Group items tagged

It would take 31,000 years to read all the web addresses in the world. Google has indexed over 1 trillion web addresses. This is particularly significant considering the internet is only 40 years old.

Yahoo has made public its proposal to hack the domain name system (DNS) so as to resolve issues with migrating to IPv6 from IPv4. Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) was the first widely deployed version of IP that supports 32 bit addresses (equating to 4,294,967,296). The issue of exhausting the 32 bit address allocation was identified in the 1990's, prompting the development of IPv6. IPv6 supports 128 bit addresses, obviously offering a more expansive address system. The article claims that a 'significant percentage of internet users have broken IPv6 connectivity'. Yahoo thus proposes to switch users to IPv4 connectivity once detection of broken IPv6 connectivity is realised. Yahoo will forward its proposal to the Internet Engineering Task Force, however questions of DNS trust and security will surely be the two topics of debate in testing this proposal.

Under IPv4, remains only a 7% of IP addresses to be assigned, which are expected to be depleted by April 2012

We've talked about the ip address in first half of the semeseter, IPv6 summit meeting at 19, May pointed out the essential need for IPv6 and the possible issue afterwards.

Apparently we'll be out of 0-255 IP addresses in approximately 500 days...

There have been a number of research programs that have investigated students' thinking and beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing, including definitions of knowledge, how knowledge is constructed, and how knowledge is evaluated. However, these different research programs have pursued varying definitions and conceptual frameworks and used quite different methodologies to examine students' epistemological beliefs and thinking. In the first section of this article, we provide a critical and comprehensive review of these different research programs. In the second part of this article, we identify nine crucial theoretical and methodological issues that need to be resolved in future research on epistemological theories. As these issues are addressed in future research, there will be more consensus regarding the nature of epistemological theories, and their relation to cognition, motivation, and learning will be made more explicit.

A tongue in cheek blog post that nevertheless addresses some real issues at stake when it comes to people's behaviour in many online communities.

Internet Policy Task Force is the name of the new initiative the U.S. Commerce Department founded. During the next months it will take a closer look at current policy frameworks and explore ways to address challenges of the new internet economy and society. It will finally advise the White House on how to improve privacy for individuals online. The article mentions current discussions about privacy issues Google and facebook have to face. But obviously these did not directly lead to the kick off of the initiative.

The conversation first looked at internet censorship from an international perspective covering issues of internet governance from and internet freedom. Unfortunately one or two members of the panel were prone to regurgitating policy rather than engaging in an actual debate. Towards the end inevitably the discussion was drawn to the proposed filtering laws within Australia. The general consensus from the panel members was that education had to be an essential part of policy when addressing online safety. Interestingly the government representative, the Minister for Home Affairs, was a keen supporter of this policy stance.

Privacy addressed by Zukerberg. Shall we believe him? Article goes hand in hand with this week's readings. 

Collecting web data, who is it helping and who is it hurting. Google Analytics is a prominent free to use service that allows everyone from micro bloggers to corporations to record the statistics for visitors to their sites. Analytics can tell you where visitors are from, what they searched for, and what time they visited. They receive this information from your IP address, and ultimately your visit could potentially be traced directly back to your comptuer. Google has created an add-on to help hid your IP address identity, in a likely effort to protect the company from privacy concerns.

Abstract In today's digital world, personal privacy has become the number one issue for consumers [9]. Consumers' confidence in personal privacy is directly affecting and limiting the growth of the Internet commercial development. Therefore, it has become a necessity to address the consumers privacy concerns for the interests of the parties involved.

This is my blog post about cyberbullying, it also addresses how to counter cyberbullies by reporting their violation of any EULA, and Terms of Service to the provider.

A group of independent film producers have initiated court actions against over 20,000 Bit Torrent users, through an organisation of their own design, a group of lawyers known as the U.S Copyright Group. This group are demanding users to either defend themselves in court or alternatively, to settle outside of court for downloading particular movie titles. Most accused will settle to avoid the costs of litigation. Actions such as this are worrying as may give rise to a standard in which large numbers of corporates, not only in film but in all types of media, may start bringing forth unrelenting actions against individual users- holding them personally accountable. This is problematic (amongst a variety of reasons) that in the identification process through IP addresses is not 100% accurate, leaving room to wrongly accuse some users.

The internet is running out of web addresses. And here another article: http://news.techworld.com/networking/3218712/google-microsoft-and-yahoo-talk-about-ipv6-whitelist/ Google, Microsoft and Yahoo talk about IPv6 whitelist and plan to create a shared list of customers who can access their websites via IPv6

Creepy: airport checks might now include checking the files in your laptop. 

This article discusses the topics of educators improving their skills on detecting the various forms of cyberbullying, follow-up prevention, and plans that address cyberbullies. It also notes that perhaps, some cyberbullying is not fully realised by the bullies themselves, as children may be unaware of how impactful their messages are. There is also the discussion of a digital divide between children and their parents with respect to how one conducts themselves online. Though, it is doubtful to claim that children are completely ignorant of their own actions on the Internet.

The year was 2008. The person was Dan Kaminsky. The discovery: DNS has security flaws. Translation: the website you are visiting may not actually be the genuine site. This might take you 15 minutes to read through, and perhaps longer to absorb....but I highly recommend spending time on learning about the technicalities of DNS and the vulnerabilities of its functionality. The discovery of its weak points is what DNS security is addressing. Briefly, it covers the distributed nature of DNS, how cache poisoning occurs and patch recommendations to provide a 'fix'.

How on earth can he guarantee that this will be 100 percent accurate - with no overblocking, and no underblocking!?!?! And in this interview, he advises that this is not a limit on freedom of speech and that the internet should not be considered a special platform.

This article discusses how the Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has dismissed the Internet as a special medium, claiming that it is nothing more than, "just a communication distrbution platform." Which, is quite short sighted, as the notion of open source, crowd sourcing, collective/collecting intelligence, collaborative intelligence is achievable because of the Internet. Conroy also claims that his filter is 100 percent accurate..." which begs to question, according to who? Filtering, content only prevents access, it does not prevent those individuals from crimnimal acts offline, nor does it address how to protect victims from their predators.

Following on from ICANN's approval 6 months ago to start using non-Latin scripts for domain names, Egypst has introduced .misr (the Arabic name for Egypt). Depending on the browser and language packs installed, if a user mouses over a .misr link on a web page, they may see this in Arabic script. Will be interesting to see how this and forthcoming addtional non-Latin domain names impact on the language barrier aspect of the digital divide. Saudi Arabia and UAE have also set up their own new domain names - ".Al-Saudiah" and ".Emarat".

Six Months after the ICANN, approved the use of non-Latin domain names, Egypt launched "Misr" domain (the Arabic name for Egypt). A new perspective of Internet in the Arabic world.