That’s a plot I’ve been mak­ing based on this data. If the y-​​axis doesn’t make any sense to you, this rep­res­ents the num­ber IP address blocks each of the world’s five Regional Inter­net Regis­tries has left to assign to Inter­net users. North Amer­ica is look­ing pretty safe for a while (hoo­ray). Asia and Aus­tralia are cur­rently expec­ted to run out on April 30, 2011. Bad things are going to be hap­pen­ing then.

I seem to have a thing for plot­ting things.

Plot also avail­able in SVG format. Both should be updated vaguely daily.

That's a plot I've been making based on this data. If the y-axis doesn't make any sense to you, this represents the number IP address blocks each of the world's five Regional Internet Registries has left to assign to Internet users. North America is looking pretty safe for a while (hooray). Asia and Australia ...

Sev­eral months ago I wrote about Freenet. It’s tech­nic­ally neat but I was under­whelmed by its util­ity, think­ing an uncensor­able net­work isn’t very neces­sary in today’s Inter­net. I wrote:

The primary value of some­thing like Freenet in mostly-​​​​free coun­tries like Canada would be Wikileaks, I would think. Well there is some of that  —  for instance there’s a frees­ite devoted to the leaked Sarah Palin emails  —  but the fact of the mat­ter is that Wikileaks exists in the “real” cen­sor­able Inter­net and it hasn’t been cen­sored. Or at least not yet. There’s been pos­tur­ing that maybe it will be some day, we’ll see. But the fact that it hasn’t been yet takes away a niche mar­ket for Freenet.

Con­sid­er­ing the reac­tion by the world’s gov­ern­ments to the most recent Wikileaks leak, I may have to recon­sider Freenet’s role a little bit.

Several months ago I wrote about Freenet. It's technically neat but I was underwhelmed by its utility, thinking an uncensorable network isn't very necessary in today's Internet. I wrote:The primary value of some­thing like Freenet in mostly-​​free coun­tries like Canada would be Wikileaks, I would think. Well there is some of that — for instance there’s ...

I’ve pos­ted this else­where, but I feel com­fort­able now post­ing it publicly.

There’s this prob­lem of hav­ing to have a pass­word for every web­site you have an account with, which is a ser­i­ous prob­lem if you have an account on a lot of sites. OpenID was sup­posed to solve this prob­lem by allow­ing you to — securely — share one account across mul­tiple sites, but never took off due to a chicken-​​and-​​egg prob­lem: almost no one uses OpenID which means almost no sites feel the need to sup­port it. Most web browsers will store pass­words for you, but that doesn’t do you any good if you want to access one of your accounts from a dif­fer­ent computer.

You can use the same pass­word — or the same few pass­words — across mul­tiple sites, but this is actu­ally a real secur­ity risk and is some­thing that should be avoided if possible.

So I put together a wee bit of Javas­cript to help man­age pass­words. You have to remem­ber one base pass­word — which should not be from the dic­tion­ary, but oth­er­wise has no con­straints — and from that pass­word it will auto­mat­ic­ally gen­er­ate what your par­tic­u­lar pass­word is for any given site. Your base pass­word is never trans­mit­ted across the net­work. The gen­er­ated pass­words should hope­fully meet the cri­teria of any site you come across: they all con­tain one upper­case let­ter, one punc­tu­ation mark and one numeric digit. If some unscru­pu­lous web­site owner gets your pass­word to one site, it is ver­it­ably intract­able for them to determ­ine your base pass­word or your pass­word to any other site. And it requires you to only remem­ber one site.

I post it in case any­one finds it use­ful or wants to use it for their own pur­poses. If you do want to use it, fol­low these steps:

1. Steal my HTML doc­u­ment and change around the style, etc., to suit your needs.
2. Find a place to host the HTML document.
3. Come up with a base pass­word, hope­fully some­thing harder to guess than “galvatron”.
4. Determ­ine the SHA1 hash of your base pass­word. You can find online SHA1 cal­cu­lat­ors, but from a secur­ity stand­point it would be prefer­able to cal­cu­late the hash on your home com­puter (e.g., on a Unix-​​based oper­at­ing sys­tem with OpenSSL installed, one can do some­thing like echo –n “gal­vat­ron” | openssl sha1 to cal­cu­late the hash).
5. In the HTML doc­u­ment, modify the Javas­cript vari­able password_​hash accord­ing to what you just calculated.

The script will then give you pass­words that you should use for sites you sign up for in the future, which you will then never have to remember.

I've posted this elsewhere, but I feel comfortable now posting it publicly. There's this problem of having to have a password for every website you have an account with, which is a serious problem if you have an account on a lot of sites. OpenID was supposed to solve this problem by allowing you to---securely---share ...

Someone recently asked about Freenet, so I decided to try it out again. If you’re curi­ous about Freenet, the about page gives a good descrip­tion of it. It’s a WWW-​​like net­work — minus the dynamic con­tent and search engines — with the added bene­fit that it’s totally anonym­ous and uncensor­able. “Anonym­ous” is a bit of a mis­nomer: it’s actu­ally closer to pseud­onym­ous since, through cryp­to­graphic prim­it­ives, it’s designed around the idea of hav­ing iden­tit­ies not linked to real iden­tit­ies. The “WWW-​​like” is also a mis­nomer as it’s actu­ally a more gen­eral key-​​data sort of enorm­ous filesys­tem, but the WWW-​​like part of it is what most users see, espe­cially initially.

I played around with it years ago and I have to say it’s improved quite a bit since then. The biggest, and just about the only vis­ible, change is in per­form­ance. I haven’t dug into see­ing what they’ve done to help things, but most frees­ites load within a minute and there are very few “data not found“s. “Within a minute” may not sound very impress­ive com­pared to the WWW, but it’s really impress­ive con­sid­er­ing the nature of Freenet.

From a local resource con­sump­tion stand­point, per­form­ance is still quite ter­rible. I’ve been run­ning it for close to a day now and the load aver­age stays some­where around 0.3 even when not doing any­thing and can jump up above 3.0 when doing cas­ual brows­ing of frees­ites or Frost boards. This is unfor­tu­nate since you have to leave it run­ning 24/​7 for it to work well.

The same prob­lem is with Freenet that has always been there: con­tent. I agree with the gen­eral philo­sophies of Freenet: even “good” cen­sor­ship philo­soph­ic­ally has bad con­sequences and so it is nice to have a place like Freenet free from any sort of cen­sor­ship. Well, in prac­tice, that hasn’t really panned out. Freenet’s been around for close to 10 years now and still doesn’t have any com­pel­ling con­tent. I’ve poked around the major frees­ites (this link will not work if you aren’t on Freenet) and the Frost mes­sage boards and…nothing. There’s piles of con­tent, of course, but little of it of con­sequence, very little of it inter­est­ing, and none of it compelling.

The primary value of some­thing like Freenet in mostly-​​free coun­tries like Canada would be Wikileaks, I would think. Well there is some of that — for instance there’s a frees­ite devoted to the leaked Sarah Palin emails — but the fact of the mat­ter is that Wikileaks exists in the “real” cen­sor­able Inter­net and it hasn’t been cen­sored. Or at least not yet. There’s been pos­tur­ing that maybe it will be some day, we’ll see. But the fact that it hasn’t been yet takes away a niche mar­ket for Freenet.

What I see a lot of on the frees­ites is politically…disagreeable…writings. In this sense Freenet actu­ally does make sense. The Inter­net is becom­ing less and less anonym­ous. It used to be that you could set up a Geo­cit­ies sites and write about your love for Emma Gold­man, but these days ser­vice pro­viders (in the most gen­eral sense) are chomp­ing at the bit jump­ing all over them­selves at the oppor­tun­ity of passing on IP addresses and what­not. The polit­ical writ­ings on Freenet aren’t gen­er­ally illegal (well, maybe there might be one or two in a few coun­tries with severe hate speech laws, but those are the excep­tions), but they’re uncon­ven­tional enough that I can see people want­ing anonym­ity. It’s not so much about Freenet being uncensor­able as it is about Freenet offer­ing this very eleg­ant pseud­onym­ity. I sup­pose it’s nice to have a place where you can write and you know that it’s impossible for future employ­ers to track you down and find out that you secretly agree with Emma Goldman’s politics.

Well, I still agree with the the­ory of Freenet and I still acknow­ledge its prac­tical value in places like China, but…I still can’t see that it applies to me. I’d like to cre­ate a frees­ite to add more con­tent and get more people inter­ested in Freenet, but like most people, I can’t think of any­thing com­pel­ling to put there. I think I’ll just unin­stall it again and wish it well.

P.S. I’ve just learned that Frost has been obsol­esced by a new Freenet mes­sage board sys­tem called FMS. When I’d pre­vi­ously used Freenet many years ago, Frost was the big one, so I installed it out of habit. FMS looks actu­ally rather fant­astic (and it works with your exist­ing news­group reader like Thun­der­bird) and maybe I’ll keep Freenet around another couple hours to play with FMS, but I doubt the con­tent on there is going to be rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent from the rest of Freenet.

Someone recently asked about Freenet, so I decided to try it out again. If you're curious about Freenet, the about page gives a good description of it. It's a WWW-like network---minus the dynamic content and search engines---with the added benefit that it's totally anonymous and uncensorable. "Anonymous" is a bit of a misnomer: it's ...

I won’t go over the back­ground of IPv6, but suf­fice it to say I think it’s rather keen and I’d like to see it catch on as it would sim­plify a lot of things. It’s got a ser­i­ous chicken-​​and-​​egg prob­lem: con­tent pro­viders don’t see the need to sup­port IPv6 until their read­ers are using IPv6; end-​​users don’t care about IPv6 until con­tent pro­viders do.

We’ve been using IPv6 (Jasna may or may not be aware of it) on our net­work for about half a year. Since my ISP, Tek­Savvy, doesn’t route IPv6 traffic I’ve had to resort to 6to4 for the time being to pre­tend that I’m part of the great IPv6 Inter­net. For IPv6-​​capable sites, I con­nect over IPv6 and for those that aren’t, I con­nect over IPv4. It’s all very trans­par­ent, so I checked my router stats to see how much of our band­width was actu­ally hap­pen­ing over IPv6 and it was only about 0.01%, very discouraging.

A large pro­por­tion of our band­width comes from Usenet, so I went to see if I could find IPv6-​​capable Usenet serv­ers to help fight the good fight. As it turns out, there are three free Usenet serv­ers which are IPv6 cap­able, all of them being in the Neth­er­lands. I tried all three and one of them actu­ally worked for me.

Finally, I decided to make this site, Wiz­ard­like, IPv6-​​capable. Well my host­ing com­pany, Dream­host, doesn’t sup­port IPv6, but there’s a friendly site, again in the Neth­er­lands, called IPv6Proxy, which will proxy any hos­ted site. Thus, if you want to con­nect via IPv6, you can no go to ipv6​.wiz​ard​like​.ca (note: even if you aren’t IPv6-​​capable, that site will still work. Due to how IPv6Proxy is set up, the host­name has to be IPv4 reach­able). The reason I cre­ated a sep­ar­ate domain for the IPv6-​​reachable site is that it can be rather slow. Con­sider:

If you’re like me hanging out in Canada, con­nect­ing to IPv6Proxy in the Neth­er­lands just so that it can con­nect to Dream­host in Cali­for­nia and then relay the web­site back to you is a little silly and adds about 100ms of latency.

In addi­tion to ipv6​.wiz​ard​like​.ca there’s also ipv6​.pro​jects​.wiz​ard​like​.ca.

I won't go over the background of IPv6, but suffice it to say I think it's rather keen and I'd like to see it catch on as it would simplify a lot of things. It's got a serious chicken-and-egg problem: content providers don't see the need to support IPv6 until their readers are using ...

With the recent announce­ment from Google regard­ing the release of Google Wave—slated for late Septem­ber 2009 — I finally decided to do some read­ing on it. I recom­mend watch­ing the abridged video of it to get an idea, though the abridged ver­sion leaves out some cool stuff about the protocol.

I love the pro­tocol. Both Google’s actions and words point to Wave being some­thing which is not con­trolled by Google in any way. The pro­tocol will be open and Google’s ref­er­ence imple­ment­a­tion will be open source. To start with, Google will be the world’s largest Wave pro­vider since they’re the ones who have developed the pro­tocol, ref­er­ence imple­ment­a­tion and have done the test­ing on it, but ideally organ­iz­a­tions will start offer­ing Wave accounts in exactly the same way they offer email accounts today.

If you watch the video, you get a very ambi­tious view of Wave: it will not only obsol­ete email, but also instant mes­saging, polling, blog­ging, pic­ture shar­ing and file shar­ing, wikis and even video games. Being a little bit famil­iar with XMPP — the tech­no­logy Wave is built upon — I have to say it was only a mat­ter of time before someone tried to do some­thing this ambi­tious. XMPP is a beau­ti­ful pro­tocol and open and extens­ible to boot. Wave seems like some­thing that had to hap­pen eventually.

Even if Google Wave sup­plants noth­ing other than email, it would be well worth it. Email has a lot of short­com­ings, as any­one who took my net­work­ing course should appre­ci­ate. Cryp­to­graph­ic­ally secure authen­tic­a­tion and encryp­tion end-​​to-​​end is required by the pro­tocol — it is impossible to send any­thing unen­cryp­ted with Wave — and that alone is some­thing to be pleased about.

The down­side to this all is I’m get­ting all excited now about it and I want to start work­ing on devel­op­ing a Wave cli­ent. I’m all adult and bor­ing these days with my “respons­ib­il­it­ies” and so it has to get thrown to the bot­tom of my to-​​do list along with all the other cool non – research-​​related pro­jects I’d love to do.

And I should say I have a hor­rible his­tory of pre­dict­ing which tech­no­lo­gies will catch on and which won’t. In my world, MSN and Face­book should be fail­ures; PGP and XMPP should have taken the world by storm. With that track record, I sup­pose Google Wave is doomed to be a spec­tac­u­lar fail­ure, which would be a real shame.

With the recent announcement from Google regarding the release of Google Wave—slated for late September 2009—I finally decided to do some reading on it. I recommend watching the abridged video of it to get an idea, though the abridged version leaves out some cool stuff about the protocol. I love the protocol. Both Google's actions ...