Tag Archives: IPv6

IPv6 Adoption Still Shockingly Low Despite 20th Anniversary

Posted on by Bohs Hansen
Reply

The IPv6 specifications aren’t new on the block, in fact, the Internet Engineering Group and the Internet Engineering Task Force, IETF, officially announced the IPv6 specifications back in December 1995 which was 20 years ago by now. Despite its age, the IPv6 adoption rate is still shockingly low and only a few have embraced it so far.

It has long been known that we are running out of IPv4 addresses and most people connected to the internet these days are sent through internal ISP networks before ending up on a shared public IP address. It works, so why change it, right? Upgrading hardware will result in increased costs, which in effect could be moved onto the consumer. This is after all where the final bill usually ends.

When we take a look at Google’s statistics, we see that the global IPv6 IP address percent of all assigned addresses only accounts for about 10.41%, which only can be described as very little and a very slow growth since birth. So why is that you may ask? Well for starters, the two standards aren’t directly compatible with each other, but they aren’t incompatible either. You just need to create a setup that can handle both and all modern system can easily do that.

A few select ISPs have made the switch along with large companies like Google and Facebook, but other than that the adoption rate is sparse. Another possible reason for the lack of willingness by the ISPs to upgrade to IPv6 could be the benefits they have from the current setup. Increased income. Back in 2012 when the EU range of IPv4 addresses was exhausted, ISPs began to hike the prices for customers with static IP addresses. I know in my own case I got a 400% price increase just to keep my static IP address.

Maybe 2016 will be the year where IPv6 takes off, although I’m not holding my breath for it.

North America Has Run Out of IP Addresses

Posted on by Ashley Allen
Reply

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the regional internet registry body for the US, Canada, the Caribbean, and the North Atlantic Islands, has revealed that it has run out of IPv4 addresses.

There’s no need to panic, though: Europe ran out of IP addresses three years ago, with Africa the only region left with space addresses. It should, however, speed up the internet-wide upgrade to IPv6 – developed 17 years ago for this very eventuality – the process for which has been on-going for the last decade. Since IPv6 is not compatible with IPv4, though, its rollout is a laborious and time-consuming exercise. Since it could take upwards of thirty years to complete the conversion, IPv4 and IPv6 will still operate concurrently, called ‘dual-stacking’, even after most sites have moved over to the newer protocol.

While ARIN has been trying to conserve IP addresses through Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) and network address translation (NAT), the internet has expanded at a phenomenal rate, which is predicted to push the amount of internet connected devices globally to 75 billion within the next five years.

The industry most affected by a dearth of IP addresses is data centres. Companies that provide internet-based services, such as hosting and cloud storage, will be forced to make changes to their operations, with solutions like multiple servers sharing the same IP address impacting availability and performance.

Thank you Opendium for providing us with this information.

IPv4 Addresses Are Becoming Scarce in the US

Posted on by Cernescu Andrei
Reply

We already know that the internet is expanding at a rapid pace and that we’re soon going to need some infrastructural improvements in order to sustain it. Furthermore, it looks like IPv4 addresses are becoming quite scarce, especially in the US, as the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) recently had to reject a request because of a lack of IPv4 stock. According to John Curran, ARIN chief executive, the US organization activated the IPv4 Unmet Requests policy with a request that was much larger than the available inventory of IPv4 addresses.

This does not mean that IPv4 is now unavailable in the US, just that companies will soon be forced to make smaller requests or wait a while for blocks of address space to become available. ARIN is the largest organization to confirm that it has a limited stock of IPv4, but it is definitely not the first. In 2011, 2012 and 2014, similar organizations in Asia, Europe and Latin America declared similar shortages.

John Curran urged companies to consider moving to IPv6 addresses in the near future, as there are plenty of those just waiting to be picked up. His exact words were: “ARIN encourages organizations to evaluate IPv6 address space for their ongoing public internet network activities.”

Thank you Fudzilla for providing us with this information.

Popular Torrents Being Sabotaged by ipv6 Peer Flood

Posted on by Robert Ainsworth
3

Torrenting, a rather simple method of sharing files between several computers over the internet.

Unknown attackers are sabotaging popular TV and movie torrents by flooding them with IPv6 peers. The vulnerability, which affects the popular uTorrent client, makes it nearly impossible for torrent users to download files. It’s unclear who’s orchestrating the attacks, but it could be a guerrilla anti-piracy move.

BitTorrent is a highly robust sharing protocol that is not easily disrupted. However, there have been some crazy efforts to stop people from torrenting some of the latest movie and popular torrents. It seems as though the technique for sabotaging uses ipv6 to overwhelm BitTorrent swarms.

Because it is focussed on the Ipv6 protocol, not all users are affected. These fake peers request data from the downloaders torrent client and very quickly fill up the request queues. The fake peers never actually transmit any data but keep your client busy and prevent it from downloading torrents.

uTorrent seems to be the client that is affected, after a few mins of the requests, the application does block the fake clients IP but makes very little difference as they will be using so many addresses.

“This new method of peer flooding makes a lot of people think there are issues with torrents. From an anti-piracy point of view it is achieving the purposed effect,” the tracker operator, who prefers to remain anonymous, said.

Could this be a clever attempt at stopping torrenting? Who knows.

Thank you to TorrentFreak for providing us with this information.

US IPv4 Address Pool Reported to Be at Its Last Drop

Posted on by Gabriel Roşu
Reply

Well folks, the time has come to gradually transition from IPv4 towards IPv6. But don’t panic! Everyone was aware of the change and the limit is expected to be reached, as previously analysis show, sometime this summer. Will this affect your everyday user? Of course not, people will most probably not see any type of change at all (hopefully).

The guys in charge of handling the transition and making sure that everything works are the ISPs, who should have already started on getting things ready for the big change. So why do we need to make the change? Limited addresses, of course. Back in 1981 when the first IPv4 was made, it used only 32 bits to generate unique addresses. The latter number of bits is able to generate 4.3 billion unique addresses and back then people couldn’t have imagined that so many devices will be connected to the Internet is such a short amount of time.

However, further analysis pointed out the issue and so IPv6 was introduced in 1999, a 128-bit upgraded version of the IPv4 protocol, able to generate 340 trillion trillion trillion unique addresses. Now the thing is, if we are to run out of addresses for this protocol, it means that we either have the worst tech addiction or we are in an era where there are more androids running around than people.

Thank you Sci-Tech Today for providing us with this information

Better Connections Offered With Bluetooth 4.1

Posted on by Gabriel Roşu
Reply

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group announced the Bluetooth 4.1, which prepares Bluetooth devices for the Internet of Things by laying the groundwork for IP-based connections, similar to the way a router connects to multiple Wi-Fi enabled devices, extending Bluetooth technology’s role as the essential wireless link for the IoT. The new spec also promises better connectivity and larger data transfers.

“Bluetooth Smart technology put us on a rocket ship of growth, with Bluetooth annual product shipment projections skyrocketing to more than 4.5 billion in the next five years,” said Suke Jawanda, Bluetooth SIG CMO. “We updated the Bluetooth specification to address this projected growth, making changes to give developers more control in assigning a role to their product, limiting interference with other wireless technologies, and allowing Bluetooth Smart products to exchange data faster and maintain connections with less manual intervention.”

The Bluetooth 4.1 release brings better cooperation between LTE radios and Bluetooth devices to avoid interference. The release also promises better connections, as reconnection time intervals will be more flexible and variable, thus devices can reconnect automatically when they are in proximity of one another. As an example, the consumer can leave the room and upon returning, two recently used devices reconnect without user intervention.

The technology also supports features like bulk data transfer, such as sensors that gathered data during a run, bike ride or swim can transfer that data more efficiently when the consumer returns home. The new spec adds a standardized way to create a dedicated channel, which could be used for IPv6 communications in the Core Specification.

Thank you Tom’s Hardware for providing us with this information
Image courtesy of cunotic.com