Group items tagged

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

Kind of a scary headline after today's class. Not quite what it sounds though. .. Or is it? Google owns or controls content. Now Google owns more content. If you look at Benkler's definition of layers (via Lessig), both the physical layer and the content layer have been subject to ownership and freedom exists/ed mainly on the layer of logic or code. Google is just a giant content aggregator.

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

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.

Bog entry: Chinese clone iPad, iPed. The product of censored infortation and trict internet regulation in China.

The European Parliament overwhelmingly voted to explicitly oppose any law or global agreement which would entail ISPs to punish customers for breaches of copyright. They have also demanded that documents surrounding the secret worldwide negotiations, which Australia is also involved in, be released publicly. 

Somewhere I read that to grasp the technology of the internet, computers and networking, you really only needed to understand: TCP/IP, the end to end principle, object-oriented programming and service based APIs. This summary of 10 serious networking papers is useful to have and also points to Blumenthal/Clark's key paper on the architecture of the internet: M. Blumenthal, D. Clark, "Rethinking the Design of the Internet: the End-to-end Arguments vs. the Brave New World," ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Vol. 1 , No. 1 (August 2001) pp. 70-109.

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.

"ICANN / IANA and the global technical community would do well to re-assert the principle that the open allocation model for IP numbers - while imperfect - has been cultivated for sound technical and political reasons"

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.

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.

After the Secretary of State in the US Hillary Clinton's speech on Internet freedom, open source source code repository SourceForge.net blocked access to IP addresses originating in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria. Open source software provides important infrastructure to these oppressed and developing nations. I hope the American government can see what a blow this is to the infrastructure and fledgling industries in these countries.

Recent press release from the European Union Digital Agenda to improve Europe's digital elements.

This is an interesting article about the presence of a digital divide in the recent political unrest in Thailand.\n\nI used this article as the basis for my fourth blog entry in terms of the importance of access to media when it comes to the efficacy of political action - it is hard to gain popular support for a movement when the use of twitter is more pervasive than broadcasts through old media like the radio.