ureadit

The Number Resource Organization (NRO) recently announced that there is less than 10 percent resource remaining within the IPv4 address space. This means that as new people sign up for Internet access and as new Internet-based services are deployed, there will be a dwindling supply of precious address space to accommodate them. This will severely affect the availability of services in the near future.

So what’s the solution? Something called IPv6.

And what’s the difference between IPv4 and IPv6? The primary difference is that there is a lot more address space available with IPv6. When IPv4 was originally rolled out to the public, it was thought that its 32 bits of address space would be sufficient to accommodate world demand for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, it was not foreseen that the Internet would quickly slip into the mainstream and explode.

Much has been written in the technical press lately about “Distributed Denial of Service” attacks. In the limited time I have this evening, I thought I’d pass along what I know about this topic.

A classic “Denial of Service” involves the inability of a website to provide a web page within a reasonable amount of time. For example, say you click on CNN’s website expecting to see the news, but instead of news, you get a blank screen. Or perhaps you get a screen that fills very, very slowly. Like most people, you’ll wait a certain period of time – perhaps ten seconds – and then you’ll give up. Maybe you’ll attempt to refresh the page, but if you are again met with a blank screen, you’ll go somewhere else.

The severity of this problem depends on the type of website. Amazon, for example, would lose a lot of money if potential customers get impatient and click away. They stand to lose revenue the instant their website fails to respond to customers. Ureadit.com, on the other hand … ah … I’d love to have the traffic. :-)

DDoS attacks aren’t the only reason websites occasionally become incapacitated. Surely, there are other reasons websites fail. The problem with DDoS, however, is that the disruption is usually the result of an intentional attack, which is meant to cause harm.

If someone in your home likes to play on the Xbox 360, chances are you’re used to the constant noise of a virtual war filling your environment. I used to have that problem. My 15 year-old-son loves playing war-based games, and there were times when our house sounded like a Marine training camp. As my son dove deeper into his games, the volume would get increasingly louder until, at last, I had to rescue my sanity and so something about the noise.

“Doing something about the noise,” was an engineering problem that was more difficult to solve than I originally expected. Here’s the problem: If you want to play online, then you’ll need to use the Xbox 360 headset-microphone combination so you can talk to and listen to your online gaming buddies. But the headset-microphone combination, which attaches to the hand-held game controller, only handles communication with other gamers; it does not play the game’s sound effects. In effect, your ears have to listen to both the headset-microphone combination for communication as well as the external speakers for the game sound effects. This does nothing to solve the problem of filling the house with gaming noise. In fact, because the headset partially occludes one ear, you tend to turn up the speaker volume, which exacerbates the noise problem for everybody else in the house.

This morning as I left for the office, I walked past my cat, who was sitting on the back of the sofa and looking out the front window. She is 18 years old, and her health is failing. She is trying to recover from a bladder infection, and it’s taken a lot of life out of her. Just before Christmas, I thought I might lose her, but she seems to be bouncing back for now.

So as I left the house this morning, I decided to walk around to the front yard and see if she would respond to me on the other side of the window. Her response? Nada. Nothing. No way. She had her eyes fixed on something else, and no matter how much I tried to get her attention, it was as if she didn’t even see me. Finally, I turned to see what she was capturing her attention, and I discovered that a seagull had landed on my neighbor’s garbage can. As sick and old as my cat was, she still had laser focus. She wanted that bird and could think of nothing else.

Seeing her focused state of mind despite her ailing body was an inspiration for me. If only I could have that much focus, perhaps I could accomplish more. After all, I’m in better physical shape, so my body wouldn't distract me, and thus I should be able to focus my mind even more, yes?

Sometimes when I’m bored – or just curious – I like to have a look at what’s going on in my PC’s network connections. I’m often surprised by the number of connections my PC maintains without my knowledge.

For example, late one evening I was on my PC and suddenly an MSN Messenger window popped up with a message from my stepson. He lives in Amsterdam, which is 9 hours ahead of my location in California. I was surprised, because I could have sworn that I’d shut down MSN Messenger. Not that I didn’t want the conversation, but it was a shock nevertheless because I thought MSN Messenger was shut down. It turns out that I’d recently updated MSN Messenger to a new version, and for some reason, the old version was still running in the background. I found it unsettling that I did not know a network connection was running without my knowledge.

Anyway, there’s a good, quick method to see what’s happening on your network, and you can use it to perform occasional “spot checks” to ensure you’re not taken by surprise. It’s called “netstat”, and you can run it from a command window.

I received another chain email from the right-wing propaganda machine again today. Funny, but I thought those chain emails disappeared when Obama was elected. Of course, I get a number of emails from the left-wing propaganda machine as well, though they seemed to die down after the last election. No matter what machine produces the emails, I’m always astounded that these things continually get passed around. It is so easy to fact-check things on the Internet these days, so you’d think such nonsense wouldn’t survive very long.

Today’s email came from a former colleague with whom I’ve remained in contact for several years. My ex-colleague had forwarded this email, and I could tell by all the extraneous formatting within the content that the email had been circulating about as much as an old dollar bill. The email cited how, during the Iran-Contra Senate Hearings – long before 9/11 – Oliver North talked about being threatened by Osama bin Laden. The email went on to explain that the senate, led by Al Gore, was skeptical and chastised Mr. North for being overly paranoid.

The problem is that this never happened.