IPv6: Start the Doomsday Clock at 830 Days

Posted on September 23, 2008
Filed Under China Internet, Mobile, Wireless Networks | 1 Comment

The Internet in China may soon run out. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, under the current allocation speed, China’s IPv4 address resources can only meet the demand of 830 more days and if no proper measures are taken by then, new Chinese netizens will not be able to gain normal access to the Internet.

…Li says that a new IPv6 network address, which is a basic network resource without these limitations, has been developed in America, but this kind of IP address is only used among educational websites in China. To use the IPv6 network address, network operators need to spend a lot of time and money on equipment updating.

CNNIC now has started hosting seminars to remind the operators to apply for the remaining IP addresses as soon as possible for a storage in addition to call for a preparation for the providing of IPv6 addresses to netizens.

There has been doom and gloom about the lack of IPv4 addresses for years, but China’s flabbergasting internet growth has made the problem acute. Addresses assigned to China are running out as more servers go live and commercial and home internet connectivity rapidly increases. The (unidentified) rate of growth doesn’t even address what I think will be the next connectivity boom in China: mobile devices.

As tempting as it is may be to declare this the end times and hole up in some digital Decameron, the IP apocalypse really isn’t upon us. ISPs can fiddle around with network address translation (NAT) to support internet access (although it would be problematic for serving internet content). This would slow, but not stop, address allocation.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s governmental futurologists-cum-arm-twisters, have already made IPv6 a priority. China already has a university network, the telecoms companies have deployed their own versions for internal use, and the Olympics ran an IPv6 network. Indeed, any networkable device or computer on the market today will support IPv6. The technology is in place and works.

But the big problem is in switching over to IPv6 from IPv4. There’s just no way to do it in one fell swoop. And even if it were possible to switch over easily, there’s the small problem of the rest of the world. There are no public, commercial, IPv6 networks out there. China would need to build a IPv6-to-IPV4 to support connectivity to the rest of the internet.

The address allocation issue is fundamentally a technical issue that everyone on the internet will have to deal with at some point. The speed with which China has embraced the internet and the size of its internet population makes the same problem much more severe.

It will be interesting to see how the government decides to address the problem. A good start would be to require new, large private networks (in the sense they are managed by a particular organization - particularly mobile) to use IPv6. IPv4 gateways can be used to connect to the legacy internet. Assuming the addressing is done right (not too tricky), the address-to-name DNS services are correctly configured for the private and public networks (tricky), and the data routing designed to support a future knitting together of the networks (fiendishly tricky), some form of coexistence should be functional.

Functional, but not necessarily robust. And there still remains the rest of the internet and its various government administrators. The NDRC can’t crack the whip over them.

Oh, and all this will (according to CNNIC) happen just in time for the Shanghai Expo.

China Mobile & iPhone: Minor Official Makes Timid Prediction

Posted on September 12, 2008
Filed Under China Business, Mobile | Leave a Comment

Shanghai Daily reports:

China Mobile, the world’s No. 1 carrier by subscribers, will launch the iPhone to tap demand for mobile e-mails.

“The iPhone will come to China as early as next year,” was all Fan would said.

Mr. Fan works in China Mobile’s “corporate client division” and made this small aside during what seems to have been a boring interview about bundling services on Blackberries for corporate customers.

Just a snoozer of a story for anyone tracking the iPhone’s China debut.

Corporate Warfare on the Internet

Posted on September 12, 2008
Filed Under China Hackers, China Internet | Leave a Comment

Shanghai Daily reports:

POLICE in Shandong Province have caught three men allegedly responsible for a citywide Internet breakdown in Weifang in July, according to xinhuanet.com.

…The report did not say when the breakdown occurred but said in July police received an alert from the Weifang Branch of the China Netcom Group, which serves about 90 percent of the internet users in the city. The company complained that hackers had been attacking its network continuously, causing a two-day breakdown.

More than 400,000 internet users were affected. The city’s government departments, hospitals and schools were affected, the report said.

A special task force was set up and officers went to Beijing, Tianjin and other provinces before they finally arrested the three men and confiscated laptops and computers.

Two of the men were managers of a local logistics company who had hired the third man to attack the Website of a rival logistics company.

However that company’s Website was set up in the core computer room of the Weifang branch of China Netcom Group and the hacker’s attack brought the entire city’s network down.

Sounds like a distributed denial of service attack. That the branch office of China Netcom was unable to filter out the attacks (either based on the target or on the traffic) or identify the source IP addresses and contact the relevant ISP(s) is a pretty damning performance. That they host websites at the core of their network rather than a server farm network is even worse.

Oh, and the next time someone goes out and hires a hacker to attack a rival’s website, they might want to make sure the hacker doesn’t bring the whole local network down. The idiots who put the contract out probably lost their access as well - not to mention all their customers’ access.

Gov to Web: Happy News it Up

Posted on September 10, 2008
Filed Under Apparatchiks, China Internet | Leave a Comment

The South China Morning Post reports:

First it was fund houses, then brokerages. Now, the cyber world is the target of a Beijing clampdown amid fears that pessimistic comments and bitter complaints about the mainland’s slumping stock markets may lead to social disunity.

Major financial websites on the mainland have been verbally informed by the propaganda department to sift out negative and sensitive commentaries, reports and headlines about the hard-hit markets, according to three online editors.

The internet censorship is another sign that mainland regulators have lost their grip on the plunging market and are desperate to avoid provoking public ire about the government’s inertia.

The pessimistic comments and bitter complaints don’t lead market sentiment, they reflect it.

Have a nice day and don’t forget to re-arrange the deck chairs on the way down.

Youku User Flagged As Inappropriate

Posted on September 6, 2008
Filed Under China Internet, China Law | Leave a Comment

Pacific Epoch reports:

A 24-year-old Internet user, surnamed Lu, was sentenced to eight months in prison on Tuesday for uploading a pornographic video to Beijing-based online video site Youku.com on March 5, reports Nanfang Daily. The video was broadcast 25,274 times, added to 19 space pages and gained 83 positive and 39 negative votes before it was removed from the web, said the report. The Guangdong Chancheng District People’s Court decided the case. Youku.com received a broadcasting license from the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television on July 3.

Despite allowing naughty bits to be seen 25,000-odd times, Youku seems to have successfully navigated the the online video regulatory minefield. They never were shut down like 56.com or shut themselves down in an introspective moral panic like Tudou.

They wangled their online video license in July, just after picking up US$30 million in their second financing round.

It’s unclear if this means that the authorities will hold the users, rather than the site, responsible for future video seediness. I wonder what this means for the 83 filth-loving, positive voters?

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