Recently in Internet Category

A proposed bill would allow President Obama to take control of the internet in national emergencies. The bill does not describe in detail what would constitute a national emergency, does not detail the process of how a decision to take control, and does not detail when an emergency would end. According to the bill, the details would be worked out after the bill is passed.

From Declan McCullagh at CNET News. McCullagh is not a relative but I met him at a wedding many years ago.

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

…

The privacy implications of sweeping changes implemented before the legal review is finished worry Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “As soon as you’re saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it’s going to be a really big issue,” he says.

Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to “direct the national response to the cyber threat” if necessary for “the national defense and security.” The White House is supposed to engage in “periodic mapping” of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies “shall share” requested information with the federal government. (“Cyber” is defined as anything having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)

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If your company is deemed “critical,” a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.

The Internet Security Alliance’s Clinton adds that his group is “supportive of increased federal involvement to enhance cyber security, but we believe that the wrong approach, as embodied in this bill as introduced, will be counterproductive both from an national economic and national security perspective.”

I have my own personal reason not to adopt IPv6. When I was setting up my home network and upgraded to Vista, I was unable to easily connect my laptop to the wireless router using WPA2 with AES encryption. I could connect but it took a lot of manual diddling after I booted up my laptop to make the connection to either the network. Sometimes I was able to connect to the network but not to the internet.

I looked through every blog and user group that I could find regarding my router, WPA2 encryption, and Vista. I never found anything that helped me. I was ready to go back to Windows XP. Finally, just last weekend, I read a totally unrelated article that suggested turning off IPv6 on existing networks for compatibility purposes. The default in Vista is to turn on both IPv6 and IPv4. I figured that if IPv6 didn’t work, then IPv4 would take over. Boy, was I ever wrong.

I turned off IPv6 and my laptop now quickly and happily connect to the network, the internet, and my printers. A simple, easy fix that took me months (though not that many man-hours) to figure out.

Now, Network World has come up with another reason for waiting to adopt IPv6:

Now it turns out that one of these IPv6 benefits — autoconfiguration — may not be such a boon for corporate network managers. A growing number of IPv6 experts say that corporations probably will skip autoconfiguration and instead stick with DHCP, which has been updated to support IPv6.

Autoconfiguration vs. DHCPv6 has become a point of contention among IPv6 proponents. As recently as last month, the IETF — the standards body that created IPv6 and DHCPv6 — held a lively online debate about rethinking autoconfiguration in light of DHCPv6.

“This is a widely discussed issue. Which is better: DHCPv6 or autoconfiguration?” says Timothy Winters, software engineering manager at the University of New Hampshire’s Inter Operability Lab. The UNH-IOL operates Moonv6, the world’s largest IPv6 test bed.

Winters sees the commercial software industry starting to back DHCPv6 because of the additional controls and tracking and debugging features it provides. “Moonv6 tried to run DHCPv6 testing two and a half years ago, and we only had two or three companies that did servers and software,” he says. “A year later, we had 14 companies…We’ve definitely seen the DHCPv6 implementations explode.”

The biggest backer of DHCPv6 is Cisco, which has supported DHCPv6 in its IOS since 2003, and also supports it in Cisco Network Register (CNR). The company says the next version of CNR, expected out by early 2008, will feature parity between DHCPv4 and DHCPv6. “From a security standpoint and for information assurance, network managers all still want visibility into their networks,” says Dave West, director of field operations for Cisco’s Federal Center of Excellence. “We believe the demand is going to be there for DHCPv6.”

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DHCPv6 … provides stateful address-configuration. DHCPv6 servers pass out IP addresses and service information to clients, and both the server and the client retain this information to prevent address conflicts. DHCPv6 lets network managers know the devices connected to the network and their IP addresses. Corporate network managers have grown accustomed to this level of visibility into their networks because they use DHCP with their IPv4 networks. Backers of DHCPv6 say they’ll want to keep this visibility into their IPv6 networks. “People want to know who is on their network, and DHCPv6 is the way to do it,” Winters says. “IT people understand how DHCP works in IPv4, and the IPv6 version is not that different. It’s easy for IT people to wrap their brains around DHCPv6 as opposed to autoconfiguration, which doesn’t exist for IPv4.”

Now, IPv6 has some great qualities about it, not least of all its ability to manage an incredibly huge address space and better security. It’s a wonderful idea but my belief is that it will take several years before it is widely adopted.