading English news periodical in China, reported last week that the number of Internet uses in China surpassed half a billion by the end of last (calendar) year, according to the China Network Information Center. According to the report, China now counts 513 million Internet users, up from about 457 million at the end of 2010, about 12% growth. The question I've been trying to answer is how many of these 513 million users have IPv6 addresses vs. IPv4 addresses? As yet I have been unsuccessful in answering my own question. But I've found that Mike Leber from Hurricane Electric publishes a daily Global IPv6 Deployment Progress Report . This report lists the TLDs with IPv6 (surprisingly only 85.9% have IPv6 addressable name servers today), a summary of A and AAAA records for "next level domains" for each TLD, a summary of advertised autonomous systems (ASes) for IPv6 networks, top websites available over IPv6 and more. The top websites statistic is

Gearing up for World IPv6 Launch

What better time to unveil the IPv6 Resource Center at BT Diamond IP than immediately following the announcement about the World IPv6 Launch! We've amassed a variety of material on IPv6 that hopefully enables people to learn about IPv6, in whatever media they prefer - video, audio, webcast, or reading with white papers and books. World IPv6 Launch is not a deadline to implement IPv6. It's another means of publicizing the need to consider IPv6 deployment - is it right for you and when? IPv4 space is pretty much gone in Asia so as new IP address consumers in that part of the world comprising over 60% of the world's population begin using broadband and wireless devices, IPv6 address use on the Internet will grow. The homogeneous IPv4 Internet of today will evolve to a mixed IPv4-IPv6 Internet. How rapidly and to what proportion IPv6 will permeate this mix is unclear. But it makes sense to track this over time and to be ready should the IPv6 density reach a level where subs

From World IPv6 Day to World IPv6 Launch!

The Internet Society announced today that several major Internet companies have agreed to transform last year's World IPv6 Day success to a deeper commitment with World IPv6 launch! The World IPv6 Launch is scheduled for June 6, 2012. Last year's event was a one-day "test flight" for IPv6. This year's launch promises a permanent enabling of IPv6 for not only major ISPs and websites, but also home networking equipment providers, which extends IPv6 to the "last mile" to residences. The goal is to enable IPv6 for enough end users so that at least 1% of wireline residential subscribers' connections to participating websites to use IPv6 by June 6. This may not sound like much but 1% of an estimated 500 million is 5 million users which is substantial. This is an exciting time for Internet companies. The industry is moving deeper into IPv6. Are you ready?

New gTLD program officially launched!

As of today, ICANN has opened the application process for new gTLDs! Applications for new generic top level domains are now being accepted through April 12, 2012. This is the first time that internationalized domain name (IDN) based gTLD applications are being accepted. Today sub-gTLD domain names may be defined in internationalized format and several country code TLDs (ccTLDs) have been in production for some time, but this is the first time that gTLDs may be defined. So what's the big deal? Depending on what gTLDs are accepted, organizations may desire to register subdomains beneath new gTLDs in ASCII or IDN format. Considering that every marketing message from an organization includes a website address, advertisting a fully native lanugage URL (and of course content!) may facilitate marketing communications with audiences in certain parts of the world. For example, if your organization is attempting to reach or attract residents in India and a new gTLD is created using the nat