IPv6

In a move to test the Internet for its readiness for a future with billions more people and devices networked, web companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others joined their forces.

As it has been reported many times the number of Internet addresses used for most traffic is about to exhaust and it is urgent that all web resources adopt IPv6 which has 4 billion times as many addresses.

A new way to hijack Windows machines was found by researchers in the course of some experiments. Experts at InfoSec Institute, an information security services company, tried the MITM, or man-in-the-middle, attacks that exploit features that present in recent versions of Windows to make it easy for computers to connect to networks using the next generation IPv6 protocol.

According to Jack Koziol, a program manager at InfoSec Institute, the attack may also exploit features of Apple's OS X for Macs, however the proof-of-concept has not been tested on that platform.

The Internet is running out of free space required for addresses allocation. The question has been raised for a long time to date but many ISPs seem to be little concerned about the problems that may arise in near future. ARIN and RIPE, which administer IP addresses on either side of the Atlantic, each received two /8 address blocks in November. A fifth block went to their African equivalent. Thus, there are only seven /8 blocks - 2.7 per cent of the total of 256 - unallocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

Facebook reported that it is now offering "experimental, non-production" support for IPv6, the Internet's main communications protocol. During the Google IPv6 Implementors Conference in February Facebook said that it had plans to support native IPv6 user requests "by the midpoint of this year." At that time Facebook's network engineers said it was "easy to make [the] site available on v6."