Posts by 'lil mouse

Australia moves to drop some cryptography by 2030 – before quantum carves it up

Move along now

This has nothing to do with desktop or website. HACE is used in high security environments usually in dedicated evaluated products.

IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4, argues APNIC's chief scientist

So very tired

Wow Geoff, can’t believe it’s the best part of 35 years since those early meetings with Ken in LaTrobe Street. I don’t know why you haven’t gone fishing by now. Wish I was.

My vague reminiscences.

We had an issues in that the children were not sharing nicely in the sandpit. Some kids had reserved lots of space in the sandpit – even if they didn’t need it, and some kids had no space at all.

Yes, the sandpit needed to be bigger, but how the kids played in the sandpit was an issue as well.

And remembering that all this took place back in the dawn of Internet-time. Many folks hadn’t yet formed the realisation that the Internet wasn’t just a plaything of universities – and in fact it wasn’t a plaything at all.

So we had a co-operative network in the form of the Internet in which people were not co-operating. In those circumstances, the technology boffins who made up most of the decision-makers looked at the issue through their narrow lens and allowing for the levers they had available. Their solution was predictable, and it was what you would expect from technologists in the circumstances:

"If the sandpit is too small and the kids keep bumping into each other – let’s make the sandpit infinitely big!"

The shortcomings of the solution pretty soon became apparent.

1 We may have a sandpit the size of Arrakis available to us, but all the cool toys were still in the old sandpit.

2 The problem with having a near infinitely large sandpit is that that’s a lot of sand. Maintaining the sandpit is a problem in itself. A near infinite sized routing table brings its own issues and attempts to implement geographical constraints were always going to be doomed. Some of those content networks you allude to decided it was better for them to advertise 65,000 /48 routes on the IPv6 routing table instead of a single /32 and did so in the course of a day. Fun times.

3 It turned out that there was whole lot of intellectual property developed around operating and securing IPv4, and many of the things found in IPv6 were a bit dodgy and not strictly comparable. Some features like mobility in IPv6 got buried before they ever really saw the light of day. Other features that folks suggested were a mandatory part of IPV6 were either turned off or worked around – meaning that many of the perceived benefits were not realised.

4 Just like kiddies in the sandpit, industry muddled on in finding workarounds to many of the pressing problems. Along came NAT, along with a whole heap of products and features that did a good job of optimising that IPv4 traffic in situations where that was important. By the time that folks were talking about implementing IPV6 the workarounds were an entrenched part of the IT environment.

5 It turns out that if you put 2 kids in a sandpit the size of the world, they will still find each other and they will still fight. Over something – anything. People are like that, and sometimes you can’t solve a social problem with a technical solution. Sometimes you need some carrots, and sometimes you need some sticks.

6 With thanks to Douglas Adams, the Internet is not a flat universe. It is curved and in fact definitely bent. Some of us like portals, stargates, wormholes and all the other weird bits :)