One of the problem of not attending meetings for a while is you start to forget someone name. Okay, at least I have that problem. So many times that someone come forward to say hi and I have to struggle to remember their name, esp. I cant see their name tag.

For those whose name I forgot, I am sorry. I have a good memory for faces but very bad with names. Its nothing personal.

Anyway, I dont really remember much what happened today. I was in a series of meetings, then running around finding people to talk to on a project I am working and poof dinner time. Oh yea, I had dinner. Twice. Once with Prof. Qian, Mao Wei and Wu Guowei and then another hosted by PIKOM chairman.

Between the geek talks, the usual WSIS/ICANN stories (gosh, the Tunsia hotel story was funny :-), one particular incident left a strong impression on me. One of my friend has a Thai wife who also attended the latter dinner. It is obvious she is anti-Singapore anti-Thaksin (at least at this moment). My friend, her husband, said this to me: “To her, Temasek is the like the invader of Thailand”.

To a country who is very proud that they never being conquered in the last century, not even World War II, and the only southeast asia that never colonized by Western power, that say a lot. I guess that’s why there is 200,000 people turn up for a protest right now.

On a lighter side, she also mentioned she holds a PPS card and that they fly in here on SingaporeAir. She wasn’t too happy when I told her SingaporeAir is owned by Temasek :-)

In Jan this year, a frontpage article on WSJ quoted Verizon Chief Executive Ivan Seidenberg “We have to make sure they (Google) don’t sit on our network and chew up our capacity”. Both AT&T and Bellsouth also made similar statements in the same article. A few days ago, Verizon repeat their call to “End Google’s Free Lunch”: “A Verizon Communications Inc. executive yesterday accused Google Inc. of freeloading for gaining access to people’s homes using a network of lines and cables the phone company spent billions of dollars to build.”

Also related, Verizon filed with FCC that they have plans to set aside bandwidth on their fiber optical network, effectively creating a two-tier Internet, one big-fat pipe for Verizon and their partners services and another for the rest. This is one of the consequences many already foresee when FCC removed the many obligations from broadband providers in order to spur the growth of broadband and fiber network in 2003.

Thus, it is no surprise that Network Neutrality, a concept where broadband providers are not to discriminate rivals when they charge tolls or prioritize traffic, is now on the agenda of the US Congress.
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The GENI (Global Environment for Network Investigators) Project recently released their conceptual document. GENI is a 367M USD, 5 year project supported by NSF to build the “next generation Internet”.

The document pointed out several good points about the limitation of the current Internet:

• The Internet is not secure. We hear daily about worms, viruses, and denial of service attacks, and we have reason to worry about massive collapse, due either to natural errors ormalicious attacks. Problems with “phishing” have prevented institutions such as banks fromusing email to communicate with their customers. Trust in the Internet is eroding.

• The current Internet cannot deliver to society the potential of emerging technologies such as wireless communications. Even as all of our computers become connected to the Internet,we see the next wave of computing devices (sensors and controllers) rejecting the Internet in favor of isolated “sensor networks”.

• The Internet does not provide adequate levels of availability. The design should be able to deliver a more available service than the telephone system. In particular, it should meet theneeds of society in times of crisis by giving priority to critical communications.

• The design of the current Internet actually creates barriers to economic investment andenhancement by the private sector. For example, barriers to cooperation among InternetService Providers have limited the creation and delivery of new services. A large number of specific problems with the Internet today have their roots in an economic disincentive,rather than a technical lack.

• The Internet was not designed to make it easy to set up, to identify failures and problems, orto manage. This limitation applies both to large network operators and the consumer athome. Difficulties with installation and debugging of the Internet in the home have turned many users away, limiting the future penetration of the Internet into society.

The Internet is for Porn from the Broadway Show Avenue Q, World of Warcraft edition.

Got this article from Dewayne Hendricks:

At the same time, the Internet’s shortcomings have resulted in plunging security and a decreased ability to accommodate new technologies. “We are at an inflection point, a revolution point,” Clark now argues. And he delivers a strikingly pessimistic assessment of where the Internet will end up without dramatic intervention. “We might just be at the point where the utility of the Internet stalls — and perhaps turns downward.”

Reminded me of what I said in my previous entry altho Clark is much more explicit and direct in claiming “The Internet is Borken”. It is not new…I heard it couple of times from various people, but mostly in whispers along the corridors.

But before you write this off as a yet another crackpot, remember Clark is one of the inventors of the Internet. And I also remember Dave Farber saying something similar during one of our dinner few months ago.

Think about it.

I just come back from the MoU signing ceremony between JGN II and SingAREN, marking a beginning of a new high-speed 155mbps R&D link between Singapore and Japan. Early last year, I paid a courtesy visit to MIC/JGN office in Japan requesting them to open their 20mbps link to the R&D community¹ but I was politely turned down. However, they promised to include the R&D community if they managed to secure funding for the next phase. I am glad this little seed I planted comes to something :-)

Anyway, JGN II is project managed by NICT (which has an annual budget of 560M USD wow!). The original purpose of JGN is to provide dark fibers and L3 (IPv4 and IPv6) services connecting up the Japanese universities. Last year, they expanded their network with a OC192 (10Gbps) to StarLight (US) and a 20mbps to Singapore. Today, they expanded the 20mbps to 155mbps and also another 45mbps to Thailand.

So what are all these high-speed network used for? Well, it is basically up to our blue-sky imagination. But to start, in addition to the ongoing media industry projects, they lined up two more projects:

(1) a e-Learning project between Catholic High School and Primary/Secondary schools in Mitaka City - Students can attend virtual classes that seem as if they are attending in the same classroom.

(2) e-Health project between Singapore National Eye Centre and Asahikawa Medical College Hospital - Basically using 3D HDTV technology to allow eye patients to be examine and even operated remotely.

If you got any more ideas, I would love to hear them!

¹ Credit should also go to Konishi-sensei who has been urging me to talk to MIC.

A month ago, I mentioned about a paper by Tony Hain regarding IPv4 allocation status. The paper was recently published in the Internet Protocol Journal which sparked a debate on Slashdot. Particularly, Tony’s paper suggested that IANA will run out of IP addresses in 5 years or less.

However, there is another paper written by Geoff Hutson which predicts that we have enough IPv4 address until 2022. The differences got most people confused. So who is right?

Actually, both are right, or rather, not too far apart. Remember, Geoff Hutson’s paper looks at the complete exhaustion of IPv4 address by 2022 whereas Tony’s paper looks at exhaustion only at IANA pool. If we examine the IANA allocations, then both of them are (somewhat) consistent with Geoff’s 2013 projection and Tony’s 2010 projection. The explaination for the 3 years difference is actually in the data used for the projection: Geoff uses IANA allocations after 1995 whereas Tony’s uses those after 2000.

But whichever you believe, 2010 or 2013, it is pretty certain IANA will eventually run out of /8 to allocate to RIRs in the next X years. In fact, many are concerned that Tony’s paper will expediate the exhaustion as many ISPs (esp. the larger ones) have not asked for allocation for quite sometime, because they have overprovisioned during the dotcom days. They might not need it for the next one or two yeaers, later but with the alarm ringing that IANA may run out of addresses to allocate, it won’t be surprising that many will start to horde IP address.

Afterall, when IPv4 address becomes harder to get, don’t be surprised to see people ebay’ing their IP address in the future.

Let me introduce my World of Warcraft character. As you can see, I just spend 1000 gold pieces (900 after discount) on an Epic Mount (the mechnical bird) which allows me to travel twice as fast. 1000 gps is really a lot of money which tooks me several months to accumlate so I am pretty proud of my bird. (no pun intended :-)

How much is 1000 gps? Well, according to Game USD, a site that keeps track of online game currency “exchange rate” to USD, based on transaction on ebay and other site like IGE, 1 gp = 0.1 USD. In other words, I actually just spend 100USD on this virtual bird!

The fact there exists a mechanism for me to convert my WoW gold pieces in real cash and vice versa via the likes of IGE (they buy/sell games currency and probably making a decent profit) has far more implications then the 100USD I spend on my bird - like money laundering or currency control. I know a 14 years old kid who has more then 5,000gps…and I am pretty certain he does not have 500 USD in his saving bank account. (Does that makes WoW a bank?)

Or how about thief? Can you report to the police if someone steal your sword? What if the sword is worth 8000gps (some do) which is nearly 800USD? Apparently, someone in China did but the police shoove him off…and he went back and killed his friend who stole his sword (and sold it). Yes, thats a real story that happen a few months ago.
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Ever since Neustar announced they signed a deal with GSMA to oversea global database for the mobile operators last week (see also Washington Post), there are many debates about the deal online.

“Neustar, a company that should certainly know better, has announced that they’re going to create a .gprs TLD to serve the mobile phone industry This, of course, requires creation of a private root zone, against the very strong warnings in RFC 2826″ said Steven Bellovin.

To the more supportive John Levine: “This isn’t quite as stupid as it seems. The GSM industry needs some way to maintain its roaming user database, the database is getting considerably more complicated with 3G features, and it looks to me like they made a reasonable decision to use DNS over IP to implement it rather than inventing yet another proprietary distributed database.”

Even Paul Vixie who has been one of the most vocal opponents of alt. root chipped in, albeit in a slightly positive tone to many people surprise: “oh and one more thing. a small technical matter, insignificant next to the democracy-related points you raised. neustar isn’t doing anything wrong– the “root” they’ll operate will only be seen by GPRS cell towers, not by end-user handsets.”

Let’s start by clarifying what Neustar is doing¹: they are providing a global distributed database for SIP URLs, especially for mobile operators who have implemented IMS (which is essentially modified SIP) using DNS technology. Specifically a variation of ENUM known as Infrastructure ENUM² that differs from (User) ENUM in its policies: the numbers are delegated to carriers & operators and not end-users . The controversial is that they are using a new TLD called .GRPS using their own alt. root server and many people jumped at the word new TLD and “alt. root”.
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On DSL Prime (via Canarie)

In a decision that is changing the future of the internet, Google has told employees to move forward on the assumption that bandwidth and server costs will rapidly approach zero. That’s a revolutionary development, whose importance is being evaluated on Wall Street and in the press in several articles you’ll read next week.

Now, that’s a powerful assumption: Bandwidth + CPU = 0. Go imaging what you can do with that…I could think of a lot (yea! unlimited porn!) but I love to hear what others have to say on this also.