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Yahoo IPv6 Upgrade Could Shut Out 1M Users

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the trial-by-fire dept.

alphadogg writes "Yahoo is forging ahead with a move to IPv6 on its main Web site by year-end despite worries that up to 1 million Internet users may be unable to access it initially. Yahoo's massive engineering effort to support IPv6 — the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol — could at first shut out potential www.yahoo.com users due to what the company and others call 'IPv6 brokenness.'"

52 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Real question is... by Migala77 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Will Yahoo still have 1M users by year-end to shut out?

    1. Re:Real question is... by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      Will Yahoo still have 1M users by year-end to shut out?

      Notice it does say 'potential'. :-P

      And, yes, I have to ask the same thing ... I've not used Yahoo's search in over a decade (do they have one anymore?), and except for Flickr, I'm not aware of a single thing from Yahoo I might use.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:Real question is... by longacre · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not sure how or why, but they still get a shit-ton of traffic and Yahoo Mail has 3x as many users as Gmail.

      --
      Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
    3. Re:Real question is... by Thud457 · · Score: 2

      The more relevant question is "Does Yahoo have one million users?"

      --

      the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

    4. Re:Real question is... by Charliemopps · · Score: 2

      And when you exclude botnets how many users do they have?

    5. Re:Real question is... by IAmGarethAdams · · Score: 2

      Yes. And then some:

      Our goals remain the same: the first and foremost of which is to keep improving the core features — speed, security, accessibility and stability — that our 275+ million users have come to depend on.

      - May 12, 2010

    6. Re:Real question is... by eyrieowl · · Score: 2

      I actually still maintain a premium email account with them for one reason: the disposable email addresses. I have the email all forwarded to my Gmail account because the integration with my phone is...considerably better. However, the email address I give out when shopping or to corporations I do business with is one of my disposable email addys on yahoo. Gmail doesn't have anything like it, afaik. Yes, on gmail you can add suffixes (myemail+ebay@gmail.com), but people are free to leave out the suffix and your actual email addy is right there. With the yahoo disposable addys, the root/prefix isn't the same as the account, and once you get rid of a suffix, you won't ever get any email on it. It's a good system, I think. The only improvement I'd like to see is some way to make creating the disposable addresses even easier, instead of having to navigate to a config page under the mail options.

      Of course, the other thing Yahoo does well, which for some reason Google refuses to really do, is support hierarchies. Yeah, I get it, labels in gmail are cool and all...but I'd still like to organize them hierarchically. I've got a lot of labels, and the gmail interface kinda blows having to always see all of them over there on the left. And google bookmarks REALLY could use some hierarchical structure. I want to organize my bookmarks into folders, thank you very much.... Labels just aren't the same when you're pulling down a drop down in a browser.

      I use Google for most things, and they have some great products, but sometimes they're just as bad as...some other fruity companies with the "this is how you SHOULD do things" lack of flexibility.

    7. Re:Real question is... by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      Good for you, you're special aren't you.

      No more than you're an asshole.

      Look, all I said is that I'm not personally aware of any offering from Yahoo that people still use besides Flickr ... not that since I don't use it, it must be irrelevant. I don't use Facebook either, but it's clearly not irrelevant.

      I'd happily accept the second half of your post and say "gee, thanks for the info, I didn't know that".

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    8. Re:Real question is... by blackest_k · · Score: 2

      If you use facebook yahoo can get your contacts out into a csv file and then import them into google contacts.
      that could be useful.

      --
      Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
    9. Re:Real question is... by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      Well allow me to enlighten then. Working retail selling, building, and repairing PCs I can tell you the Yahoo portal that geeks can't stand because it is so "cluttered"? Yeah that damned thing is THE #1 home page for those that aren't geeks by such a large margin it isn't even funny.

      I've sat and watched users (including my GF who insists on having a profile on my PC set to "her place" AKA Yahoo Portal) and basically what it boils down to is this: They use the site like a giant starting off point before they go onto the big wide Internet, that is if they even leave it at all. They check their mail, peruse the headlines, see what is gonna be on TV that night, and as another poster pointed out Yahoo Sports is THE number 1# most checked sports site.

      So for them Yahoo has taken the place of the morning newspaper. I even picked my dad up a netbook so he could "read the paper" as he called it and chat while watching TV in his living room. As much as geeks may think it is a cluttered mess (and I personally use search.yahoo.com instead) for the average Joe it is the home page by a HUGE margin. In fact it is so popular that when someone comes in that doesn't have it set to Yahoo Portal is when I take notice.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    10. Re:Real question is... by Migala77 · · Score: 2

      I have recently changed my default search engine in Chromium to Yahoo because of Google's annoying Instant Preview "feature" that can't be turned-off.

      You can turn off Google Instant using the Settings link.
      (and Yahoo search is powered by Bing now)

  2. killer app by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Once Yahoo! is only available over IPv6, the internet will have no choice but to upgrade!

  3. Great logic there Lou by OverlordQ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From

    IPv6 experts say some Internet users will experience slowdowns or have trouble connecting to IPv6-enabled Web sites because they have misconfigured or misbehaving network equipment

    to

    "IPv6 brokenness."

    So I should blame the water company if I install my plumbing wrong?

    --
    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
    1. Re:Great logic there Lou by gstoddart · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So I should blame the water company if I install my plumbing wrong?

      No, but if they changed their infrastructure to no longer be compatible with your existing (and working) plumbing and expected you to pay to upgrade, you'd be mad, right?

      One of the problems with IPv6 is everybody already has networking equipment that they've paid for and that works ... I can't see much motivation for most people/organizations to switch to IPv6, especially if it means it breaks what they've already got. I can also see making everyday things like ping and telnet much more cumbersome.

      All of the people with home routers and the like (and older operating systems) don't want to pay to upgrade for something which they don't understand what benefit it is supposed to give them. I must confess, except for a bigger address space, I'm not sure what benefit IPv6 has for *me* -- which is why IPv6 has been languishing in the "don't care pile" for seemingly forever.

      If my ISP needs to change all of their cable-modems to support this, you can bet I'm gonna have to pay out of pocket.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:Great logic there Lou by idontgno · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, but if the water company switches to IPv6 water and your plumbing is incompatible, you might blame them. After all, water is water, and the plumbing worked just fine until they changed something.

      Or, to put it in light of a bit of recent history, a lot of Americans are still grumbling at local broadcasters and the FCC because over-the-air TV was working JUST FINE until June 2009, when ALL OF A SUDDEN the rabbit ears weren't enough. And that was with a sustained, repetitive, annoyingly pervasive advertising campaign to raise awareness of the upcoming DTV transition, plus subsidies for converter gear. And a distinct minority still missed the transition. And that's just broadcast TV, which is stupid simple in terms of end-user infrastructure.

      IPv6, implemented piecemeal, will simply black out parts of the net to many (most?) users until something like the DTV transition makes it (A) obvious to Joe Intarwebuser that the transition IS UNAVOIDABLY COMING, and (B) subsidizes replacements of incompatible key components of the users' and providers' network path. (I'm looking at you, manufacturers of residential gateway router devices and network ISPs.)

      --
      Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
    3. Re:Great logic there Lou by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      No, but if they changed their infrastructure to no longer be compatible with your existing (and working) plumbing and expected you to pay to upgrade, you'd be mad, right?

      This is actually a pretty good analogy. Suppose the city was upgrading to higher pressure water in order to be able to reach further (yeah I know doesn't really work that way). So about 20 years ago the city started telling everyone they were going to switch over and if you have antique, clay pipes in your home, you'll need to make sure your main intake valve handles things correctly or it could jam and cause problems. So, having bought a new intake valve within the last decade (and really who hasn't bought a new router or leased one within that time frame) you might want to make sure it supports the new standard, or just wait to see if you have problems. And if you do have problems, yeah you might be mad. If you're rational, you'll be mad at the people who sold you the intake valve, but you might be mad at the city too.

      That's progress I suppose.

      I must confess, except for a bigger address space, I'm not sure what benefit IPv6 has for *me*

      It has a bigger address space. Yup you nailed it. That's the big difference. That means networks stop being so tiered and problematic and each device you own can have a number of unique addresses, enabling a whole range of new technology cheaply and affordably. You don't want new networking technologies and such? Well that's just fine, but you'll have to excuse the rest of us when we ignore your complaints.

    4. Re:Great logic there Lou by sjames · · Score: 2

      You mean other than not wanting to end up sitting all alone in IPv4 space pinging themselves so they can feel like someone cares?

      I've been doing 6to4 tunneling on a years old WRT54GL. If you have to buy a new router, blame the vendor of the old one for not providing a firmware update, because the hardware is certainly capable of it.

      Comcast is pressuring cable-modem vendors to provide the needed firmware updates.

    5. Re:Great logic there Lou by WillDraven · · Score: 2

      That happened on my street. I live in the historic district (basically 1 street full of 100-130 year old houses) and when they replaced the old leaky water main suddenly the whole street was plagued with exploding plumbing.

      --
      This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
    6. Re:Great logic there Lou by klapaucjusz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think you're missing the point.

      We're not speaking about switching to pure IPv6. We're speaking of making Yahoo accessible over both IPv4 and IPv6.

      Pure IPv4 ("legacy") sites will have no problem, they'll just contact Yahoo over IPv4. Properly configured dual-stack sites will have no problem, they'll have a choice between IPv4 and IPv6. It's only mis-configured clients that might have problems.

      The article claims that 0.05% of Yahoo's customers are mis-configured. These 0.05% will need to either disable IPv6, or fix their systems. --jch

    7. Re:Great logic there Lou by sjames · · Score: 2

      A lot of it has been lazy vendors sticking their heads in the sand and pinching pennies. It took the DOD mandating v6 support on all new equipment to motivate the vendors to even offer v6 in theory (though often without even the most rudimentary testing).

      Of course a lot of that was because so many management teams ascribe to the piss on fires theory of change management and lack of v6 wasn't even smoldering yet. It doesn't matter if you give them 100 years heads up time, they will wait until it's an emergency to do anything about it.

      It's worth noting that the specs and standards have been complete and final for over a decade. Even XP has had support for v6 available for years now, as have Mac and Linux.

      On the business IT side, it's mostly a matter of people tripping themselves up and making it harder than it is. The dirty truth is that there are a few networking professionals out there and a LOT of people who do networking by rote and hope for the best. The latter are totally flummoxed by v6 because the addresses look different.

    8. Re:Great logic there Lou by John+Hasler · · Score: 2

      No, but if the water company switches to IPv6 water and your plumbing is incompatible, you might blame them. After all, water is water, and the plumbing worked just fine until they changed something.

      The only change they made was to add all new IPv6 water mains. The old IPv4 mains are still there and unchanged. The problem is that you had your plumbing redone by an incompetent who connected it so that it sometimes believes that it is hooked to the IPv6 mains when it actually only connects the the IPv4 ones.

      --
      Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
    9. Re:Great logic there Lou by stoborrobots · · Score: 2

      The truth is that analog was far more robust. I might not get a great signal, but I got a usable one. Now I don't even get that.

      And the trade off was that the analog signal used around four times the bandwidth to get that robustness...

      --
      "Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
  4. IPv6 "brokenness" =/= lack of IPv4 support by clone5342! · · Score: 4, Informative

    That isn't what they're doing (yet). Although the headline/summary made it sound like they were shutting out IPv4 users, this is not the case. They will be supporting both simultaneously.

    What that means is that if a website advertises itself as simultaneously IPv4/IPv6 compliant, and someone's computer/browser thinks they are IPv6 compliant but their attempts to connect via IPv6 don't make it through (ISP? router? modem? who knows), their connection times out and the site is unreachable.

    The solution in this case would be to identify the node that doesn't support IPv6 (might be difficult) or force the system on the user-end to use IPv4 (shouldn't be that hard). It certainly shouldn't be the end of the world, and it shouldn't really even affect too many people. And it will be a push to at least support IPv6 (not necessarily require it) at every step of the path so that users whose computers are capable of IPv6 connections can actually connect successfully over it.

    1. Re:IPv6 "brokenness" =/= lack of IPv4 support by Zan+Lynx · · Score: 2

      Even systems with working IPv6 still make DNS requests over IPv4. The system would have to be pure IPv6 and not dual-stack to make that work. Besides that, DNS servers work by forwarding and caching requests and results. Even if a client made a IPv6 DNS request, its DNS server may forward that request on IPv4.

    2. Re:IPv6 "brokenness" =/= lack of IPv4 support by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2

      Even systems with working IPv6 still make DNS requests over IPv4.

      More specifically, an IPv6 system may make a DNS request over IPv6, which goes to the ISP's DNS cache. This cache may then issue a DNS request over IPv4. Similarly, the converse may happen - a DNS cache may handle a v4 request by doing a v6 recursive query.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    3. Re:IPv6 "brokenness" =/= lack of IPv4 support by WidgetGuy · · Score: 5, Informative

      That isn't what they're doing (yet). Although the headline/summary made it sound like they were shutting out IPv4 users, this is not the case. They will be supporting both simultaneously.

      You are correct. I believe it's called "running a dual stack."

      If slashdotters want to test whether their present system (client, router, NAT, firewall, proxy, ISP) is IPv6-ready, go here. Its free and there s a ton of good information about the conversion "issues" and what you'll need to do to become a full IPv6 citizen.

      --
      One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
    4. Re:IPv6 "brokenness" =/= lack of IPv4 support by IAN · · Score: 3, Interesting

      [...] if a website advertises itself as simultaneously IPv4/IPv6 compliant, and someone's computer/browser thinks they are IPv6 compliant but their attempts to connect via IPv6 don't make it through (ISP? router? modem? who knows), their connection times out and the site is unreachable.

      More precisely: if the DNS has both v6 (AAAA) and v4 (A) records for the site's name, and the client prefers v6 connectivity over v4, and a v6 connection can't be established for some reason, the site will appear to be broken. Most large sites have measured this kind of brokenness, but haven't published their methodology nor results; there is an exception, but it's limited to Scandinavian users. It is nevertheless a very interesting analysis, which basically suggests that eliminating just two sources of brokenness (OS X < 10.6.5 and Opera < 10.50) would practically eliminate client loss.

  5. Yahoo mail by Issildur03 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yahoo mail has a nice tab-based interface so you can open multiple emails while writing a few more, which Gmail is missing. It's also hard to migrate 10 years' of emails to a new service (they make it hard, at least) - not to mention getting everyone to use your new email address.

    1. Re:Yahoo mail by Lumpy · · Score: 2

      No problem for me. I weeded out my 10 years of emails down to 200 of actually real emails that need to be kept. then I set my yahoo email address to auto foreward to my Gmail.

      Also by not giving out the old email address PLUS having my sig on my emails showing that my email address has changed to his new one... I have not had 20 legitimate emails hit my yahoo account in a year.

      It's not hard, you just cant be lazy about moving to a new email address.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    2. Re:Yahoo mail by noidentity · · Score: 2

      Yahoo mail has a nice tab-based interface so you can open multiple emails while writing a few more, which Gmail is missing.

      Uhhh, aren't tabs something your browser supplies? At least in mine, I can open multiple GMail tabs with separate emails just fine.

    3. Re:Yahoo mail by repetty · · Score: 2

      It's also hard to migrate 10 years' of emails to a new service (they make it hard, at least)....

      I've got to say that just knowing that would make me work pretty hard to move away. That's me, though.

    4. Re:Yahoo mail by g253 · · Score: 2

      I use both gmail and yahoo mail, but I don't see why yahoo's tabs are a plus. I got tabs right in the browsers - so even with gmail I can easily open several mails in different tabs (and bookmark them as well, a great feature).

  6. Re:Yahoo IPv6 Upgrade Could Shut Out 1M Users ... by MozeeToby · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's not even a shutout from what I understand. The IPv6 request will timeout after a while and revert to IPv4, so while people will certainly experience slowdowns, I doubt anyone will be actually unable to access the site. Detect this and point people to resources to resolve the problem and things will take care of themselves. And by things taking care of themselves I mean that you will be asked to go fix the internet by your parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, friends, friends-who-are-only-friends-when-there's-a-computer-problem, and your grandma's bridge partner who you once installed a printer for.

    Honestly, if it weren't for the army of computer geeks fixing most of the IT problems for friends and family I think the whole thing would collapse overnight.

  7. Why? by Yvan256 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is there some operating systems out there which still aren't compatible with IPv6, or is it a problem at the ISPs level?

    1. Re:Why? by raxx7 · · Score: 2

      It depends on the case.

      Like most others, Yahoo's website is only available through IPv4. Thus, even computers that have IPv6 still use IPv4 to get to access Yahoo.

      When they enable IPv6, computers which have IPv6 will try to use IPv6 to access Yahoo.

      Computers which aren't compatible with IPv6 are actually fine: they'll just use IPv4 like always.
      The problem here is that there's a large number of computers which (thinks) it has IPv6 connectivity but actually, the IPv6 connectivity is broken. Thus, when Yahoo enabled IPv6 on their site, these computers will have trouble getting to Yahoo.

      The reasons vary.
      One reason are computers that sit on a network that has IPv6 for internal use but doesn't have IPv6 internet connection.
      Another reason (or set of reasons) is that the computer has an IPv6 internet connection but, somewhere between the computer and Yahoo (ISP, etc, etc) , it's broken.

    2. Re:Why? by yuhong · · Score: 2

      Note that Yahoo is not abandoning IPv4 support.

    3. Re:Why? by j+h+woodyatt · · Score: 2

      I was gonna explain all this here, but instead, I'll just drop this link. Suffice to say that there are a lot of contributors to "IPv6 brokenness" and older Mac OS X [especially pre-10.6.5] behaviors are only one of several ways that Internet users will have problems on World IPv6 Day.

      --
      jhw
  8. as opposed to IPv4 brokenness by chuckychesthair · · Score: 2

    yet another article that's skeptical of how ready IPv6 is. The amount of brokenness that is there is not very big. Of all the people that have the full Internet (that is IPv4 *and* IPv6) most will simply connect to any IPv6 website without issues.

    And apart from the fact that yahoo seems to be a US only thing, and even there is not so relevant anymore, I applaud them doing IPv6, when they get to it. (and after Google, Comcast, Akamai and many others)

    I wish we'd get over this "brokenness" story and simply deploy and then fix it for the 1% that has issues. Would be nice if it gets rolled out to the point of 20% traffic in 2011, the year we'll run out of available IPv4 addresses.

  9. Re:There goes my dialup connection. by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 2

    Maybe this can help?

    Aside: Woah, I pasted something and it worked!

  10. Despite the haterade by mixmasta · · Score: 2

    Yahoo still has a lot of good stuff. Mail and calendar work well, there is useful news and finance pages as well. I was playing around with their YUI stuff yesterday, and it is pretty cool and open source.

    Sites should probably serve ipv6 from a separate colo to a separate domain name to work the kinks out first, e.g. yahoov6.com. After a testing period they could start moving the support over, assuming the results were good.

    --
    #6495ED - cornflower blue
  11. Re:As goes Yahoo, so goes.... someone? by Belial6 · · Score: 2

    Many people still use their instant messaging, but what I see use a LOT is the Yahoo Groups. It is a simple way for average joes to create private mailing lists. I know that at least 4 of the moms groups for creating kids playdates my wife has joined had their mail list/forum hosted on Yahoo Groups. There email seems fine too.

  12. Impact due to misconfiguration? by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 2

    IIRC the problem isn't with computers that don't support IPv6. It's with networks where the computers and DNS software does support IPv6 but there's no IPv6 connectivity. In those cases a name query gets back AAAA records, the computer tries to connect via IPv6, and the connection doesn't go through because IPv6 traffic doesn't have a route off the local network. If your computers don't support IPv6 at all, the problem doesn't happen (the AAAA records never get used). If the DNS software (probably in your router) doesn't support IPv6, it won't do queries for AAAA records in the first place. Note also that at the other end (the DNS servers for the web site's domain) there should also be filtering in place: AAAA records shouldn't be being returned in queries that came in via IPv4. But not all sites do that filtering, so clients have to be prepared to get IPv6-only data back in IPv4 responses and filter it out.

    1. Re:Impact due to misconfiguration? by Gompers · · Score: 2

      It's slightly more complicated than that. Almost every modern OS supports IPv6 out of the box, and has link local IPv6 address configured (prefixed with FE80::). Windows Vista/7 generally also configures a Teredo interface (prefixed by 2001:0::). When communicating on the link local network, it will likely use IPv6 if it's available between two hosts (and they both know each other's IPv6 addresses through some mechanism like mDNS/bonjour etc). Without a global address, this is as far as it goes. Once a global IPv6 address is configured, things get interesting. Host software now assumes that it has off-site IPv6 connectivity and will act accordingly.

      The DNS servers don't originate the queries for the AAAA records, the client software does. IPv6 compliant web browsers will query for the AAAA record for a given host first, followed by the A record. If it gets no AAAA reply, it will go ahead and use the A reply. The DNS servers (unless they are VERY old) will just pass on through the response. If there is no AAAA record, you'll just get a SERVFAIL, it won't return the A record instead. The absence of an AAAA record for a given hostname implies to the client that the hostname is not IPv6 compliant. If there is an AAAA record, though, modern browsers will favor it over the A reply.

      This is perfect behavior as long as the IPv6 address the host has actually has real, global, IPv6 connectivity. It really becomes an issue on networks with broken IPv6 implementations. Hosts have a global IPv6 prefix assigned, but not real connectivity will still try to use IPv6 instead of IPv4 and that's the issue that Yahoo (well the whole internet, at some point, really) is going to have to deal with.

      It's perfectly reasonable for an IPv4 native or IPv4/6 dual stack DNS server to return AAAA queries received via IPv4. There's no reason that every DNS server that replies to queries needs to have IPv6 enabled to serve up AAAA records, just as there's no reason that IPv6-enabled DNS servers should only return AAAA records. DNS isn't the issue here, it's client behavior (and more importantly, network behavior) to the availability of IPv6 connected hosts. Most modern hosts behave in a perfectly reasonable manner to having native IPv6 connectivity. It's the things that connect them together that are still broken in places.

  13. A German website tried this by Casandro · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They had their servers respond to both IPv4 and IPv6 on the same domain name for a day. Among one million visitors they only had 5 with a problem. 2 could be solved by rebooting the router and or the computer, 2 had unreleated problems with their internet, and one actually had triggered a bug in the OS.

    http://www.heise.de/netze/meldung/IPv6-Tag-bei-heise-de-Erste-Ergebnisse-1081201.html

    1. Re:A German website tried this by Casandro · · Score: 2

      This is a website with a community. The experiment was largely publicised before and people knew how to get to them easily. There were no complaints about outage in the forums afterwards. In fact they have no completely switched to dual-stack.

      So in short, I do not think that much more than those 5 had a problem.

  14. A bit of a misnomer... by owendelong · · Score: 2

    First, it's not really IPv6 brokenness so much as it is an issue with hosts that think they have IPv6 connectivity, but, really don't.

    Second, in most cases, affected users will see long page load times, not complete inability to access the site.

    The 0.05% number is probably pretty accurate. Several sites have used embedded tests to measure this and come to the same number. However, the good news is that a year ago, this was 0.1% and it is continuing to trend downward.

    With IANA running out of IPv4 this month, it's not surprising that Yahoo is moving forward. It's disturbing that so many others appear not to be.

  15. Re:As goes Yahoo, so goes.... someone? by jonbryce · · Score: 2

    Yahoo Finance is much better than the competition. Yahoo Mail is still the market leader, just slightly ahead of Hotmail, possibly because they were one of the first. Flickr is quite popular as well.

  16. Re:As goes Yahoo, so goes.... someone? by bhcompy · · Score: 2

    Yahoo Sports highest trafficked sports site on the net
    Yahoo Finance worlds better than Google or MSN
    Yahoo Stores is a popular interface for web stores
    Flickr, Delicious, etc

  17. Yahoo! is relying on old, incomplete data. by Above · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yahoo! has been talking about this at conferences for a while, but I'm not sure they are using good data. Here's a lighting talk from NANOG about it:

    http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog46/presentations/Tuesday/Igor_ipv6_recursive_light_N46.pdf

    Page 2 has the crux of the issue, Yahoo! claims if you add AAAA records that 0.078% of the user base "breaks", that is they understand a AAAA enough to try IPv6, but they lack IPv6 connectivity to the destination.

    There was a time this made sense. A lot of early IPv6 deployments were islands without complete connectivity. Additionally, up until about 18 months ago there was a serious lack of IPv6 interconnectivity between ISPs, they were still figuring out how to turn up peering, filter, and so on.

    However, times change. ISP's are now fairly well interconnected, and getting a lot better every day. Almost no one turns up IPv6 as an island anymore. Interestingly, some of the original islands still exist, on purpose, as they are test labs or other non-production deployments. The people use them expect them to be broken in some ways, in some cases to test what the user experience is when various things break. Indeed, I suspect the number of islands is small, and constant, and thus an ever decreasing percentage of the IPv6 user base.

    Another large issue with the numbers is that they are only measuring the difference between the status quo and one of the four outcomes. A user could have:

    A) Broken IPv4, Broken IPv6.
    B) Broken IPv4, Working IPv6.
    C) Working IPv4, Broken IPv6.
    D) Working IPv4, Working IPv6.

    What Yahoo has done is measure the status quo (IPv4 only) to bullet point C.

    However, there will be some folks in bullet B. These are folks who can't get to Yahoo! today at all, but would be able to if Yahoo! had AAAA's. Granted, it's probably smaller, but still is an offset. Basically they are trying to scare folks that 470k folks might not be able to access Yahoo with IPv6. However, 470k folks may already be unable to access it via IPv4, they just can't measure that right now because they never see the requests!

    There is also the looming issue. As a we run out of IPv4 addresses (likely in late 2011) ISP's will basically be forced to turn up IPv6 only users. Even if you take Yahoo!'s numbers as correct, that 0.078% are broken, then all you would need is a larger percentage than that of the user base to be IPv6 ONLY and it makes more sense to have AAAA's and exclude them. Basically 1% deployment of IPv6 completely flips their argument if the goal is serving the largest number of folks.

    My take, some folks inside Yahoo! collected some rather raw data early on in IPv6's life cycle. Folks from Marketing and such read too much into it, and went into a panic that some large number of users wouldn't be abel to get to Yahoo! This created a huge issue for the engineers trying to deploy IPv6, which they have been fighting ever since.

    1. Re:Yahoo! is relying on old, incomplete data. by Orgasmatron · · Score: 2

      Nonsense. A and B are, for all practical purposes, not on the internet as we consider the internet to be today. In fact, I would consider the union of groups C and D to be the closest thing possible do a meaningful definition of what the internet is.

      I would be amazed if group B could be considered part of the internet, as most people think of such a thing, in less than 2 years. 5 seems more likely, or even 10.

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  18. Re:NAT isn't going anywhere by j+h+woodyatt · · Score: 2

    This is bullshit. Every single ISP I know that offers IPv6 service today delegates a prefix. All the ones I know that are preparing commercial IPv6 services will be delegating prefixes. Even the tethering you're going to get from your IPv6-capable mobile phone will delegate a /64 prefix. Most residential providers will delegate at least a /56 and the ones run by SMART PEOPLE will delegate a /48 to each subscriber.

    There is no need for residential. mobile and small-office subscribers to use NAT for IPv6.

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  19. Re:1 Million Internet viewers... by kasperd · · Score: 2

    This has nothing to do with Yahoo. Those users won't be able to access any other IPv6 capable website either. Hopefully most of them will be fixed around the 8th of June, where large parts of the Internet will be unreachable for them that day.

    I welcome a commitment to move ahead even if it means a few people will have to fix their Internet connection. Hopefully they have an ISP that can help them, and if not, they should probably find a different ISP.

    After all the mess we will have if websites remain IPv4 only will be much worse than 0.05% of users losing access temporarily until they get a working Internet connection again.

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