Dotless

It was never obvious at the outset of this grand Internet experiment that the one aspect of the network’s infrastructure that would truly prove to be the most fascinating, intriguing, painful, lucrative and just plain confusing, would be the Internet’s Domain Name System.


The Big Bad Internet

I often think there are only two types of stories about the Internet. One is a continuing story of prodigious technology that continues to shrink in physical size and at the same time continue to dazzle and amaze us. We’ve managed to get the cost and form factor of computers…


Valuing IP Addresses

The prospect of exhaustion of the IPv4 address space is not a surprise. We’ve been anticipating this situation since at least 1990. But it’s a “lumpy” form of exhaustion. It’s not the case that the scarcity pressures for IP addresses are evidently to the same level in every part of…


Updating the Predictions of Exhaustion

It’s time I updated the IPv4 Address Report. For ARIN and LACNIC the time when the registry reaches into its collection of available IPv4 addresses and comes out empty handed is getting closer, and its time to sharpen up the modelling about exhaustion.


All IP Addresses are not the Same

One IP address is much the same as another – right? There’s hardly a difference between 192.0.2.45 and 192.0.2.46 is there? They are just encoded integer values, and aside from numerological considerations, one address value is as good or bad as any other – right? So IP addresses are much…


A Question of DNS Protocols

One of the most prominent denial of service attacks in recent months was one that occurred in March 2013 between Cloudflare and Spamhaus. How did the attackers generate such massive volumes of attack traffic? The answer lies in the Domain Name System (DNS). The attackers asked about domain names, and…


When?

At the April 2013 ARIN meeting the inevitable question came up once more: “Exactly when is ARIN going to run out of IPv4 addresses?” Various dates have been proposed as an answer to this question, based on various methods of prediction. As the date is indeed getting closer, it may…


DNS, DNSSEC and Google’s Public DNS Service

For some time now we’ve been tracking the progress of the deployment of DNSSEC in the Internet. Its been a story of an evolution of the measurement technique, starting with a technique that attempted to guess at the behaviour of resolvers, through to techniques that explicitly pose novel DNS names…


Here’s looking at you …

Much has been said in recent weeks about various forms of cyber spying. The United States has accused the Chinese of cyber espionage and stealing industrial secrets. A former contractor to the United States’ NSA, Edward Snowden, has accused various US intelligence agencies of systematic examination of activity on various…


A Year in the Life

On the 6th June 2012 we held the World IPv6 Launch Day. Unlike the IPv6 event of the previous year, World IPv6 Day, where the aim was to switch on IPv6 on as many major online services as possible, the 2012 program was somewhat different. This time the effort was…