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IPv6 Application Competition - win $10,000
sneekz writes "The IPv6 Promotion Council of Japan has announced a competition for developers of IPv6-enabled applications. Various prizes up to $10,000 for ideas and actual implementations, and you keep the rights to your work. From their site: 'The contest will award developers of applications and software which helps to create new possibilities in the Internet world.'"
The Japanese. Many Japanese ISPs will give you your own IPv6 subnet right now, for not very much money.
from ipv6.org IPv6 is short for "Internet Protocol Version 6". IPv6 is the "next generation" protocol designed by the IETF to replace the current version Internet Protocol, IP Version 4 ("IPv4"). Most of today's internet uses IPv4, which is now nearly twenty years old. IPv4 has been remarkably resilient in spite of its age, but it is beginning to have problems. Most importantly, there is a growing shortage of IPv4 addresses, which are needed by all new machines added to the Internet. IPv6 fixes a number of problems in IPv4, such as the limited number of available IPv4 addresses. It also adds many improvements to IPv4 in areas such as routing and network autoconfiguration. IPv6 is expected to gradually replace IPv4, with the two coexisting for a number of years during a transition period. It prevents spoofed UDP backets (no more easy, D.O.S attacks, and spoofted packets) It makes the amount of posible adresses so large that worms that use simple seek algotrithems (such as slammer) would take like 20 years to infect enough systems to do any damage and would allow for all the future embedded apps, to get their own ip's.
come comment on the madness at http://slashdot.org/~phreak03/journal/
Grand Prize is 1,000,000 yen... thats 8,306.775 USD not $10,000.
Award for Promotion 5 works 150,000 yen each (1,246.03 USD)
Award for Planning 5 works 50,000 yen each (415.332 USD)
Grand Prix 1 work 1,000,000 yen (8,306.775 USD)
Award for Excellence a few works Total 1,000,000 yen
Award for Fine Works a few works Total 500,000 yen (4,153.15 USD)
So they are paying people to port applications to IPv6 now? hmp.. I would have thought that the ISP's and telicos would have ported to it automaticly when Internet IP's started to dry up.
NTT Communications Corporation
A subcompany of the NTT group; the country's largest ISP.
Fujitsu Limited
One of Japan's largest manufacturers of PCs and servers.
Impress Corporation /. users should know this one - it runs the Akiba PC Watch site.
Internet Research Institute, Inc.
A company founded to take advantage of academic research. Funded by Yahoo Japan/Softbank (Softbank's one of Japan's largest Internet-related companies, and actually runs Yahoo Japan).
KDDI CORPORATION
Japan's #2 phone company after NTT.
Matsushita Electric Works, Ltd.
Japan's largest manufacturer of electronic goods.
Nokia-Japan Co., Ltd.
Need I say more?
Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc.
The Mitsubishi group's research organization.
The reason Japan's so hot for IPv6 is that it got rather shortchanged in the IPv4 handout - the ratio of IPv4 addresses to users is much worse than in the US.
And even if your ISP won't assign you an IPv6 subnet, you can always utilize a free Tunnel Broker to obtain a huge IPv6 address space of your very own (tunneled to your IPv4 IP). I used this recently when adding basic IPv6 support to the Nmap Security Scanner. My announcement also provides a concrete example of IPv6 being used to subvert firewall rulesets.
A ton of useful IPv6 information is available from Kame.Net -- once your setup is working, the turtle on the top of that page starts to dance :). I also found the Linux IPv6 HOWTO to be incredibly helpful.
-Fyodor
Concerned about your network security? Try the Free Nmap Security Scanner
If the upstream router from you (whether that's a $20k rack box from Cisco or some Pentium Linux box) has IPv6 connectivity then all you need to do on your hosts is turn on IPv6 and the rest happens automatically.
/etc/sysconfig/network and restart networking
/48 to each subnet in the building.
e.g RH Linux, set NETWORKING_IPV6=yes in
If you don't have upstream IPv6 then (1) Tell your provider that you think they should look into it sooner rather than later (2) round up the OS specific documentation for a technology called "6to4" tunnels.
A 6to4 tunnel can be created from any fully operational IPv4 host, even if it's a dialup link on some mom&pop ISP. Like the rest of IPv6 this is autoconfigured, you set a few options according to the documentation from your OS vendor and then it Just Works (TM).
If you have a typical small office/ geek house NAT setup with a single router & a lot of hosts spread around a building, the 6to4 tunnel will let you give all those hosts unique IPv6 addresses too, by assigning a
To check that it's working visit e.g. http://www.kame.net/ for visual confirmation. You may have to restart your browser if IPv6 wasn't installed when it was first started.
Some of the UK academic network has started an experimental IPv6 network for researchers to play with.
who's actually using IPv6? I know some use it privately within their org, but are there any publicly using it?
ah, lots of people, actually... it's all over the routers and servers, nowdays... but the local network admin and network engineers are probably doing their best to make the migration as invisible as possible.
A good starting point to learn more about IPv6 would be www.internet2.edu. If you check out the corporate partners, you'll notice that ATT&T, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Lucent, Microsoft, Nortel, Qwest, SBC, and Sun are all in on the "Internet2" act, which includes the IPv6 protocol And the list of affiliated universities stretches nearly 200 members long...
Anyhow, Sun Solaris 9, Microsoft Windows2000, Microsoft WindowsXP, and Cisco IOS all have support for IPv6, as I understand... They're publicaly using it and supporting it.
If you want to know more about IPv6, check out this link and just search for the term "IPv6"... you should get about 93 articles regarding the Request For Comments (RFC) procedure used to define the protocol... As you will notice, IPv6 is a 128bit protocol, and was designed to be able to be broken up into 4 32bit packets, which allows it to interoperate with older IPv4 networks...
Moral of the story is that there are millions of people already using IPv6 on their client machines, who already don't know and don't care about the specific protocol implementations...
The article refers to an award for application developers to develop IPv6 enabled applications... If you calculate the ratio between IPv6 address and the total surface area of the earth, you will notice that there are approximately 2,000 IP addresses per square meter, with the IPv6 protocol... enough to give an address to every nut, bolt, and widget in every plane, train, and automobile on earth, with billions and billions left over... The awards will be going to people who figure out not just how to use IPv6, but how to code new applications and new uses for that kind of domain space...
Last year i did a research paper on IPv6 for my data communications class. People, those who think IPv6 is dumb, unecessary, or already dead, pull your head from where the sun ain't shining and take a look at what it has to offer, you might consider giving some RFC's a read, that is unless your a pussy, and if thats the case, why do you read /. ?
IPv6 RFCs
It offers some really neat, and much need security imporovements, like secure hashing, encryption at the IP level(data link layer) and seriously, there is no longer a need for DHCP. It is a network administrators dream come true, now if only people would start using it...
Sorry for being an anonymous coward, i haven't posted in so long, i forget my userid...