It is the last day of 2006. What better time for predictions…

From the experts:

• The security threats that will bind us in 2007

• If you are more inclined to make (or lose) money next year, here’s “the take” from the Washington Post

Spamroll says:

• Spam will not end in late January (and Bill Gates will remain mum thereafter)

• Some spyware companies will be getting sued again by February, while the rest change their company name
• The government will quit buying consumer data in March, after determining that who is buying TMX Elmo is in no way correlated with who has a tendency to be a terrorist
• Everyone will be backing up their hard drives by April, but only if external hard drives are free
• They’ll be encrypting them by May, because everyone will be running hacked versions of Vista
• We’ll all take the summer off, since phishers already do
• Back-to-school will piss off millions of children, and not much else
• October will be much like September
• Telcos will implement IPv6 for Thanksgiving, and everyone on the internet will know who everyone else is, once and for all (with the exception of MacBook Pro users, which are already being tracked via heatsink)
• We’ll get a ton of self-serving predictions for 2008, a week early at Christmas

Happy New Year!

UPDATE: Sarcasm does work - someone is thinking about backup.

Looks like the transition will happen sometime in 2008, roughly two years ahead of the Microsoft Windows Vista revised release date.

Of course, the transition to IPv6 is already happening over here. Sounds like Google doesn’t want to wait either.

The Blue Security fiasco took down SixApart, but it seems the trouble didn’t end there. Multitudes of related operations went haywire, begging the question - is the internet really that fragile?

Slashdot readers debate the issue. I wonder if embracing IPv6 would solve a lot of these problems.

Hacker’s tools can be used for no good, but a lot of folks use them to test vulnerabilities, so early release can be a very good thing. Meanwhile, IPv6 is hardly popular in the US, despite how easy it is to get going, because service/content/network providers in the States just haven’t embraced it (mostly citing cost issues). But when they do, they’ll have hacking tools to help them out.

In the US, no less. A new firm Command Information, is promising a better internet by pushing the IPv6 standard. I can’t help but say its about time.

Getting up to snuff in this arena will bring the need for new hardware and software, and new human resources to bear. Many will say that the IP address they have now is good enough - “what do I need that for?” And I’ll say that is exactly the kind of thinking that will keep the US on a tech competitiveness losing streak. And for those that don’t believe that’s happening, just ask the software engineer who just lost out on a project to someone overseas. If you want to be at the forefront of technological advancement, you have to have the right tools. And the new IP addressing standard is one of them.

I might also say go do it yourself, but that would be a bit harsh, and more than a bit presumptuous.

I have been following the IPv6 thing for a while now, mostly wondering why it is second nature for non-US ISPs, and why the US just can’t seem to get its act together on it.

So a few days ago I took it upon myself to determine just how far out of reach IPv6 was for the average finance geek turned tech explorer.

What did I find? Cake..nothing but cake.

What follows is a “base map” that any remotely tech savvy person can use to get IPv6 service over a broadband connection. And when I say tech savvy, I mean if you can visit a few websites, follow a few directions, plug in an ethernet cable, and don’t mind blowing $60 on a router, you can be on IPv6 in just a few hours time.

First stop, Hurricane Electric, an IPv6 tunnel broker. Register - it costs you nothing. Give them your connection’s regular IP address, and within a day or two (assuming they can ping your router - make sure you let it accept pings), you are approved. You then set your nameservers as blank, and you get an IPv6 address block.

Next step, get a new router that is IPv6 capable. Here is where the $60 and a few tricks come in. I found that the Linksys WRT54G was hackable as all getup, as long as you had a version lower than v5. I picked one up at CompUSA, and with rebates, set me back $45. Then hit BrainSlayer’s DD-WRT Wiki, where you can find all the information you need to turn that Linksys router into a powerhouse. Follow the directions there closely, particularly if you have a version 4 router like I did (more on that later).

Once you have the new firmware installed, visit Chris Sologuk’s Solosoft.org - Chris provides all the instructions and scripts you need to light up that router’s IPv6 capability. And for those of you unlucky enough to have version 4 of those Linksys routers, don’t fret when you can’t get those scripts to work. Chris was kind enough to email me a proposed workaround that I am including below, with as little editing as possible so the contributor (whoever Jimmy is) gets credit where credit is due:

Hi Chris,

I think I’ve tested this enough, after unplugging the router and
rebooting the router a few times it still retained the settings…
here’s a brief outline of what i did using your guide as the initial
basis… i’d like to have used jffs as well but since space is at a
premium here goes…

(im running the dd-wrt standard image on the wrt54gsv4 device)

1. sign up to HE for a tunnel
2. got your sample radvd.conf and ip.sh scripts…
2a) i modified radvd.conf to suit my subnet…

interface br0
{ AdvSendAdvert on;
MinRtrAdvInterval 3;
MaxRtrAdvInterval 10;
AdvHomeAgentFlag off;
prefix 2001:470:xxxx:xxxx::/64
{ AdvOnLink on;
AdvAutonomous on;
AdvRouterAddr on;
};};

2b) i got the ip.sh file and ripped out all the comments and
variable substitutions…. and was left with this….

/usr/sbin/ip tunnel add sixbone mode sit local xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
remote 64.xxx.xxx.xxx
/usr/sbin/ip link set sixbone up
/usr/sbin/ip link set mtu 1280 dev sixbone
/usr/sbin/ip tunnel change sixbone ttl 64
/usr/sbin/ip -6 addr add 2001:470:xxxx:xxxx::xxxx/127 dev sixbone
/usr/sbin/ip -6 ro add default via 2001:470:xxxx:xxxx::112E dev
sixbone
/usr/sbin/ip -6 addr add 2001:470:1F00:xxxx::/64 dev br0

3. go to the web interface of the linksys router…
3a) go to administration -> management, then enable ipv6 and radvd
3b) paste the above radvd config to the config box in the web
interface

4. go to the webinterface of the linksys router…
4a) go to administration -> services, then enable sshd, enable
password login if not using ssh keys

5. (here’s the neat thing that i found after reading the dd-wrt
wiki…) it involves using the rc_startup variable in the nvram to store
the iproute commands to setup the tunnel itself. this can be done either
via the web interface or the console. I’ll just show you what/where i
went to set this up….
5a) go to the web interface of the linksys router…
administration -> diagnostics
5b) click on the “run” button
5c) a new window will have popped up allowing one to enter in
commands to run on the router, its just a fancy interface to the console.
5d) enter in the above iproute commands and then click on “save
startup”.
5e) to verify or do this from the command line, ssh into the
router, then do

=======sample=======
~ # nvram show | grep rc_start
size: 24279 bytes (8489 left)
rc_startup=/usr/sbin/ip tunnel add sixbone mode sit local
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx remote 64.xxx.xxx.xxx
=======sample=======
(the above seems to be truncated but if you do nvram show |
more and just scroll through the list you’ll see the whole set of commands)

this is how one would set it up from the console, you can
set the radvd config up with one of the nvram variables as well but its
easier to use the web interface

=======sample=======
~ # nvram set rc_startup=”
/usr/sbin/ip tunnel add sixbone mode sit local
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx remote 64.xxx.xxx.xxx
.
.
(press enter on a blank line to end the sequence of commands)
=======sample=======

the rc_startup variable is generally used to call a user defined script
on startup, but since its just a shell variable and you’re just calling
a script you can put a few commands in there… i seem to have only 10kb
of free nvram before doing this, and after wards about 8kb left, thats
why i stripped down the iproute commands as much as possible and used
the inbuilt radvd config stuff (which is probably using up some nvram as
well)

this method does appear to work for me since i couldnt get the samba
stuff working properly as i dont always have a machine on and the method
does require some thinking on the person setting up, but i think most
people who are interested in this will probably know what they are at
anyway….

Jimmy.

Master Jimmy’s instructions worked first try for me. And don’t be intimidated by all the technical stuff - it was easier than it looks at first glance. For me, it was a sum total three hours work, including a trip to the store.

Good luck!

***UPDATE***

Tooling around with IPv6 may be fun to some, education to others (like me). But it isn’t going to make you any safer from web bugs, so keep your firewall and anti-virus on on on.

***UPDATE 2***

On a lighter note, once you finish all this work, you can test your connection at www.kame.net. If you see the “dancing kame” then check the bottom left hand corner of the page. You should see some stats that look like this:

Again, good luck.

Everyone knows the story about Google sucking up all the brainpower in the Bay Area. On the flip side of the coin, folks say you can do anything and work from anywhere in the internet age, so why work for Google? That is true if you have the human resources and infrastructure to beat the next guy to the punch, and two unfolding elements could throw that off.

The first of those phenoms is a pretty obvious and well talked about one - the shifting of human resource allocations to India. It makes sense from an intermediate term cost perspective, and some big hitters are investing heavily in the region right now. But in the long-term, it pushes the desire for tech learning away, leaving the US less competitive as time passes. If you thought your future was headed across the sea, you’d apply to law school too (although that profession may not be far from disappearing either).

The second take is the reluctance to move on to bigger and better infrastructure. IPv6, the next step in internet protocols, is making slow progress in America. Everyone is bitching about the potentially enormous cost, when both the range of estimates (very wide) and its cost relative to GDP (very small) remain out of focus. Meanwhile European and Asian countries are pushing ahead fast. Funny that those same regions are the ones everyone is seeing the jobs moving to.

Google seems to know what is going on. They invest heavily in local resources, and they are already prepping for IPv6. Will they be the only competitive tech company left standing in the US?