Less Than 1 Year Until The Internet Runs Out of Addresses

With a maximum of just over 4 billion unique addresses, the Internet will run out of Internet addresses in about 1 year’s time, due to an explosion of data about to happen to the Web — thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data; the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet; and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web.

The solution: IPv6, the next generation Internet Protocol, which uses a 128-bit address, vs. 32 bit with the current IPv4.

Copyright Kriminals

A documentary about digital samplings head-on collision with copyright law, features many of hip-hop musics celebrated figures—including Public Enemy, De La Soul, the Beastie Boys...

DARPA Spends €51 Million

According to soldiers, consistent and realistic drill forms the foundation of any successful military action. But where an infantryman can hone his aim at a firing range, America's Internet warriors don't have a similar venue for developing their skills at cyberwar. But DARPA hopes a $51 million network simulation, complete with computer programs that behave like human targets and adversaries, will provide the perfect arena for developing the next generation of cyberwar weapons and tactics.

The simulation, National Cyber Range (NCR), first went public last year, but just yesterday the cash needed to get this project moving was finally doled out. Johns Hopkins received $24.8 million for the project, while Lockheed Martin walked away with $30.8 million. The Lockheed contract is significant, as its defense industry competitor Northrop Grumman actually won the Phase I grant in 2009.

According to DARPA, the NCR will "realistically replicate human behavior and frailties," and provide "realistic, sophisticated, nation-state quality offensive and defensive opposition forces." Basically, computer programs acting like real people will populate a the virtual world that the cyberwarriors will attempt to disrupt or save, depending on the mission. Paging Agent Smith...

Even more impressive than the automation of the virtual population is the size of the simulation. DARPA hopes that the NCR will be able to simulate the entire Internet, allowing soldiers to drill in virtual simulations ranging from a small scale computer virus to a World War III-sized conflict.

The project just entered Phase II testing, so there it's still going to be a wait before the NCR starts running at full capacity. In the meanwhile, let's just hope someone remembers to teach the computer how to play tic-tac-toe.

Cyberspace is filling up!

Internet users face regular “brownouts” that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace, according to research to be published later this year.
Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.

It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an “unreliable toy”.

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist, wrote the code that transformed a private computer network into the world wide web in 1989, the internet appeared to be a limitless resource. However, a report being compiled by Nemertes Research, a respected American think-tank, will warn that the web has reached a critical point and that even the recession has failed to stave off impending problems.

In America, telecoms companies are spending £40 billion a year upgrading cables and supercomputers to increase capacity, while in Britain proposals to replace copper cabling across part of the network with fibre optic wires would cost at least £5 billion.
Engineers are already preparing for the worst. While some are planning a lightning-fast parallel network called “the grid”, others are building “caches”, private computer stations where popular entertainments are stored on local PCs rather than sent through the global backbone.

Telephone companies want to recoup escalating costs by increasing prices for “net hogs” who use more than their share of capacity.

Do we need a New Internet

Two decades ago a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate student brought the Internet to its knees with a simple software program that skipped from computer to computer at blinding speed, thoroughly clogging the then-tiny network in the space of a few hours.

The program was intended to be a digital “Kilroy Was Here.” Just a bit of cybernetic fungus that would unobtrusively wander the net. However, a programming error turned it into a harbinger heralding the arrival of a darker cyberspace, more of a mirror for all of the chaos and conflict of the physical world than a utopian refuge from it.

Since then things have gotten much, much worse.

Bad enough that there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.

What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.

“Unless we’re willing to rethink today’s Internet,” says Nick McKeown, a Stanford engineer involved in building a new Internet, “we’re just waiting for a series of public catastrophes.”

The Internet’s original designers never foresaw that the academic and military research network they created would one day bear the burden of carrying all the world’s communications and commerce. There was no one central control point and its designers wanted to make it possible for every network to exchange data with every other network. Little attention was given to security. Since then, there have been immense efforts to bolt on security, to little effect.

“In many respects we are probably worse off than we were 20 years ago,” said Eugene Spafford, the executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University and a pioneering Internet security researcher, “because all of the money has been devoted to patching the current problem rather than investing in the redesign of our infrastructure.”

In fact, many computer security researchers view the nearly two decades of efforts to patch the existing network as a Maginot Line approach to defense, a reference to France’s series of fortifications that proved ineffective during World War II. The shortcoming in focusing on such sturdy digital walls is that once they are evaded, the attacker has access to all the protected data behind them. “Hard on the outside, with a soft chewy center,” is the way many veteran computer security researchers think of such strategies.

Despite a thriving global computer security industry that is projected to reach $79 billion in revenues next year, and the fact that in 2002 Microsoft itself began an intense corporatewide effort to improve the security of its software, Internet security has continued to deteriorate globally.