Archive for the ‘network’ Category.

APNIC triggers final IPv4 address block distributions

APNIC announces:

APNIC received the following IPv4 address blocks from IANA in February 2011 and will be making allocations from these ranges in the near future: 39/8 106/8

Please be aware, this will be the final allocation made by IANA under the current framework and will trigger the final distribution of five /8 blocks, one to each RIR under the agreed “Global policy for the allocation of the remaining IPv4 address space“.

After these final allocations, each RIR will continue to make allocations according to their own established policies.

Storage Innovation Ahead

The existence of cheap and presumed-reliable storage services such as
Amazon S3
will cause a burst of innovation in personal and corporate storage options.
A particularly good fit: content-addressible storage schemes such as
plan9 venti
and
git,
that offer frugal use of bandwidth (important when metered), and attractive features like version snapshots “for free.”
A little searching shows one talented software developer thinking along these lines already:
Brad Fitzpatrick: wsbackup — encrypted, over-the-net, multi-versioned backup.
There will be more.

GMail fronts for other domains

I just happily discovered that GMail settings support non-GMail “From:” addresses. It’s a welcome feature for me, as I had no intention of binding to a vendor domain name ever again.

Perhaps it has been a feature for quite some time, and I just wasn’t aware of it. GMail is predisposed toward pleasant surprises without fanfare (e.g. “plus addresses” are supported too).

Linear combinations are not just for obfuscation any more

Network coding applied to P2P content distribution, as seen in Microsoft’s Avalanche research paper, is motivated by network performance improvement: it makes good use of available network throughput by filling the pipes with data that is useful to others, while avoiding the difficult problem of selecting what your downstream peers will need. Nodes send linear combinations of everything they’ve got, and receivers can reconstruct what they need from that.

There are interesting implications for content filterers. Previously one could argue that transmitting combined blocks (e.g. XOR a file with the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and today’s Dilbert) is purely an obfuscation technique for easily evading content recognizers. Now those techniques will be a basic component of efficiently using available bandwidth, with a side effect of making content recognition and filtering more dynamic and more difficult.

PPTP and WEP: No more room for nails in the coffin

Two hoary protocols get even more final nails driven into them:

EarthLink SIPshare

EarthLink SIPshare: SIP-based P2P Content Sharing Prototype contibutes an open-source P2P favoring end-to-end principles:

EarthLink believes an open Internet is a good Internet. An open Internet means users have full end-to-end connectivity to say to each other whatever it is they say, be that voice, video, or other data exchanges, without the help of mediating servers in the middle whenever possible. We believe that if peer-to-peer flourishes, the Internet flourishes. SIPshare helps spread the word that SIP is more than a powerful voice over IP enabler — much more. SIP is a protocol that enables peer-to-peer in a standards-based way.

The emerging ubiquity of SIP as a general session-initiation enabler provides a rare opportunity to offer users all manner of P2P applications over a common protocol, instead of inventing a new protocol for each new P2P application that comes along.

[via Many-to-Many]

Clever Zombie Tracking by Manipulating DNS Views

GMail implements “plus addresses”

I had the opportunity to join GMail [beta]. My first piece of feedback to them was a request for user-defined recipient sub-addresses (e.g. using the sendmail “username+anything@domain” convention. Having that available for recipient filtering is more reliable than trying to parse numerous styles of correspondence (some list software inserts List-ID, some doesn’t, etc).

It turns out that GMail already implements the sendmail ‘+’ convention.
It works, but as far as I can tell, it’s not documented anywhere — or at least I didn’t think of the right search terms for it.

I hope that this creates new incentives for web sites and other email addressing processing software to
stop violating RFC2822 by excessively restricting the character set of email addresses.

P.S. If anyone else wants to try GMail [beta] also,
let me know;
I now have a ration of invitations too.

The spread of the Witty worm

Shannon and Moore:
The Spread of the Witty Worm:

Witty infected only about a tenth as many hosts than the next smallest widespread Internet worm. Where SQL Slammer infected between 75,000 and 100,000 computers, the vulnerable population of the Witty worm was only about 12,000 computers. Although researchers have long predicted that a fast-probing worm could infect a small population very quickly, Witty is the first worm to demonstrate this capability. While Witty took 30 minutes longer than SQL Slammer to infect its vulnerable population, both worms spread far faster than human intervention could stop them. In the past, users of software that is not ubiquitously deployed have considered themselves relatively safe from most network-based pathogens. Witty demonstrates that a remotely accessible bug in any minimally popular piece of software can be successfully exploited by an automated attack.

Orkut[1]: In with the in crowd

Now I have received my first Orkut invitation.
Interestingly, it came from an actual friend — probably a good sign for Orkut, as the quality of their system depends on the utility of actual relationships, not random diffuse connections.

It’s good timing for Orkut.
Our distance from the Six Degrees era, and the current spontaneous blossoming of intellectual/social relationships as seen among intertwined weblogs, make it seem fresh, and not just another selling-eyeballs.com.

Yet-another fatigue is now a barrier to entry for Orkut competitors.

Will I go out and spam all my colleagues and friends with Orkut invitations?
No, it seems a little too close to a MLM pitch.
I think I’ll just pick on a few who I know are in the right frame of mind.

Previous: Orkut[0]: Out with the out crowd