Networking

Network and Web site operators are coming under increasing pressure to support IPv6 -- the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol -- as more market indicators point to the rapid depletion of addresses for IPv4.

The Number Resource Organization (NRO announced on Tuesday that only 8% of IPv4 addresses remain unallocated. The NRO consists of the five Regional Internet Registries, which dole out blocks of IPv4 and IPv6 address space to carriers.

For the second time in two weeks, bad networking information spreading from China has disrupted the Internet.

On Thursday morning, bad routing data from a small Chinese ISP called IDC China Telecommunication was re-transmitted by China's state-owned China Telecommunications, and then spread around the Internet, affecting Internet service providers such as AT&T, Level3, Deutsche Telekom, Qwest Communications and Telefonica.

Are you ready for IPv6? It may sound arcane but without support for the latest version of the Internet Protocol the rapid expansion of people and devices trying to link to the Internet could hit a major speed bump.

The pool of available Internet Protocol addresses could run out before the end of 2011 under today's IPv4 software. That's leading a widening circle of companies and organizations to press for support for Internet Protocol version 6 in anything connected to the Net.

People in the United States basically invented the Internet. So U.S. connections must be the fastest and cheapest in the world, right? Not so much.

Broadband Internet speeds in the United States are only about one-fourth as fast as those in South Korea, the world leader, according to the Internet monitoring firm Akamai.
And, as if to add insult to injury, U.S. Internet connections are more expensive than those in South Korea, too.

After years of being alive on the web, Yugoslavia will disappear from the online world tomorrow when its ".yu" domain name officially expires on Tuesday at noon.

The Serbian National Register of Internet Domain Names, RNIDS, has announced that the move to terminate the name came after a decision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN. RNIDS has also reminded all those still using the extension to make the necessary changes in data and protocols in order to continue using their internet services without disruptions.

A China-based root DNS server associated with networking problems in Chile and the U.S. has been disconnected from the Internet.

The action by the server's operator, Netnod, appears to have resolved a problem that was causing some Internet sites to be inadvertently censored by a system set up in the People's Republic of China.

Network engineers from Yahoo are pitching what they admit is a "really ugly hack" to the Internet's Domain Name System, but they say it is necessary for the popular Web content provider to support IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol.

Yahoo outlined its proposal for changes to DNS recursive name resolvers at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) held here this week.

VPN software brings the security of a private network to an insecure network, and allows you to access private local networks from anywhere. As we've explained in the past, you can do things between computers on your local network you can't from out on the internet: like listen to a shared iTunes library or access files in shared folders. Virtual private network applications give you access to your computer from anywhere on the internet as if you were home on your local network.

BitTorrent is currently the most popular peer-to-peer network for file sharing. However, experience has shown that Bit- Torrent is often used to distribute copyright protected movie and music files illegally. Consequently, copyright enforce- ment agencies currently monitor BitTorrent swarms to iden- tify users participating in the illegal distribution of copyright- protected files. These investigations rely on passive methods that are prone to a variety of errors, particularly false positive identification.

INTERNET OCTOPUS Google has just announced that it intends to roll out an experimental fibre to the home service in the US. At least in areas where the local population takes an interest.

In a blog post, Google said it was keen to test the high-speed Internet service in a "small number of trial locations" across the US, adding that its fibre infrastructure will enable Internet speeds up to 100 times faster than what most American punters currently enjoy. Or moan about, depending on how slow they think it is.