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IPv6 Turns 20, Did You Notice?
IPv6 is 20 years old and the milestone has been celebrated with 10 percent adoption across the world for the first time.
The idea that IPv6 remains so far behind its saturated incumbent, IPv4, is horrifying given that three continents ran out of IPv4 addresses in 2015. Unfortunately, because the product isn’t ‘end of life’ most internet providers have been working on a ‘not broken, don’t fix it’ basis.
But 2016 looks to be the year when IPv6 makes its great leap to the mainstream, in Britain at least. BT, the UK’s biggest broadband provider, has already committed to switch on IPv6 support by the end of the year, and most premises will be IPv6-capable by April. Most companies use the same lines, but it will be up to each individual supplier to switch over. Plusnet, a part of BT, is a likely second.
IPv6 has a number of advantages over IPv4, most notably that it is virtually infinite, meaning that the capacity problems that the expanded network is facing shouldn’t come back to haunt us again. It will also pave the way for ever faster, more secure networks.
Some private corporate networks have already made the switch. Before Christmas we reported that the UK Ministry of Defence was already using the protocol, leaving thousands of unused IPv4 addresses lying idle in its wake.
IPv6 is also incredibly adaptable for the Internet of Things. Version 4.2 of the Bluetooth protocol includes IPv6 connectivity as standard, making it a lot easier for tiny nodes to make up a larger internet-connected grid.
Google’s latest figures suggest that more than 10 percent of users are running IPv6 connections at the weekend, while the number drops to eight percent on weekdays. This suggests that the majority of movement towards IPv6 is happening in the residential broadband market.
That said, it is imperative that businesses begin to make the leap. As Infoblox IPv6 evangelist Tom Coffeen told us last year, it could start to affect the speed at which you are able to trade.
“If someone surfs onto your site and its only available in IPv4, but they are using IPv6, there has to be some translation, which puts your site at a disadvantage. If I’ve not made my site available in IPv6, I’m no longer in control over where that translation occurs.”
In other words, if you don’t catch up, you will soon get left behind. It was ever thus.
Courtesy-TheInq
Adobe Eases Privacy Concerns
November 14, 2014 by admin
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Tests on the latest version of Adobe System’s e-reader software reveals the company is now collecting less data following a privacy-related row last month, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Digital Editions version 4.0.1 appears to only collect data on e-books that have DRM (Digital Rights Management), wrote Cooper Quintin, a staff technologist with the EFF. DRM places restrictions on how content can be used with the intent of thwarting piracy.
Adobe was criticized in early October after it was discovered Digital Editions collected metadata about e-books on a device, even if the e-books did not have DRM. Those logs were also sent to Adobe in plain text.
Since that data was not encrypted, critics including the EFF contended it posed major privacy risks for users. For example, plain text content could be intercepted by an interloper from a user who is on the same public Wi-Fi network.
Adobe said on Oct. 23 it fixed the issues in 4.0.1, saying it would not collect data on e-books without DRM and encrypt data that is transmitted back to the company.
Quintin wrote the EFF’s latest test showed the “only time we saw data going back to an Adobe server was when an e-book with DRM was opened for the first time. This data is most likely being sent back for DRM verification purposes, and it is being sent over HTTPS.”
If an e-book has DRM, Adobe may record how long a person reads it or the percentage of the content that is read, which is used for “metered” pricing models.
Other technical metrics are also collected, such as the IP address of the device downloading a book, a unique ID assigned to the specific applications being used at the time and a unique ID for the device, according to Adobe.
Google Had Developed Own Currency
March 5, 2012 by admin
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Google once contemplated the idea of issuing its own currency, to be called Google Bucks, company Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said on stage at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona,Spain on Tuesday.
At the end of his keynote speech, Schmidt hit on a wide array of topics in response to audience questions. “We’ve had various proposals to have our own currency we were going to call Google Bucks,” Schmidt said.
The idea was to implement a “peer-to-peer money” system. However, Google discovered that the concept is illegal in most areas, he said. Governments are typically wary of the potential for money laundering with such proposals.
“Ultimately we decided we didn’t want to get into that because of these issues,” Schmidt said.
He also hinted that Google might be preparing for a battle in China once its acquisition of Motorola is complete.
“Google’s been willing to take on China pretty well,” he said in response to a question about whether Google expected to continue to ignore theft of Motorola intellectual property in China, as Motorola has been doing. The acquisition hasn’t closed yet, Schmidt noted. “We’ve taken a pretty strong position on IP. We are well aware of the issues and we are considering your question,” he said.
Google is still waiting for some government approvals of its proposed acquisition of Motorola.
Microsoft and Others Enable IPv6
The so-called worldwide launch of IPv6 has been set for 6 June 2012, when companies will permanently enable IPv6 connectivity in their products and services.
Following the relative success of 2011′s IPv6 day, a number of firms including Cisco, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have pledged support for “World IPv6 Launch” day, which has been set as 6 June 2012. On that day the companies have pledged to permanently enable IPv6 connectivity to their associated products and services.
IP address allocation bodies such as ARIN and RIPE have been pushing IPv6 adoption for years but it took last year’s dramatic exhaustion of IPv4 addresses to jolt companies into action. IPv6 day was supported by many of the firms taking part in the IPv6 launch later this year, to drum up awareness and see how much disruption there will be when IPv6 connectivity is enabled.
Daniel Karrenberg, chief scientist at RIPE NCC said, “Operational experience and measurements on World IPv6 Launch will help content providers and ISPs to identify and rectify any potential problems with delivering services over IPv6.”
Apple Goes Down In Court
Apple has lost a move in US District Court in San Francisco to keep some of its software ‘secrets’ out of view of the public.
It had asked Judge William Alsup to keep documents sealed that had surfaced in its lawsuit against Psystar, Bloomberg reports. The information about Apple’s Mac OS X operating system covers topics such as technological protection measures, system integrity checks and thermal management techniques.
The court turned down Apple’s request, however, noting that the company didn’t deny that the information was already public or claim that it had been misappropriated. Apple had argued that it still deserved trade secret protection because it didn’t release the information and had never confirmed it, but that didn’t convince Judge Alsup.
The information at issue is available on a web site about the Mac OS X operating system, the judge noted, adding that Apple’s decryption key haiku is available to any user that compiles and runs publicly available source code on a Macbook Air laptop.
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Prank Website Offers $49 HP TouchPads
August 28, 2011 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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With technophiles still scrambling to get their hands on the remaining Hewlett-Packard’s $99 TouchPads, a $49 deal just seems too good to be true.
And, as the thousand or so people who tried to buy cheap TouchPads on an HP look-alike website Tuesday learned, one should think twice about seemingly unbelievable deals.
The prank site — registered Tuesday as Hewlett-packard.org.uk — looks legitimate. In fact, many of the links on the site go to real HP addresses.
But anyone who tries to purchase the $49 TouchPad gets Rickrolled. It’s a popular type of Internet prank where the victim clicks on a seemingly irresistible link — a $49 TouchPad, or a sneak copy of a Kim Kardashian wedding video — and ends up instead sitting through a YouTube clip of schmaltzy soul singer Rick Astley singing his 1987 hit, “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
SpyEye Poses Risk To Banking Defenses
Financial institutions are facing more trouble from SpyEye, a piece of malicious software that steals money from customers online bank accounts, according to new research from security vendor Trusteer.
SpyEye is a dastardly piece of malicious software: it can harvest credentials for online accounts and also initiate transactions as a person is logged into their account, literally making it possible to watch their bank balance drop by the second.
In its latest versions, SpyEye has been modified with new code designed to evade advanced systems banks have put in place to try and block fraudulent transactions, said Mickey Boodai, Trusteer’s CEO.
Banks are now analyzing how a person uses their site, looking at parameters such as how many pages a person looks at on the site, the amount of time a person spends on a page and the time it takes a person to execute a transaction. Other indicators include IP address, such as if a person who normally logs in from the Miami area suddenly logs in from St. Petersburg, Russia.
SpyEye works fast, and can automatically and quickly initiate a transaction much faster than an average person manually on the website. That’s a key trigger for banks to block a transaction. So SpyEye’s authors are now trying to mimic — albeit in an automated way — how a real person would navigate a website.
Hackers Go After WordPress
March 6, 2011 by admin
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We found out Bloggers using the WordPress platform was shutdown by a DDos attack yesterday that apparently affected many blog sites.The DDos hostilities began in the morning and lasted for a couple of hours. The estimates on the DDos attack was thought to be “multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second”, according to sources, WordPress is working with their providers to prevent such acts from ever taking place again.WordPress the attack is over, though in Chicago, Dallas and San Antonio. The good news is that the site is back up. However, while the attack was in progress sources say it was on of the “largest” the organization has ever seen. Even centersThe attack unfortunately hit main three data. Read More…..