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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.'"
who's actually using IPv6? I know some use it privately within their org, but are there any publicly using it?
A consortium of some 300 individuals and corporations interested in the promotion of IPv6 have to offer significant amounts of money just to generate interest in this new protocol. A decent Internet protocol should not be forced on the public cum pecunia; it should be developed openly and freely under the currently-existing RFC standards. If there were any real, useful applications of IPv6 to the whole world, then an open, free-entry consortium would be overseeing the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 now.
However, there is no desperate shortage of IP addresses under the current scheme. While there are less IPs than theoretically possible (256^4 = 4,294,967,296), thanks to overhead and mismanagement (MIT getting its own Class A subnet makes perfect sense...NOT), nevertheless there is no current need for this initiative.
The fact is, this contest is simply a ploy by these companies to get your intellectual capital at a fraction of its potential worth. Do the world a favor and make your ideas and code snippets public and free (or GPL'd). Death to corporate tyranny!
We should push Linksys (and other cable/DSL router manufacturers) to write firmware capable of creating an IPv6 intranet, as opposed to the typical class C. Better still, I'm sure they could add support for something like TunnelBroker (as mentioned above) and map one's intranet into genuine IPv6 space. Yes, you could do the same thing with a 486 running BSD or Linux, but I think using a nice, small, energy-efficient box would be more elegant.
What you are refering to is the QOS field, which exists in IPv4 (what we currently use) and IPv6. However it isn't commonly used in IPv4.
The end points (eg your Quake client and the server) usually set the QOS field, and what is theorically suppose to happen is the routers along the way go.. ah, he wants low latency, so I'll send these packets down this link.
However, what usually happens is most routers ignore the QOS bits.
As for the slow downs, etc. That may be your upstream (ISP), who may twiddle the bits, but they can only do that based on a number of factors, to/from port, IP address, bandwidth usuage, etc.
There is nothing (much) you can do to avoid your ISP slowing down certain connections, except by making it hard to identify what is "legitimate" and what is "illegitmate" traffic. Eg giFT uses random port numbers of both sides, so its very difficult for the ISP to say, lets throttle giFT traffic. Freenet does much the same thing.
IPv6 will not answer the bandwidth and traffic shapping problems, all it will answer is the limited number of IP addresses problem. (And if you think about it, probably cause more bandwidth problems because you'll be able to have *LOTS* of different devices all plugged into your upstream bandwidth, all sapping it).
My recommendation is if you live under a draconian ISP is one of the following:
1) Move ISPs. If All ISPs are like this, move country.
2) Go postal, grab yourself a semiautomatic assult rifle, storm into your local ISPs NOC (network operations centre), and demand a 100mbit connection for your laptop, "right this instant!".
3) Find an open proxy, use that to bypass port based traffic shapping. If your ISP is shapping every port but port 80 (web), go find an open proxy that is running on port 80 and use that for other connections. The best bet would be find some willing (or otherwise) machine somewhere outside of draconia, and put a SOCKS proxy on port 80 on the machine.
4) Implement IP over carrier pigeon. Pigeons are not known for looking at each IP packet and flying differently because of its contents, though if the packet size is too large, it could slow the transport mechinisim down. I'm not sure if this RFC supports IPv6, but sinces its a transport mechinisim, I should think it would matter.
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
It makes me wonder what IPv4 will be like in its last days. Will it simply be a haven for warez, spam, and porn untill the weight of all the leechers causes it to collapse all together or will it somehow live for years and years with a slowly dying population like old school BBS'es.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep