internet

58 Articles

The Glacial IPv6 Transition: Raising Questions On Necessity And NAT-Based Solutions

October 26, 2024 by 72 Comments

A joke in networking circles is that the switch from IPv4 to IPv6 is always a few years away. Although IPv6 was introduced in the early 90s as a result of the feared imminent IPv4 address drought courtesy of the blossoming Internet. Many decades later, [Geoff Huston] in an article on the APNIC blog looks back on these years to try to understand why IPv4 is still a crucial foundation of the modern Internet while IPv6 has barely escaped the need to (futilely) try to tunnel via an IPv4-centric Internet. According to a straight extrapolation by [Geoff], it would take approximately two more decades for IPv6 to truly take over from its predecessor.

Although these days a significant part of the Internet is reachable via IPv6 and IPv6 support comes standard in any modern mainstream operating system, for some reason the ‘IPv4 address pool exhaustion’ apocalypse hasn’t happened (yet). Perhaps ironically, this might as [Geoff] postulates be a consequence of a lack of planning and pushing of IPv6 in the 1990s, with the rise of mobile devices and their use of non-packet-based 3G throwing a massive spanner in the works. These days we are using a contrived combination of TLS Server Name Indication (SNI), DNS and Network Address Translation (NAT) to provide layers upon layers of routing on top of IPv4 within a content-centric Internet (as with e.g. content distribution networks, or CDNs).

While the average person’s Internet connection is likely to have both an IPv4 and IPv6 address assigned to it, there’s a good chance that only the latter is a true Internet IP, while the former is just the address behind the ISP’s CG-NAT (carrier-grade NAT), breaking a significant part of (peer to peer) software and services that relied on being able to traverse an IPv4 Internet via perhaps a firewall forwarding rule. This has now in a way left both the IPv4 and IPv6 sides of the Internet broken in their own special way compared to how they were envisioned to function.

Much of this seems to be due to the changes since the 1990s in how the Internet got used, with IP-based addressing of less importance, while giants like Cloudflare, AWS, etc. have now largely become ‘the Internet’. If this is the path that we’ll stay on, then IPv6 truly may never take over from IPv4, as we will transition to something entirely else. Whether this will be something akin to the pre-WWW ‘internet’ of CompuServe and kin, or something else will be an exciting revelation over the coming years and decades.

Header: Robert.Harker [CC BY-SA 3.0].

Will .IO Domain Names Survive A Geopolitical Rearrangement?

October 23, 2024 by 46 Comments

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a major functional component of the modern Internet. We rely on it for just about everything! It’s responsible for translating human-friendly domain names into numerical IP addresses that get traffic where it needs to go. At the heart of the system are the top-level domains (TLDs)—these sit atop the whole domain name hierarchy.

You might think these TLDs are largely immutable—rock solid objects that seldom change. That’s mostly true, but the problem is that these TLDs are sometimes linked to real-world concepts that are changeable. Like the political status of various countries! Then, things get altogether more complex. The .io top level domain is the latest example of that.

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Access The Information Superhighway With A Mac Plus

October 17, 2024 by 5 Comments

For some time now, Apple has developed a reputation for manufacturing computers and phones that are not particularly repairable or upgradable. While this reputation is somewhat deserved, especially in recent years, it seems less true for their older machines. With the second and perhaps most influential computer, the Apple II, being so upgradable that the machine had a production run of nearly two decades. Similarly, the Macintosh Plus of 1986 was surprisingly upgradable and repairable and [Hunter] demonstrates its capabilities by bringing one onto the modern Internet, albeit with a few tricks to adapt the old hardware and software to the modern era.

The Mac Plus was salvaged from a thrift store, and the first issue to solve was that it had some rotten capacitors that had to be replaced before the computer could be reliably powered on at all. [Hunter] then got to work bringing this computer online, with the only major hardware modification being a BlueSCSI hard drive emulator which allows using an SD card instead of an original hard disk. It can also emulate an original Macintosh Ethernet card, allowing it to fairly easily get online.

The original operating system and browser don’t support modern protocols such as HTTPS or scripting languages like Javascript or CSS, so a tool called MacProxy was used to bridge this gap. It serves simplified HTML from the Internet to the Mac Plus, but [Hunter] wanted it to work even better, adding modular domain-specific handling to allow the computer to more easily access sites like Reddit, YouTube, and even Hackaday, although he does call us out a bit for not maintaining our retro page perhaps as well as it ought to be.

[Hunter] has also built an extension to use the Wayback Machine to serve websites to the Mac from a specific date in the past, which really enhances the retro feel of using a computer like this to access the Internet. Of course, if you don’t have original Macintosh hardware but still want to have the same experience of the early Internet or retro hardware this replica Mac will get you there too.

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Undersea Cable Repair

July 30, 2024 by 6 Comments

The bottom of the sea is a mysterious and inaccessible place, and anything unfortunate enough to slip beneath the waves and into the briny depths might as well be on the Moon. But the bottom of the sea really isn’t all that far away. The average depth of the ocean is only about 3,600 meters, and even at its deepest, the bottom is only about 10 kilometers away, a distance almost anyone could walk in a couple of hours.

Of course, the problem is that the walk would be straight down into one of the most inhospitable environments our planet has to offer. Despite its harshness, that environment is home to hundreds of undersea cables, all of which are subject to wear and tear through accidents and natural causes. Fixing broken undersea cables quickly and efficiently is a highly specialized field, one that takes a lot of interesting engineering and some clever hacks to pull off.

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Credit: Xinmei Liu

The US Surgeon General’s Case For A Warning Label On Social Media

June 17, 2024 by 68 Comments

The term ‘Social Media’ may give off a benign vibe, suggesting that it’s a friendly place where everyone is welcome to be themselves, yet reality has borne out that it is anything but. This is the reason why the US Surgeon General [Dr. Vivek H. Murthy] is pleading for a health warning label on social media platforms. Much like with warnings on tobacco products, it’s not expected that such a measure would make social media safe for children and adolescents, but would remind them and their parents about the risks of these platforms.

While this may sound dire for what is at its core about social interactions, there is a growing body of evidence to support the notion that social media can negatively impact mental health. A 2020 systematic review article in Cureus by [Fazida Karim] and colleagues found anxiety and depression to be the most notable negative psychological health outcomes. A 2023 editorial in BMC Psychology by [Ágnes Zsila] and [Marc Eric S. Reyes] concurs with this notion, while contrasting these cons of social media with the pros, such as giving individuals an online community where they feel that they belong.

Ultimately, it’s important to realize that social media isn’t the end-all, be-all of online social interactions. There are still many dedicated forums, IRC channels and newsgroups far away from the prying eyes and social pressure  of social media to act out a personality. Having more awareness of how social interactions affect oneself and/or one’s children is definitely essential, even if we’re unlikely to return to the ‘never give out your real name’ days of  the pre-2000s Internet.

Dial-Up Is Still, Just Barely, A Thing

March 6, 2024 by 94 Comments

In an era dominated by broadband and wireless cellular networks, it might come as a surprise to many that dial-up internet services still exist in the United States. This persistence is not a mere relic of nostalgia — but a testament to the diverse and uneven nature of internet infrastructure across the country.

Yes, dial-up internet, with those screechy, crackly tones, remains a useful tool in areas where modern, high-speed internet services are either unaffordable or unavailable. Subscriber numbers are tiny, but some plough on and access the Internet by the old ways, not the new.

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Replacement PCB Replicates Early 80s Modem

February 21, 2024 by 29 Comments

It’s certainly been a few decades, but plenty of us remember a time before widespread access to broadband internet, when connections were generally made over phone lines using acoustic modems. In the 90s these could connect you to AOL and Napster well enough, but in the early 80s the speeds were barely enough to read text as it loaded. A company called Hayes set out to change this with some of the first useful, widely-available modems for the PCs at the time. While they couldn’t keep up with the changing times there’s still a retro community that has these antiques, and to modernize it a bit this drop-in replacement for the PCBs replicates these old modems almost exactly.

The new PCB is equipped with everything needed to get a retro computer online again, including all the ports to connect a computer without any further modifications. It houses a few modern upgrades beyond its on-board processors, though. Rather than needing an actual acoustic coupled phone, this one has an ESP32 which gives it wireless capability. But the replacement PCB maintains the look and feel of the original hardware by replicating the red status LEDs at the front, fitting into the original Hayes cases with no modifications needed at all, and even includes a small speaker through which it can replicate the various tones, handshakes, and other audio cues that those of us nostalgic for this new online era remember quite well.

For those looking for a retro feel without the hassle of getting antique networking equipment functional again, this type of upgrade that preserves the essence of the original hardware is an excellent way of keeping retro computers functional on modern networking equipment. But if you absolutely must get the networking equipment exactly right down to the last patch cable, you might end up having to build your own ISP from scratch.

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