Circuit Rider
by Jim Scheef
Version 4.11

General Meeting on RFID

I can't wait to hear what Dr. Paul A. Moskowitz has to say about this topic. Is it a solution in search of a problem or the biggest threat ever to personal privacy? Or a means to save millions through improved productivity? What products does IBM have in this arena? And, of course, one of my favorite topics, how might RFID impact personal security. You can find some interesting pre-meeting reading at:

For a primer on Homeland Security's Real-ID program, check out the article on C/Net at tinyurl.com/23cl2x and tinyurl.com/ab89a. [TinyURL is a service that converts long URLs to something manageable.] 

Supreme Court Sense

Our system of government virtually guarantees that most of us will be dissatisfied at least some of the time. Our "new" Supreme Court has finally made a decision I can agree with wholeheartedly. In their infinite wisdom, the Justices have agreed that patents must be non-obvious. Well, thank God! In the specific case, the court ruled that a patent for a gas pedal with an electronic sensor was invalid because it was an obvious combination of existing technology. How this decision will play in the medical and technology industries will be very interesting. For example is the Amazon "one-click checkout" an obvious combination of prior art? This will be fun, especially if you're a lawyer.

Wi-Fi Cops

Could you go to jail for not securing your Wi-Fi access point? Do you live or work in Westchester County, NY? Well, apparently no actual jail time is involved, but the fines would be significant to my wallet! How about $250 for a second violation and $500 for a third? Sort of like the "war on drugs", the approach here is to go after the "suppliers" rather than the person with the laptop who needs a quick fix of e-mail. California has a "Wi-Fi User Protection Bill". It requires manufacturers of wireless routers to provide security warnings in products sold in that State starting this Fall. I leave it to you to make sense of this nonsense.

IPv6 is coming! IPv6 is coming! 

Now, this is really significant and I cannot believe there has not been more news about this. The Internet community has tried to ignore IPv6 for - well, for - years. The introduction of network address translation (NAT) back in the mid-90's greatly alleviated the impending crunch in network address space. Remember when it was all over the news that we were going to run out of IP addresses? No? Well that's because someone had the brainstorm to take what the hackers called "address spoofing" and give it a nice mainstream name like NAT and then everyone could use "private" network addresses like 192.168.0.0 to multiplex the traffic from several computers onto one public IP address. All of a sudden the crunch was gone. Of course there are other factors (like CIDR), but the crunch was postponed.

What's wrong with what we have - good old IPv4? Actually IPv4 has lots of problems that we all deal with every day. Want to run a secure virtual private network (VPN) between your notebook in the coffee shop to your home or office? Well, often it chokes because both the coffee shop and your home network use NAT. If you had real public IP addresses at both ends, your VPN would be much easier. And there are all sorts of more insidious security issues that make denial of service attacks such a popular sport.

IPv6 deals with many of these problems and, of course, creates some of its own. The biggest advantage to IPv6 is an astronomical increase in address space. The IP addresses we all know and love are 32-bit numbers so there are about 4 billion (4x109) - not enough to give just one to every human on earth. An IPv6 address is a 128-bit number - 4 times as long - with enough room for 3.4×1038 unique addresses. Someone said that was more than enough to address each atom on earth. I'm not sure if that is true, but IPv6 should solve the address crunch for some time.

So why worry about this now? Because our fair government's Office of Management and Budget says you must. OMB has decreed that the Federal government, including all agencies and contractors, will transition to IPv6 by June, 2008. Yikes! That's one year from NOW!

As is so often the case, one solution becomes the next problem. The fact that your home router uses NAT but does not support IPv6 is the biggest impediment to the smooth adoption of IPv6. Obviously you will hear a lot more about this in the next few months!

The Saga of Julie Amero

Julie Amero's sentencing has been postponed for the third time. If her conviction is vacated, as it should be, it will be interesting to see where the prosecution will go next. Ms Amero was a great scapegoat because the state could avoid any technical issues. If they try to prosecute the network administrator, the implications for IT are grave.