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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