The 2019 holidays season is underway. You want to look festive for the season. It is time to reach down into the corner of your closet and get your best worst holiday sweaters.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
E
very device that connects to the Internet needs an address to get bits delivered to it, just like your home has a street address so that FedEx, UPS or the post office can leave you packages. On the Internet, they are called IP addresses. Currently, there are 2 types of addresses on the internet – IPv4, and IPv6.
IPv4 is still used every day and has over 4.3 billion IP addresses – but that is not enough. Followers of the Bach Seat know most of the original IPv4 addresses are no longer available. In 2011 Asia ran out of IPV4 addresses, and in 2015 the U.S. ran out.
Just last week (11/25/2019) RIPE, the organization that handles IPv4 addresses for 76 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Central Asia announced that it ran out of IPv4 addresses. “We made our final /22 (1,022 address netblock) IPv4 allocation from the last remaining addresses in our available pool.”
IPv6 is a not-so-new specification, created in 1995 to replace IPv4. IPv6 has over 340 undecillion IPv6 addresses.
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A tell-tale sign of a dysfunctional market is the evolution of a grey market. Followers of Bach Seat know that a grey market in IPv4 addresses has existed since 2011. IPv4 prices on the grey market can range from $11 – $33 per address, meaning the IPv4 transfer market is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars globally.
ars points out that end-users and the SMB market are largely unaffected by IPv4-address exhaustion. They can still connect to the web and do what they need to do.
They predict that new Internet service providers will be the first to really feel the IPv4 exhaustion pinch. They will need IP addresses firms know-how to deal with (hint- it’s not IPv6) to hand out. According to ars this could include cloud providers such as Conga, Digital Ocean, Huddle, and Optiv who also act as Internet Service Providers.
If you are an incumbent ISP this is a good thing, for everybody else it is a significant barrier to entry for new players in either local or cloud ISP markets.
They conclude that full adoption of IPv6 and its 340 undecillion individual addresses is the way around the incumbent oligarchy.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Updated 12/26/2019 – The rumor mill says that Dell Technologies is working with too big to fail Morgan Stanley in a bid to sell off RSA Security.
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Is RSA available? In keeping with the wave of cybersecurity mergers and acquisitions the rumor mill is reporting that Dell is exploring the sale of its RSA Security business unit. If the rumors are correct, RSA can be had for at least $1 billion. Rumors about Dell potentially selling RSA have surfaced multiple times over the past few years.
Dell inherited RSA in 2016 as part of its $67 billion acquisition of EMC. EMC bought RSA for about $2.1 billion in 2006. RSA Security was founded in 1982.
RSA is well-known for its products. Well known products include SecurID multifactor authentication tokens and NetWitness for security incident event management and threat detection and response. However, RSA is probably best known for its annual RSA Conference in San Francisco. RSA faces many of the same issues that have precipitated the HP – Xerox face-off. The challenges include competition from fast-growing cloud and software based identity and access management (IAM) firms. The RSA challengers include Okta and Ping Identity, according to Bloomberg.
Dell may have put RSA on the block because it is redundant in the Dell portfolio. Dell also owns Secureworks, an MSSP that’s evolved a software-defined era led by threat detection and management services. Additionally, Dell’s VMware business now owns Carbon Black — an endpoint protection and cybersecurity company that works closely with MSSPs. Dell has been connecting the dots between Secureworks, VMware, and Carbon Black as part of its own enterprise security strategy.
Neither Dell nor RSA commented on the Bloomberg report.
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As I have noted a number of times on Bach Seat, the cyber-security market is seeing lots of M&A action. If Dell is really serious about unloading RSA, now is the time to do it. Before the cyber-security bubble bursts and/or the economy tanks again. Not only would selling RSA streamline Dell’s security story the $1 billion would allow Dell to pay down its debt after its purchase of EMC or fund other projects.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Friends and Thanksgiving UK retailer Firebox has released a Giant Turkey Mask modeled after Friends’ unofficial seventh member, the turkey head from The One with All the Thanksgivings. It includes a fez hat with see-through “sunglasses” that let you see your Turkey day spread and watch the Lions lose.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
In 1969 Apollo 11 took man to the moon, Woodstock rocked, Sesame Street debuted, Wendy’s was founded and the Internet was born and crashed. On October 29, 1969, at 10:30 pm Pacific Time. The first use of the proto-Internet was attempted by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline. He was trying to log in to a system at Stanford.
Only 2 characters were sent before the entire fledgling Internet crashed. About an hour later, after debugging a code translation problem caused by the UCLA computer using EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) and the SRI computer using ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), the first actual remote connection between two computers was established over what would someday evolve into the modern Internet.
The proto-Intenet was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (the predecessor of DARPA). It is commonly believed that ARPANET was built to explore technologies related to building a military command-and-control network that could survive a nuclear attack. However, Charles Herzfeld, the ARPA director who would oversee most of the initial work to build ARPANET told ars Technica:
ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack … clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA’s mission to do this … ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators … were geographically separated from them.
In its infancy, ARPANET had only four “nodes”:
Rather than being directly connected, physicist Wesley Clark suggested the mainframe computers connect to ARPNET via another device to off-load the connections. These devices were called Interface Message Processors (IMPs). IMP’s were the first network routers and built by BBN which used Honeywell DDP-516 mini-computers with 12K of memory. The early-ARPANET connected the nodes with AT&T 50kbps lines. This would allow additional systems to be added as nodes to the network at each site as it evolved and grew.
Some of the major innovations that occurred on ARPANET include;
As ARPANET grew interoperability grew as an issue. The solution proposed by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1982 was TCP/IP. The evolution of TCP/IP allowed organizations of all sizes to began using Local Area Networks or LANs. A standard network protocol like TCP/IP then allowed one LAN to connect with other LANs.
ARPANET was slowly replaced by NSFnet (National Science Foundation Network) beginning in 1986. NSFnet first linked together with the five national supercomputer centers, then every major university. ARPANET was finally shut down in 1990. NSFnet formed the backbone of what we call the Internet today.
When ARPANET was shut down, Vinton Cerf, one of the fathers of the modern Internet, wrote a poem in ARPANET’s honor:
It was the first, and being first, was best,
but now we lay it down to ever rest.
Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears.
For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years
of faithful service, duty done, I weep.
Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep.
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Len Kleinrock, a UCLA professor since 1963 who was present at the birth of the Internet, described the attitude of the early Internet for NBC News, “Allow that open access, and a thousand flowers bloom … One thing about the Internet you can predict is you will be surprised by applications you did not expect.”
That openness of the early Internet has given way to growing concern that the Internet has become centralized by a few major companies, compromised by governments, and monetized by the collecting and sharing of private data.
ars Technica notes that the first three characters ever transmitted over the precursor to the Internet were L, O, and L. Without ARPANET, there would have been no Internet.
The Internet is still laughing out loud at us.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
