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Obama Highlights IPv6 Issue
alphadogg writes "The Obama Administration bills itself as the most tech-savvy political team ever, but until now it has ignored one of the biggest issues facing the Internet: the rapid depletion of IPv4 Internet addresses and the imminent need for carriers and content providers to adopt IPv6. Today, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will host a workshop on IPv6 that features high-profile executives from government, industry and Internet policymaking organizations. Some observers are hoping the Obama Administration will use the workshop to issue a deadline for all federal agencies to support IPv6 on their public-facing Web sites."
I heard he's going to mandate that all Federal agencies cut over to IPv6 by the time they close Gitmo.
-Peter
Can we at least all agree that NAT is evil, and destroys one of the nicest features of TCP/IP (and a free Internet): it creates a network of peers?
Coming up next ... our monthly reminder of ipv4's demise.
How many stories can you guys come up with that basically dance around the same issue?
We know its happening, now we're just waiting for everyone to catch up and get compliant.
This is not the penguin you're looking for.
Gee, I hope while they are at it, they can make sure they can track all the content, every citizen and device that get's "plugged" into the internet.
Hopefully, they are bringing in the vast collective knowledge of the **IA's to ensure that the rest of the world is represented as well.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
and you see this in all sorts of problems in life, from coworker's agendas, to politicians and their bombast:
you can win attention in the short term by describing a threat in worse language than it actually is
but by doing that, you pay the longterm cost of people just not trusting what you say anymore
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
To be honest the whole "addresses are running out" thing is just a way to sell IPv6 to laypeople, because "we have 4 billion addresses and over 6 billion people" is so easy to understand.
In reality it's about getting rid of the restrictions of needing network address translation, allowing devices to be accessible by one address anywhere, unifying different forms of addressing like phone numbers, IPv4 addresses, multicast/anycast addresses, etc all into one address space, making routing more efficient, making autoconfiguration more seamless, getting built-in cryptography, etc, etc, etc.
Addresses running out is, for the reasons you give and more, really not what it's about, but it is a bit heart-wrenching to see tech-savvy people say we shouldn't go for IPv6 because we're not really running out; we aren't, but we still need to go for IPv6, and if tech-savvy people don't have one mind on this issue it'll take far longer than it should.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
how does delusional hoping for the rapture do for leadership?
I was visiting my father-in-law in Canada, and we were driving through northern Ontario. I'd gotten used to all the street signs in metric by then, and I was surprised to see an old highway sign with a distance in miles. My father-in-law pointed out that Canada had converted to the metric system in 1977, based upon the US plan to convert to the metric system in 1976.
I worked for a blueprint printing company for several years. One issue that often came up was difficulties in rescaling blueprints for different page sizes, as the arbitrary sheet sizes that were standard each had different ratios of length to width. As a political activist, I also often designed flyers; scaling flyers to half-size always came out ugly. One day, I happened to read up on ISO paper sizes, and how they were all based upon ratios of one to the square root of two, which meant that ratios were uniform and rescaling was easy. Apparently, ISO paper sizes are the standard used everywhere but in the US and a few countries in Latin America; Canada prints in US sizes because of the scale of the US market. The ratio of one to the square root of two was proposed early in the history of printing, centuries ago.
As I understand, all modern operating systems have native support for IPv6, and have had such support for years; part of the impetus is that the US Federal government had, at some point, announced a policy requiring any software it used to support IPv6. From what I can make out, it's the ISPs that are dragging their heels on implementing technology that's been tested and ready to deploy for years.
I can understand hesitancy to deploy radical new ideas. However, I don't understand the hesitancy to deploy ideas that have been tested exhaustively, deployed, and used widely.