Networking

US authorities have officially cut off servers in New York put in place to direct internet traffic for computers infected with the DNSChanger malware.

But concerns around a potential internet blackout for an estimated 211,000 computers still believed to be infected at the time of the shut down were ultimately unfounded. Approximately 6000 Australian internet subscribers faced a similar fate locally, with the majority sourced to Telstra connections.

Network firewalls and mainframes are old technology, but despite calls over the years to do away with one or the other, they remain in widespread use. As to why, just ask IT professionals who manage large networks.

"We have three times the amount of firewalls than seven or eight years ago," says Andrew McCullough, lead infrastructure security architect in the information security and compliance department at Motel 6.

As part of what one Member of Parliament calls “the most intrusive surveillance regime in the west,” the British government's Home Office is hoping to require ISPs to route all of the data that gets transferred over their servers through a 'black box.' In addition to spying on you, the box will also slow down everyone's connection speed. Sounds like fun.

When I was in high school in the mid-1990s, I got to spend a few weeks with my French extended family at their country house east of Paris. Nearly each night, I watched my uncle stare into a small, old, dusty computer to monitor the results of the Tour de France. The little beige box had a fold-down keyboard and a pretty old-school text-only interface, even by mid-'90s standards. This was a Minitel.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions – any sys admin would relate to this. You have nothing but the best intentions when you install a tool, set up a service, or plug in a device on your network, convinced that that these will be of benefit.

Yet how often did you find out that instead of helping to manage or improve the infrastructure, the results were disastrous, security holes were opened, making audits a nightmare and creating other major issues for everyone?

In a speech on Wednesday, the head of the International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations, explicitly denied that the group is interested in taking over the Internet. But this speech makes clear that the body is quite interested in helping domestic telecommunications operators make boatloads of cash by controlling the flows of content to individual countries.

In terms of holding interest, enterprise technical architecture management (ETAM) ranks somewhere between watching paint dry and grass grow, with the additional disadvantage of being intellectually demanding. The less technical your audience, the more ETAM serves as a side-effect-free alternative to Lunesta.

The news gets worse: ETAM is the one subject where IT needs to engage business leaders on a technical level -- a conversation about the enterprise technical architecture that's limited to metaphors and business terms won't get the job done.

Do we have flying cars, robot servants, jetpacks and time travel machines yet? Nope, not yet... but tomorrow we will be getting a lot more IP addresses when IPv6 launches.

In the past month, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the Leveson inquiry website, Visa and Virgin Media have all been hit by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Much had been made of the motives for such attacks, and the methods that attackers use, but what impact do they have on the victim’s finances? 

Go to the Internet Society’s Website, and across the top of one of the pages is a countdown clock, the seconds ticking away as ttime closes in on World IPv6 Day June 6.