The Next Net

Qa32 wrote to give a heads up on a BBC article discussing the IETF's plans for the future, including information on VoIP, IPv6, and security concerns. From the article: "Given the net was designed for the whole community, it has done well to reach millions. If you want to reach the whole population, you have to make sure it can scale up."

Comments

Mass media distribution

[thundercatslair]

IPv6 is nothing, it was just created because we are running out of IP addresses quickly. The future as I see it is mass distribution of media. Instead of running out and buying movies you could download the whole dvd and watch that.

Re:Mass media distribution

[mboverload]

First we need download speeds that are even close to our Asian neighbors.

It is pathetic that even poor people in South Korea have lines for 20 bucks a month at 25 mbps. America the leader in tech? I beg to differ.

Re:Mass media distribution

[arturov]

South Korea is also just a *teensy* bit smaller than the US. The infrastructure costs required to wire all the areas in the US with 25 Mbps speeds would be enormous. Also, just how many people can afford 20USD/month in South Korea? Does this include "the poor people"? Quit trying to compare two vastly different situations just to bash the US.

Re:Mass media distribution

[Doc Ruby]

These comparisons are normalized to scale. Why doesn't *anywhere* in the US, like a Korea-sized area around NYC encompassing 50M people, get 25bps for $20? Where lots more people have $20:mo? Could it be that the situations are vastly different in the agressiveness with which the respective telcos are pursuing innovation? Or are you saying that Koreans are somehow innately more bandwidth-hungry than Americans?

Re:Mass media distribution

[arturov]

A step in the right direction, but the speed is still quite low compared to other more developed countries.

Only if you gauge a country's level of development by starcraft player density.

Re:Mass media distribution

[Hogwash McFly]

Quit trying to compare two vastly different situations just to bash the US

You know, not every negative observation about the United States is an attempt to jump on the 'US Bashing' bandwagon.

Re:Mass media distribution

[Doc Ruby]

We've subsidized the telcos and the broadband buildout in the US every way possible. We should demand the return on our investment. Instead we're resigned to feeding our monopolies and losing our leadership.

Re:Mass media distribution

[Doc Ruby]

What about the Korea-sized swath from DC, through Philly and NYC, to Boston? It's pretty densely populated with rich media consumers. Why not just in NYC, where only 10% of the fiber is even lit, and we're among the richest, hungriest media consumers on the planet? Could it be that broadband providers are limited by their bizmodel, defined by the regulations they lobby incessantly to retain? That their lazy management is more interested in the low-hanging fruit of overcharging for pay-per-view of the movies they own, rather than opening up the infrastructure to competition from every shop with real broadband, or P2P?

Re:Mass media distribution

[sonoluminescence]

South Koreans are not all that poor.

Every post seems to be suggesting that south korean is some third world country, with the economic strength of Uganda when the reality is that their GDP per capita is roughly equivalent to that of lesser EU nations.

Just make sure...

[advocate_one]

you keep patents out of the standards... Microsoft have been trying to stick one in for the basic premises of IPv6... and surprise, surprise... they were also involved in the standards committee...

Those familiar with the meetings of the IETF as the committee hammered out the IPv6 IP address discovery system told eWEEK.com that Microsoft was actively participating in those discussions back in late 1997 and early 1998. Microsoft left the meetings and filed a patent for work on which there already existed numerous RFCs (requests for consensus)--basically the legislation that runs the Internet.

Wow! think of all them IP addresses.

[pg110404]

I believe IPv6 has something like 50 addresses for every square foot of land on the earth.

That's amazing. Soon we'll be able to wire up our entire house and everything from the fridge to the alarmclock would be accessible from the internet.

I only hope if it gets to that, nobody can hack into my microwave when I'm cooking my dinner, or someone hacking into my alarm clock and messes with the settings.

If microsoft does good on their desire to control it all, they'd better finally have some reasonable measure of security. I wouldn't want to wake up to find out some low life got to my hot water heater and turned it off because of a buffer overflow vulnerability.

Re: Wow! think of all them IP addresses.

[gidds]

I believe IPv6 has something like 50 addresses for every square foot of land on the earth.

Actually, I believe the figure's much bigger - something like 6.2 x 10^22. (My own calculation, confirmed by one web page, though others give widely varying results. That's based on a figure of 197 million square miles, incl. sea.)

But that's not the point, because the addresses aren't evenly spread. Once you allocate some of the most significant values to various organisation, protocols, or special values, then you start to lose a good number of those. And if you split the rest hierarchically (by country/region, ISP/organisation, and/or topology), then you'll find large numbers becoming unavailable.

Of course, there's such a big number to start with that that'll still leave plenty for everyone. But the number-per-square-foot value doesn't necessarily tell you very much.

Re:Wow! think of all them IP addresses.

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

Fine, semantics. The packet is unmodified, so its address matches to none of the TCP/IP stacks on the LAN, so it gets dropped by every PC. Not rewriting an address is effectively dropping it (unless you somehow had a local machine with an IP identical to that of your NAT box on the Internet)

You are assuming that every packet that comes down your internet connection will have a destination IP address matching your router's public IP address. That is an unwise assumption to make for at least two reasons:

1. You are effectively placing the security of your LAN into the hands of your ISP.

2. Many broadband connections present subsribers with an ethernet interface, which from their perspective makes all subscribers in the area look like they're on one big ethernet. In this situation other users can simply add a route to your LAN's address via your outside IP address and viola, full access to your LAN.

Re:IPv6 Not Enough?

[mboverload]

Remember alot of those IP's will be within a private network. I doubt they will be handing out static IPs to lightbulbs any time soon.

OMG HE MADE TEH AL GORE FUNNY!!1eleven

[daniil]

Seriously, mate, this joke is so old it's about time it was put out of its misery (as it's no longer funny) and bury it under three miles of solid rock (otherwise, the stench would be unbearable).

Re:Dosen't the internet scale?

[Anonymous Coward]

from my understanding, IPv6 isn't THAT dramatic of a change from IPv4. It's all in the addressing. Your NIC doesn't really CARE what address it has. For that matter a router shouldn't care what is really going on with the addresses other than "This packet goes here and that packet goes there". IPv6 makes that a little different but not totaly alien.

There will still be subnet masks and that will still be what a router uses to move packets from one network to another. Once a packet is on the "correct" network its all about the MAC address from that point on.

This whole bit about scaling up is addressing. What you really need to worry about is some sort of DRM trickery but this guys sounds on the level.

Re:An observation on IPv6

[WeblionX]

I'm using Windows you insensitive clod!

Re:Interesting quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting for many here that the new guy at the head of the IETF seems to give this issue such emphasis.

Why? I'd say that it's quite logical -- if you want to ensure flawless communication, then free (so that everyone can use them) and open (so that everyone can understand them) standards are obviously better than a bunch of closed ones that may not be interoperable.

Re:IPv6 is a hack

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, hope that a company's networking policy is left to the company, not some burecracy who wants to nanny my networking setup.

Your comment also speaks of technical ignorance. Simple packet filtering can make a network just as secure as a NAT'd network, while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of NAT.

Re:IPv6 is a hack

[irix]

IANA hasn't been handing out class A blocks "like tap water" for a long time. Sure, some organizations have too many addresses, but these were mainly organizations that pioneered the IP network and were handed these netblocks very early on.

As an AC pointed out in an earlier response, NAT is the hack, not IPv6. It breaks end-to-end connectivity, and you have to jump through lots of hoops to get many protocols to work correctly. NAT was a measure that slowed the need for IPv6, but it didn't remove it.

Re:Mind you...

[pHDNgell]

IPv4 only supports 4bil address in a given addressible domain. With NAT, things get more interesting, and to be honest, is the BEST thing that has happened to computer security ever. People whine about NAT, but it's poor protocols that cause NAT to break things (FTP, RTSP and SIP come to mind). Otherwise NAT solves the issues.

NAT has in no way improved security. You're confusing firewalls with NAT. Firewalls would be just as effective without NAT.

Since you seem to be so informed, though, how exactly are you working to fix these ``poor protocols'' that are preventing me from doing video chat with my daughter or managing her computer? I cannot ssh, remote desktop, or ichat AV because her machine is behind a NAT outside of her control.

How does this benefit her, the customer of this service? What does it do to improve security beyond the built-in firewall or any given add-on stateful firewall?