It happened in San Jose, it happened in Taiwan and soon it will happen in Philadelphia! A nightmare? A conspiracy? No, no, it was just the IPv6 hour. One hour of pure IPv6 LAN for NANOG attendees with a NAT-PT as valve to the crowded teeming world of the IPv4 internet... At 12 noon, Tuesday February 19th it happened! While Mac, Vista, Linux and Unix can breathe AAAA, Windows XP however cannot do DNS over IPv6 transport. What to do to avoid all these Windows XP users... more
The prospect of exhaustion of the IPv4 address space is not a surprise. We've been anticipating this situation since at least 1990. But it's a "lumpy" form of exhaustion. It's not the case that the scarcity pressures for IP addresses are evidently to the same level in every part of the Internet. It's not the case that every single address is being used by an active device. A couple of decades ago we thought that an address utilisation ratio of 10% (where, for example, a block of 256 addresses would be used in a network with some 25 addressed devices) was a great achievement. more
Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) today announced it has reached the last block of its available pool of IPv4 addresses. The day is marked as key turning point which initiates a major change in regional delegation policy. more
Many in the network security field may be familiar with the phrase: "It's always DNS." This is a popular meme within the industry, often making reference to the internal domain name system (DNS), the dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) part of a company's online network, that whenever there is a network issue, it's always an issue with DNS. more
On Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, 2015, some of the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) root name servers received large amounts of anomalous traffic. Last week the root server operators published a report on the incident. In the interest of further transparency, I'd like to take this opportunity to share Verisign's perspective, including how we identify, handle and react, as necessary, to events such as this. more
What is the impact of IPv6 on telecommunications, VoIP, unified communications, etc? Why should telecom operators care about IPv6? What VoIP systems already support IPv6? What efforts are underway within organizations like the IETF and the SIP Forum to ensure that telecommunications can work over IPv6? more
In 1949 a Bell Laboratory researcher, Claude Shannon, published a paper on a new science of "Information". Bell Labs had sponsored the research with the goal of improving phone networks but was not prepared to embrace the full implications of the new science which made explicit the distinction between information in the information sense and information encoded in numbers or bits... more
I never thought I'd see the day when the difference in capability between a wireless and a wireline Internet would become a core policy differentiator in a national election, but this has now happened in Australia. ... It seems that everyone has an interest in a ubiquitous, fast and cheap internet. Now that interest has been taken up as a major policy differentiator by both sides of the political spectrum in the recent Australian election. What was this all about? more
Feb. 3, 2011, came and went without much fanfare, but it was a milestone for Internet stakeholders, whether they knew it or not. On that Thursday, the last available IPv4 addresses were allocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Though some Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) have a reasonable inventory of IP addresses that could last another year or two, the days of "new" IPv4 address allocations are largely over. more
One of the more persistent founding myths around the internet is that it was designed to be able to withstand a nuclear war, built by the US military to ensure that even after the bombs had fallen there would still be communications between surviving military bases. It isn't true, of course. The early days of the ARPANET, the research network that predated today's internet, were dominated by the desire of computer scientists to find ways to share time on expensive mainframe computers rather than visions of Armageddon. Yet the story survives... more
In Ian Flemming's Thunderball M sends 007 to the Bahamas on a hunch that SPECTRE is hiding something there. Well, it's been our hunch for a while that the Bahamas "office" for the Registrar Internet.BS does not exist. Now we have confirmation of such. It has been documented in an explosive undercover expose by LegitScript that Internet.BS address as stated could not be verified, could not accept mail, and that the business itself could not actually be found in the Bahamas. more
As often occurs in networking and cryptographic history, anecdotes and insularity conspire to mask how developments actually occurred, and seminal roles undertaken by women are forgotten or ignored. One of the notable examples of this proclivity occurred in the cybersecurity cryptology arena as it involves a critical platform known as the Transport Layer Security Protocol (TLS) and the pioneering role of Ruth Nelson. more
Qtel, the largest carrier in Qatar (and nearly the only Internet provider) appears to connect all their users (~600K) to the Internet through just one or a very few public IPv4 addresses. 82.148.97.69 was their single public address in 2006-2007. How can network address translation (NAT) put all those users through just one IP address? more
The Egyptian government has disabled most Internet and cell phone services in an apparent effort to disrupt the anti-government protests gripping the country. Egypt's four primary Internet providers all stopped moving data early Friday, effectively cutting off Egyptians from the outside world and each other. more
We are approaching the end of this 10 part series on the most common IPv6 security myths. Now it's time to turn our eyes away from security risks to focus a bit more on security resources. Today's myth is actually one of the most harmful to those who hold it. If you believe that there is no good information out there, it's nearly impossible to find that information. So let's get down to it and dispel our 9th myth. more
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