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Unblocking the internet with IPv6
The following may all sound rather reminiscent of late 1999 and the push to immunise businesses against the millennium bug, but this time the numbers are definitely stacked against us.
"In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today."
So predicted Jim Cicconi - vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T – at London’s Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 in April. His point was to illustrate how our current internet architecture is insufficient to cater to the demands of a content-rich web to which we will all be connected in almost perpetual activity.
Couple this exponential escalation of data being transferred over the web with a lack of available IP addresses to go round and the doomsayers may have a point when crying that ‘the internet is full’. With about four to seven years before all available IP addresses are used up.
However, solving the IP problem isn’t as simple as adding a new number in front as happened when Australian phone numbers began to hit the wall in the 1990s. IP addresses are built into the very infrastructure and hardware the internet runs on. This requires an ‘upgrade’ from the current IPv4 system to IPv6 and will make more than enough IP addresses available to allow plenty of growth for the future.
However, IPv6 needs to be supported by the various technologies we use each day. The current iPhones don’t support IPv6, for example. Neither do the bulk of servers web hosts use. Only 30% of US ISPs are currently prepared.
IPv6actnow.org has more information for small and large businesses to understand what they can do to prepare, including the questions to ask of internet service providers and technology vendors to ensure everything will still work as intended after the last IPv4 address is snapped up.
Is your web host ready for Google TV?
The announcement of Google TV at last weeks San Francisco Google I/O conference may still be light on some details, but there are inferences to be made, particularly to the hosting infrastructures that may need to be improved to support it.
In a web cast to Sydney media on May 25, Rishi Chandra – Google’s senior product manager – outlined the three primary goals behind the development of Google TV.
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To produce the first fully integrated and seamless television and web experience
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To open up the living room to innovation by reducing the fragmentation of living room tech and encouraging developers to create increasingly more groundbreaking apps for the new setup
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To encourage content makers, advertisers and businesses to tap into the living room via the open source framework
Google TV may be in the ‘one to watch’ category for a little while yet – especially as there is no launch date outside of the US so far. However, by bringing the technology and innovation we have come to expect from our laptops, desktops and phones into the living room, some predictions can be made.
By allowing the entire web onto our television screens in a seamless platform, instead of the tiny subset of web content we currently access this way – there are potential consequences for how businesses optimise their content. Video will need to be of a suitably high quality to not only present well on a larger screen but also be optimised to enable easy discovery. More online video content of a higher quality will have ramifications for the hosting industry. Increased storage space, reliability improvements and data transfer speeds will become the central issues for many more users, content providers and businesses.
It has become rare these days for a television channel to resort to a ‘technical difficulties’ message as transmission is interrupted by hardware failure. Google TV could see the return of such messages as web hosts struggle to deliver content as fast, as smoothly and as widely as may be required.
Google TV is predicted to arrive in Australia sometime in 2011 as both a full television unit with in-built Blu-ray and also as a set-top box for your existing living room set-up.
Google Chrome – as fast as chips!
Speed seems to be the battle ground where the future successes and failures of the web will be decided. According to Glen Murphy – senior developer of Google’s Chrome browser – a delay of even a tenth of a second in delivering a webpage can impact on user behaviour.
Most internet browsers were developed when the web was much slower and web pages less complex than they are today. That is why Google is keen to push the speed credentials of its own Chrome browser.
Still, all the number crunching in the world doesn’t illustrate this as well as the below video!
Senator Conroy versus Google – round two
Senator Conroy clearly believes that the best form of defence is attack. At the senate hearing on May 24, Conroy choose to respond to questions about his proposed internet filter by instead launching a renewed attack on Google and Facebook over their recent privacy breaches.
Conroy described Google’s controversial capture of private data from unsecured wireless networks as “the largest privacy breach in the history across western democracies". He also strenuously put forward that this was a premeditated and deliberate act. “Google have admitted to doing this and claim it was a mistake in the software code, meaning that it was actually quite deliberate, the code was collecting it.”
Google maintains that the data capture was inadvertent . At the Google Sydney I/O presentation on May 25, Alan Noble – Google Australia’s head of engineering – reiterated that any such data capture had never been signed off and had certainly never been intended. The Street View program is on hold pending a review, but Noble wouldn’t confirm whether every line of code in Google software would now be subject to audit.
However, Conroy’s attempt to deflect discussion away from the proposed filter onto Google did not go unnoticed. Google continues to be outspoken in its opposition to the filter, so many have interpreted Conroy’s comments as an attempt to discredit a powerful critic while avoiding answering those concerns directly.
Noble reiterated those “deep concerns” at the I/O event by restating that any large-scale technology placed on top of the existing internet framework would most likely impact on speeds and the user experience with an added high risk that it would not work as intended.
Is Facebook the right place for your business anymore?
Facebook has yet again found itself at the centre of a storm over civil liberties and their cavalier attitude to privacy, despite their privacy policy running longer than the original US Constitution! This latest episode – over the sharing of user data with advertisers – may well be the last straw for many users.
But that’s not all. Some are already predicting that businesses with a presence on Facebook may also become tainted with the bad press. If a business chooses to partner with an organisation with such a Machiavellian approach to users, uncomfortable inferences can be drawn.
Mark Zuckerberg has commented on Facebook’s reaction to the controversy, falling short of a public apology but full of assurances of changes to come. But it may be too late, considering this isn’t the first time Facebook’s privacy settings have been questioned.
ZDNet has published a step by step guide to how to delete your account and ensure that your data remains secure.
“Are you confused by the myriad of changes Facebook keeps making to its privacy settings? Are you angry about your data being exposed without your express consent? Are you just fed up and not going to take it any more?”
http://www.zdnet.com.au/how-to-delete-your-facebook-account-339303361.htm
