Let's take a second to look back some 50 years to the world of 1972 and the technology and telecommunications environment at that time. The world of 1972 was one populated by a relatively small collection of massive (and eye-wateringly expensive) mainframe computers that were tended by a set of computer operators working around the clock and directed by specialized programmers, trained in the obscure symbol set used by the job control systems on these computers. more
All devices that connect to the internet need unique addresses. The number of IP addresses is limited, creating a demand for addresses worldwide, particularly from the cloud computing industry. This demand has raised the value of IPv4 to levels that the internet's original developers didn't predict, in part because the internet was considered an experiment at the time. Of course, use - and so demand -- has exceeded anyone's realistic expectations. more
A network can fence its own IP addresses or block specific external ones from access. Administrators frequently block access to their own IP addresses to bar unwanted access to content. Individual IPs or blocks of IPs may also be blocked due to unwanted or malicious behavior. IP address blocking prevents a specific IP address or group of IP addresses from connecting with a server, computer, or application. more
CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) is a routing system in which network engineers can distribute IP addresses based on the size of their specific network. This is more efficient than the previous system, which assigned IP addresses depending on whether the size of a network fits into one of only three sizes: Class A, Class B, and Class C. more
On Monday May 23 2022 at 3 -- 5pm EEST (12:00 -- 14:00 UTC) the Finnish Internet Forum will convene a panel at the University of Helsinki with the topic 'Internet and War'. A panel of experts will address the question of how the war has affected the Internet and how the Internet has been used to influence Finland and elsewhere during the war. The event will be conducted in English. more
The saga of the IPv6 transition continues to surprise us all. RFC 2460, the first complete effort at a specification of the IPv6 protocol, was published in December 1998, more than twenty years ago. The entire point of IPv6 was to specify a successor protocol to IPv4 due to the prospect of running out of IPv4 addresses. Yet we ran out of IPv4 addresses more than a decade ago. more
Do you know someone who has made outstanding contributions in service to the Internet community? Someone who has made the Internet better in some way who deserves more recognition? Maybe someone who has helped extend Internet access to a large region? Or wrote widely-used programs that make the Internet more secure? Or served in some capacity behind the scenes in Internet services? more
Once you head away from the areas serviced by modern terrestrial cable infrastructure, the available digital communications options are somewhat limited. Some remote areas are served using High-Frequency radio systems, using radio signals that bounce off the ionosphere to provide a long-distance but limited bandwidth service. Or there are satellite-based services based on spacecraft positioned in geostationary orbital slots. more
Network operators rely on guidance from IP address experts because not all IP addresses used on the Internet are the same. The "reputation" of email senders is especially important because some are malicious users of the system. But identifying "senders" based on their email addresses or the individual IP address of a user presents issues that are unnecessarily complex. more
Speculation about Russia disconnecting or being disconnected from the wider Internet abounds. In this article, we look at the connectivity of the Russian Internet to the wider Internet and how this evolved around the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the related sanctions. more
I've often joked that I don't play computer games because I'm holding out for a holodeck. While that may sound ridiculously far-future, we're on the verge of seeing the web-based virtual reality that will be a major step towards a holodeck. There is already some awesome virtual reality software and games where a person can get immersed in another world using a headset. more
The Domain Name System has provided the fundamental service of mapping internet names to addresses from almost the earliest days of the internet’s history. Billions of internet-connected devices use DNS continuously to look up Internet Protocol addresses of the named resources they want to connect to - for instance, a website such as blog.verisign.com. Once a device has the resource’s address, it can then communicate with the resource using the internet’s routing system. more
On Friday, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's digital transformation minister, asked Cloudflare and Amazon to stop serving Russian web resources and protecting Russian services. He said in a tweet that Ukraine was "calling on Amazon to stop providing cloud services in Russia." He also said that "Cloudflare should not protect Russian web resources while their tanks and missiles attack our kindergartens." more
Last week the Ukrainian government sent a letter to ICANN asking them to revoke the ".ru", ".рф" and ".su" top-level domains. It also said they were asking RIPE, which manages IP addresses in Europe, to revoke Russian IP addresses. Both ICANN and RIPE said no. Other people have explained why it would have been a policy disaster, but beyond that, neither would actually have worked. more
I bet that nobody believed in 1992 that thirty years later, we'd still be discussing the state of the transition to IPv6! In 1992 we were discussing what to do about the forthcoming address crunch in IPv4, and having come to terms with the inevitable prospect that the silicon industry was going to outpace the capacity of the IPv4 address pool in a couple of years, we needed to do something quickly more
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