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from the don't-give-huge-blocks-to-businesses dept.
Things are looking up for our next-generation internet.
[...] But the shortage of IPv4 elbow room became a steadily worsening issue -- have you noticed all those phones that can connect to the network now, for example? So tech companies banded together to try to advance IPv6. The result: World IPv6 Day on June 8, 2011, when tech giants like Google, Facebook and Yahoo tested IPv6 sites to find any problems. For a sequel, they restarted those IPv6 connections and left them on starting on World IPv6 Launch Day, June 6, 2012.
Back then, there was still a risk that IPv6 wouldn't attract a critical mass of usage even with the tech biggies on board. The result would've been an internet complicated by multilayer trickery called network address translation, or NAT, that let multiple devices share the same IP address. But statistics released Wednesday by one IPv6 organizer, the Internet Society, show that IPv6 is growing steadily in usage, with about a quarter of us now using it worldwide. It looks like we're finally moving into a future that's been within our grasp since the Clinton administration.
"While there is obviously more to be done -- like roll out IPv6 to the other 75 percent of the Internet -- it's becoming clear that IPv6 is here to stay and is well-positioned to support the Internet's growth for the next several decades," said Lorenzo Colitti, a Google software engineer who's worked on IPv6 for years.
[...] How much room does IPv6 have? Enough to give network addresses to 340 undecillion devices -- that's two to the 128th power, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 if you're keeping score.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday June 07 2018, @03:56PM (10 children)
The Crypto Wars and "Going Dark" (but they didn't call it that) were fought long ago. During the Clinton years. The government gave up. But not without trying. And while this was known within the technology sector, it wasn't that generally well known to the general public.
They were wanting to mandate the One True™ crypto. Clipper. It would be implemented using sooper sekrit hardware chips. Made by our wonderful government! Every device would now have fast, efficient hardware encryption and decryption. Standard APIs. Standard drivers. What's not to love!
That went over like a lead submarine. Or a balloon with a screen door. Or Microsoft Bob.
Exporting other cryptographic technology would be outlawed! Major prison for exporting even the techniques for strong crypto.
One argument that was raised, was what if I carried a book, say, Applied Cryptography, or similar, with me as I traveled abroad? Was the government now going to ban certain books? But Technology books, not those other kind of books. It seemed the government didn't have to guts to want to pull the trigger on that one. But we were still stuck with weak 40 bit keys for exported crypto even though domestically you could use strong crypto.
Now here we are again wanting to weaken technology so that everything becomes hackable because: Think Of The Children!
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday June 07 2018, @04:36PM (7 children)
"Handbook of Applied Cryptography" helpfully there's more than one book with that title (a normie filter, I guess) and you want the one by Schneier with the red or reddish orange color. I've got a copy somewhere.
I had the tee shirt with some 80s 90s era crypto algo in C. Probably something really hard core like 40 bit DES (well, this was the 90s), I don't remember. I think it was a 2600 fundraiser, like I bought it off a table at a HOPE conference to raise funds. Probably to raise funds to "free kevin" anyone remember that? Anyone remember when 2600 radio show / podcast wasn't just political ramblings? Nah me neither.
Ah nostalgia. "Free" tee shirts were the thing to collect around the turn of the century. I had genuine phone company shirts, a really ugly GNU shirt, a Debian tee shirt that looked like I was a member of the red cross, I owned shirts that outlasted the companies that died in the 2000 dotcom crash where I'd wear them to work years later for the novelty of "hey remember this place that went out of business four years ago?" etc. That sort of novelty seems to have dropped from culture around the rise of social media, who needs to read your shirt if they should be reading ur tweet instead.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DannyB on Thursday June 07 2018, @04:54PM (6 children)
I would have to go home to look to see which book I mean. I know there are several on the subject.
I'm going TOTALLY FROM MEMORY here . . .
Long before 9/11, I was reading something interesting in the book . . .
(I just googled it, and the entire book I am thinking of is downloadable. [psu.edu] So now I can cite exact page number and quotation.)
On page 93 (of the PDF), talking about Key Escrow, Clipper Chip, etc.
But on page 94 . . .
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday June 07 2018, @05:09PM (5 children)
Yeah key escrow is basically the gun control argument. Only criminals would want crypto. The writers of the constitution never envisioned blah blah blah.
The way the civilized modern world looks at key escrow is pretty much how (real) americans look at gun control.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday June 07 2018, @05:19PM (3 children)
There is one big difference. The legitimate every day uses of crypto technology VASTLY outweigh the illegitimate uses. Even if there is such a thing. Furthermore, crypto does not have the direct purpose of killing someone. I mean it is not inherently a weapon nor is it violent. It is an academic discipline. Like all tools, a claw hammer for example, crypto can be used for good and bad purposes. And, of course, so can guns.
I would also argue that people with differing views on gun control are all real americans, with real arguments. Just with differing opinions on policy. Some policy viewpoint differences are driven by whether you live in a dense urban environment or not. Declaring some americans less real than others is what drives division even deeper.
I find no conflict in being against government regulation of cryptography, yet in favor of some reasonable restrictions on firearms. But it is a difficult and thorny subject. It seems to me that there are beyond doubt certain individuals who simply should not have guns. This subject has been debated to death in other forums.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday June 07 2018, @05:59PM (2 children)
Propagandists can twist anything, and the perfect example for the line above would be permissive action links for nuclear warheads. I'm sorry we have to take your GPG or ROT-13 away, but no private citizen should have ownership of nuclear weapon technology, sir...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday June 07 2018, @06:17PM (1 child)
It's true. That's why it's good, for everyone, to try not to be a propagandist.
Propagandists twist things to absurd lengths.
Reasonable people want to protect themselves from how far some reasonable idea could be stretched beyond any sane limits. That also leads to a lot of division. Maybe try to write a compromise that can't be stretched. But then some people won't compromise.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday June 07 2018, @07:00PM
With a side dish of the fallacy of argument to moderation, where there are some areas of debate like crypto freedom or gun control or slavery or ownership of property where "kinda in between" is worse than either extreme.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @03:06AM
Help me out here. How can I tell the difference between (real) americans and (fake) americans?
Do the (real) ones support the purity of IPv4 and distain IPV6, or is it the other way around?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday June 07 2018, @06:00PM (1 child)
I Am Absolutely Serious: It was clearly OCR with human eyeball corrections.
For a little while I was working on a true GUI Mac OS X PGP encryption program - MacPGP was just a really brain-damaged GUI wrapper around the command-line PGP.
I was able to read a keychain file once I transcribed some of the book's source into ThinkC.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday June 07 2018, @06:24PM
The more that crypto source code gets published in textbooks, the better. It makes it look a lot worse to try to suppress academic text.
Ah, Think C. It was my first experience with C, and C++ after being a long time Mac Pascal programmer (even on Lisa using MacWorks before MPW existed). Then I got Symantic's C++. It was okay. Then, as I recall from memory, version 8 was a total disaster. The behavior of object code was CLEARLY wrong from what the source code said. It didn't last long as a product either. I get MetroWerks CodeWarrior and loved it. But as Apple's fortunes declined, and Linux came along, and I was still looking for a cross platform holy grail, I eventually found Java. I hadn't enjoyed something like that since the UCSD p-System.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.