sb - Slashdot User

Comment APNIC gets last available IPv4 blocks (Score 1) 312

by sb on Tuesday February 01, 2011 @05:34PM (#35072992) Attached to: Last Available IPv4 Blocks Allocated

It's interesting to read what APNIC's own chief scientist thought of IPv4 exhaustion only five years ago. Quotes from that article:

"The death of IPv4 has not really killed the Internet. In fact, far from it, we've managed to make an industry around it. We've already created a business around where we are, not where we want to be. Skype is not a charity and it works in all of this muck. If it couldn't work, complain to me, but as long as it works, I don't see the problem."

and

"Anyone that is a clever economic unit will buy and sell. Anyone with class B addresses will figure out that if they band up behind a NAT, they can sell off all spare addresses. So scarcity is just a pricing function and there will be a market in address compression."

So now APNIC gets 3 out of the last 7 /8 blocks, which I know was always to be expected due to the growth in the APAC region. But one also gets the feeling that several big players are planning to purposefully delay IPv6 adoption as long as humanly possible in order to monetise the hell out of their IPv4 allocations.

Expect the net to become nice big clusterfuck of CGN and other "solutions" in the next few years before everyone finally gives up and migrates to IPv6... assuming the transition actually happens and we don't kiss end-to-end goodbye forever.

Submission + - UK authorities accused of inciting illegal protest (schnews.org.uk)

Submitted by jarran on Sunday January 23, 2011 @02:27PM

jarran writes: Questions are being asked about the tactics being employed by UK authorities to monitor and control protest groups. Schnews reports on evidence that government IP addresses are posting messages to sites like Indymedia, attempting to provoke activists into taking illegal direct action. Evidence has emerged recently that the police consider sex to be a legitimate tool for extracting information from targets, and senior police have been accused of lying to parliament about the deployment of undercover agents at protests.

Submission + - Hungarian Officials Can Now Censor the Media

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 01, 2011 @06:29AM

An anonymous reader writes: Hungary is set to regulate the media, including web-published content, under a new law applicable today. The law requires all the media to provide a "balanced view" and must not go against
"public morality", and places all publications under the control of a new regulating body, whose top members have all been nominated by Prime minister Viktor Orban.

Orban, whose strong ways have been compared to Putin's, has been tightening his grip over Hungary. "In the seven months since Orban came to power with a two- thirds parliamentary majority, he has implemented retroactive taxes in violation of the constitution, curbed the Constitutional Court’s power, effectively nationalized private pension funds and put ruling-party allies in charge of at least four independent institutions, including the audit office".

Citizens sentenced in application of the new law can still challenge it at the European Court of Human Rights — see you in a few years.

Submission + - Putin Orders Russian Move to GNU/Linux (blogspot.com) 2

Submitted by Glyn Moody on Monday December 27, 2010 @02:09PM

Glyn Moody writes: Vladimir Putin has signed an order calling for Russian federal authorities to move to GNU/Linux, and for the creation of "a single repository of free software used in the federal bodies of executive power". There have been a number of Russian projects to roll out free software, notably in the educational sector, but none so far has really taken off. With the backing of Putin, could this be the breakthrough free software has been waiting for?

Submission + - Auditors question TSA's use of and spending on tec (washingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by Frosty Piss on Monday December 27, 2010 @01:47PM

Frosty Piss writes: Government auditors have faulted the TSA and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, for failing to properly test and evaluate technology before spending money on it. The TSA spent about $36 million on devices that puffed air on travelers to "sniff" them out for explosives residue. All 207 of those machines ended up in warehouses, abandoned as unable to perform as advertised, deployed in many airports before the TSA had fully tested them. Since it was founded in 2001, the TSA has spent roughly $14 billion in more than 20,900 transactions with dozens of contractors, including $8 billion for the famous new body scanners that have recently come under scrutiny for being unable to perform the task for which they are advertised. 'TSA has an obsession of finding a single box that will solve all its problems. They've spent and wasted money looking for that one box, and there is no such solution.' Said John Huey, an airport security expert.

Submission + - What FLOSS developers need?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19, 2010 @06:38PM

An anonymous reader writes: I am a free software developer, I maintain one relatively simple project written in C, targeted at end users, but I feel that I could contribute something more to FLOSS community than my project. Instead of focusing on another project targeted at end users, I thought that I could spend my time working on something that FLOSS developers need ("Developers, developers, developers, developers!"). The question is: what more do FLOSS developers need from existing development tools? What would attract new developers to existing FLOSS development tools? Which existing development tools need more attention? I can contribute code in C, Python, bash, but I can also write documentation, do testing and translate to my native language. Any hints?

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