True Insight

Here is an hilarious article[timesonline.co.uk] from The (London) Times. Foxnews.com’s title is even more hilarious: “Report: The End of the Internet Is Near”. OMG!!! Gather up the Ponies!!

Messr. Harris at The Times either has no idea what he’s writing about or owns a ton of stock in Cisco or Juniper. Or perhaps both. The following line from the article is particularly ridiculous:

If, for example, Google wants to support IPv6, it will need to build a whole new IPv6 web service, complete with new domain names, servers and bandwidth.

Hogwash, my good chap! The only bloody thing good ol’ Google will need to do is get IPv6 addresses from its ISPs. Its servers undoubtedly already support IPv6 as do almost all recent Un*x and Windows OSes (Linux and Mac OSX included). All Google will have to do is tell its servers what each one’s IPv6 address is and everything will work just the same as it has. No need for a new domain name, new servers, or new bandwidth. And certainly not any new code for their web services.

In fact, what I said above isn’t even necessarily true: Google doesn’t need to get an IPv6 address from its ISPs because there is an IPv6 prefix[wikipedia.com] already reserved for all the old IPv4 addresses. In essence, if you have an IPv4 address, you already have an IPv6 address that will route to all other IPv6 addresses–if only your upstream ISPs supported IPv6.

I tend to believe that Google has already prepared for this. I’m betting that their servers are already configured for IPv6. Their routers are probably configured for IPv6. Google might even have pure IPv6 connections to the Internet already. It’s hard for me to confirm my suspicions, though, because I don’t have a pure IPv6 connection to the Internet although I could setup something like 6to4[wikipedia.com].

Messr. Harris pumps the same old doom-and-gloom line that has been going around since the mid-1990s. Yes, friends, back when IPv6 was started the “experts” were prediciting we would run out of IPv4 addresses within a few years. Over a decade later, the new “experts” are predicting another three years.

Here’s a prediction: NASA will land men on Mars before IPv6 makes its way down to the home user, and I’m talking about his Cable/DSL router, not his actual PC.

The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner has been widely reported as a feat of technological engineering. The plane has three separate networks on-board: an administrative network, a flight control/navigation network, and a passenger network. Everything about this plane seems cool from the Ethernet jacks in the armrest of every seat, to the completely computerized flight controls system, to the ability for the plane to automatically adjust humidity settings based on the number of passengers on-board. There’s just one problem. Reports indicate[foxnews.com] that the three networks (administrative, flight, and passenger) are not completely separated. There is at least the ability for one-way communications from one of the networks to another. But unless this is a connectionless, no guarantee of delivery, UDP-like fire-the-message-and-hope-it-arrives communications protocol, there are obviously two-way connections, even if control information was designed (in software) to be transmitted in only one direction.

So these networks are not air-gapped, the only foolproof way to prevent one network from talking to another. To make matters worse, it seems that the administrative network is accessible via Wi-Fi (for maintenance personnel), particularly while the aircraft is sitting at the gate. So a sufficiently skilled 16-year-old Johnny Q. Hacker could sit comfortably in an airport terminal with his laptop and attempt to hack into a 787’s administrative network.

I hope they are using WPA2 with AES encryption and rolling keys…