If you are interested in the current state of IPv4 address exhaustion within North America as well as the current state of IPv6 deployment, there will be a live stream today, April 17, of the sessions happening at INET Denver starting at 1:00pm US Mountain Daylight Time (UTC-6). The event is subtitled "IPv4 Exhaustion and the Path to IPv6" and you can view the live stream at. more
The former contract with ICANN and the US Department of Commerce (DOC) was due to expire on September 30, 2002. In the statement announcing the renewal, the DOC acknowledged that ICANN was the subject of many complaints from many sectors of the Internet community. Some of these complaints had been presented to the US Congress during a hearing held in June 2002 by a Senate Subcommittee. At the hearing, a General Accounting Office (GAO) spokesperson, Peter Guerrero, testified, noting not only that ICANN had failed in its mandate, but that the U.S. Department of Commerce was also at fault in failing to properly oversee ICANN activities. He explains... more
Time flies. Although it was over 18 months ago, it seems just like yesterday that a small Czech provider, SuproNet, caused global Internet mayhem by making a perfectly valid (but extremely long) routing announcement. Since Internet routing is trust-based, within seconds every router in the world saw this announcement and tried to pass it on. Unfortunately, due to the size of this single message, quite a few routers choked -- resulting in widespread Internet instability. Today, over a year later, we were treated to a somewhat different version of the exact same story. more
For many years the consuming topic in DNS circles was that of the names themselves. If you wind the clock back twenty years or so, you will find much discussion about the nature of the Internet's namespace. Why were there both generic top-level labels and two-letter country codes? If we were going to persist with these extra-territorial generic country codes in the namespace, then how many should there be? Who could or should manage them? And so on. more
Now that IPv6 deployment is happening in major networks around the world, the question becomes -- what does "success" look like for IPv6? How much IPv6 traffic is "enough"? What are major milestones we should be tracking in IPv6 deployment? What is next for IPv6? more
The US Department of Commerce (DOC) has recently signed a new contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for one more year. ICANN and the DOC are to continue to work together to design an organizational form that is suitable to administer and control the infrastructure of the Internet. That infrastructure includes the IP numbers, which are critical to the functioning of the Internet protocol TCP/IP. These numbers must be unique for the Internet to continue to function. The infrastructure also includes the protocols that make the Internet possible. Protocols involve the conventions or agreements that each network that is part of the Internet accepts in order to make communication possible across the boundaries of the different technical and political and administrative entities that comprise the networks of the Internet. Another component of the Internet's infrastructure is the domain name system (DNS). This system includes the names that identify various sites on the Internet and the translation of those names into IP numbers via the system of computers that make the one to one mapping between names and numbers. more
This week, I ran into an interesting article over at Free Code Camp about design tradeoffs... If you think you've found a design with no tradeoffs, well... Guess what? You've not looked hard enough. This is something I say often enough, of course, so what's the point? The point is this: We still don't really think about this in network design. This shows up in many different places; it's worth taking a look at just a few. more
It has now been about eight months since I joined the Internet Society as the Director of Deployment & Operationalization and I still get asked on a fairly regular basis "what do you do?" Well, with ISOC's Chief Internet Technology Officer Leslie Daigle's recent departure, and with my time here having exceeded both my first 120 days and my first 6 months, this seems like the right moment to reflect on my brief tenure here so far and perhaps pontificate a bit on where we're going - and why. more
Today we just don't have an "Open" Internet. The massive proliferation of network-based middleware has resulted in an internet that has few remaining open apertures. Most of the time the packet you send is not precisely the packet I receive, and all too often if you deviate from a very narrowly set of technical constraints within this packet, then the packet you send is the packet I will never receive. more
Open Source (OS) Management and Orchestrations (MANO) is a European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) initiative that aims to develop a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) MANO software stack, aligned with ETSI NFV. The main goal of MANO is to simplify the onboarding of virtual network components in telco cloud data centers. The initiative has gained impressive momentum among leading Communication Service Providers (CSPs) around the world as part of their NFV programs. more
At the 20th Internet Governance Forum in Lillestrøm, Norway, the UN Internet Governance Forum's dynamic coalition Internet Standards, Security and Safety (IS3C) released its new report on post-quantum policies. This report presents the findings of a collaborative study undertaken by IS3C and the French domain name registry Afnic and examines the critical need for Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) to achieve greater security in the ever-expanding global IoT landscape. more
RIPE held its 75th meeting in Dubai in mid-October. As usual, there was a diverse set of presentations covering a broad range of activities that are taking place on today's Internet. The topics include issues relating to network operations, regulatory policies, peering and interconnection, communications practices within data centers, IPv6, the DNS, routing and network measurement. If that's not enough, the topic of the Internet of Things has been added as a Working Group in the RIPE pantheon. If you add address policy, database and RIPE services to the mix, you get a pretty packed five days with topics that would appeal to most Internet folks. more
Following up on my recent post about how solving the Bufferbloat problem could dramatically increase the speed of Internet usage, I recently learned via a Google+ post by Michael Richardson of this video of a presentation by Jesper Dangaard Brouer of Red Hat at the recent DevConf.cz Brno 2013 titled "Beyond the existences of Bufferbloat - Have we found the cure?" more
A new IETF draft has been published that specifies a new HTTP status code for legally restricted resources. That is, if the government restricts your access to the web page, return this code (similar to how something not found is a 404). The error code: 451. From the Internet Draft, if the user tries to access a page, but access to the page is restricted by the government, display the following... more
An interesting new paper from the Naval Postgraduate School describes what appears to be an interesting new twist on spam filtering, looking at the characteristics of the TCP session through which the mail is delivered. They observe that bots typically live on cable or DSL connections with slow congested upstreams. ... This paper tries to see whether it would be practical to use that info to manage spam in real time. more