5th

Entering a nerdy period, I decided to have a look at IPv6… again. I’ve been looking at the possibilites of IPv6 on and off for the last 6 years, but it never really seemed mature for usage. But now, I think it is, thanks to providers like SIXXS and Hurricane Electric, who offers IPv6 tunnels and subnets, and the forums which is getting a lot more info on how to get started using IPv6.

The biggest reason IPv6 is evolving so slow, is a common chicken and egg scenario. Service providers won’t implement IPv6, since customers don’t want it. And customers don’t want it, as long as they can get the IPv4-space they  need. Should they however find a need for IPv6, it might require changing service provider, since very few offer it.

But there are useful advantages with IPv6:

First of all, IPv6 is 128bit compared to 32bit for IPv4. That’s alot larger address-space, so being conservative with your addresses is no longer necessary. No more need for NAT and the problems associated with that.

Second, IPSec is built directly into IPv6 thereby making secure connections trivial. Authenticated and encrypted connections is built straight into the ip-stack. In these days where privacy and security in wireless networks is in it’s prime, this might be a good reason to consider IPv6.

Third, resource allocation. Endpoints can request that a connection gets a certain priority, eg. in voice og realtime video conversations, you would like less than 50 ms. That’s possible with IPv6, and the routers can easily be optimzed for this. Instead of carrying the priority in each packet, a flowlabel is used. This label is negotiated during connection setup, and afterwards routers can just check for a flowlabel, and forward accordingly.

Fourth, IPv6 headers doesn’t use a fixed length, they use extension headers. This has the major advantage, that it’s possible to extend the protocol without to much hassle. Fx. we might see a location-extension header, that includes the location of the source IP, sometime in the future. Implementing such a header would be easy, and wouldn’t require anything except a destination that could handle it.

But it’s not all good. IPv6 has one big disadvantage. It’s unknown, it’s the new black, and everything you know about networking is about to get a little shake.

It’s no longer 127.0.0.1, it’s ::1.. It’s not netmasks, it’s prefixlengths… And it’s no longer 4 decimals you can remember eg: 74.125.77.99), but it’s 8 16bit hex-values (eg: 2a00:1450:8001:0000:0000:0000:0000:0093).

BGP is getting another address-family, DHCP is getting a v6-version, that works a bit differently, OSPF and IS-IS should be pretty much the same, but if I recall correct, there’s some quirks that’s nice to know.

I’m gonna explore IPv6 further, and tell of my findings. Be sure to check out NANOG’s great tutorials on IPv6 for service providers. There’s a lot of good information for end-users too.

Feel like trying yourself? Go ahead and read how I did it.

Sometimes, problems is approached very ‘wrong’. I’ve just read an article about how algorithms are being developed, which can determine a piece of music’s genre, to make music-services better at suggesting which tracks to play to it’s customers.

To me, that’s not the right approach at all.

Example, take AC/DC Highway to Hell and Metallicas, Nothing else matters. Both belong to the rock-genre, but playing them back to back doesn’t work. Highway to Hell is a crowd-pleaser, a floor-filler, a hands-in-the-air-and-clap.. Nothing else matters, is the opposite. Heads down, get a grip of your heart, perhaps a hand in the air with a lighter.

Music is about feelings, and should be categorized as such. Genres can only tell you something about the ‘programming’ of a track, such as instruments, tempo and flow. But nothing about which feelings it provokes in the listener.

I’ve been listening to the best DJ’s in electronic music for many years, and what makes a good mix/session to me, is the emotional states he/she takes me through. Playing a lot of the same, doesn’t do anything for me. Taking me on a musical journey, does.

Looking at the genres within electronic music, also indicates that the genre-approach isn’t the best. With genres such as psychedelic trance, ambient and chillout, emotions and feelings is what it’s about.

Comparing with art, which I know absolutely nothing about, I can’t say anything about the artist or it’s ‘genre’, I can however always say something about how it makes me feel.

So get a grip you mad scientists, drop the techie-techie, algorithmic, mathematical, analyzing approach, and instead find out which feelings people associate with a track, and voila, you’ve started a revolution.

Note: A tip on how to use feelings in iTunes. Use the Grouping-field to put in words, which you think describe the track, examples from my collection is: sunset, lounge, listening and minimal. Then make a Smart Playlist and group by the Grouping words, and you’ll have playlists based on your descriptive words, instead of genres.

6 months ago I cancelled my cable, I had noticed for some time, that I didn’t really watch anything of value, so why not try without it. And that was a very good decision.

Now, I still need to relax and chill, so I looked for some alternatives.

For a long time I had an EyeTV Hybrid, so I cranked it out and set it up on my Mac Mini. Now I was able to check out the few channels that I could get over the air. At least that would cover the news. But I soon replaced my news with an RSS-feed from one of the big danish broadcast-channels, DR. And since then, I’ve been more up to date on the news than ever before, since I choose when I watch the news, instead of arranging my life around specific times.

To get my tv-shows, which mostly consists of what’s available on Hulu and Netflix (which isn’t available outside the US), I found TED, Torrent Episode Downloader. This is the perfect way to catch the shows I want, although I’d prefer to pay for Hulu or Netflix.

Now, that covered the usual broadcast media, but a lot of new content isn’t distributed that way. TedTalk fx., I’m currently checking their RSS-feed, but I consider using Boxee, as my mediabrowser, where I can ‘zap’ around.

So, all set up with content, how about watching it. Well, Boxee comes with an iPhone remote, which is quite awesome. But yesterday I found the perfect application, Air Video. Download a server, install on your media-device, choose your media, and now you can watch everything on you iPhone. And it does live conversion too, so no hassles of any sort.

Am I missing anything? Well, I can still watch a few of the big shows that gets a lot of public attention. I don’t get HD-quality, however, I’ve always been more interested in the content, than the packaging. And I still believe that movies should be seen in the cinemas.

The only thing I don’t get, is the ability to just sit back and see whatever is on. I have to choose, browse and click “Next episode”

The Documentary Movie.. You’ve all seen it, they’re are getting more and more popular. To name a few:

• Super Size Me
• Sicko
• An Inconvenient Truth
• Waiting for Superman
• Countdown to Zero

I have one very big problem with these movies. They’re trying to send a message and clear up the facts, but why do they make a lot of money doing so? Where are the superhealthy fastfood restaurants financed by the revenues from Super Size Me?

I have a very hard time believing these movies, when I know they earn big bucks in the theaters. But the worst part is, that the entire world flips over, and pours their ‘truths’ all over the place. I’m getting sick of it.

It seems the news-cycle is like this, let’s take the nuke-situation as an example:

1. North Korea is accused of developing nukes
2. Iran is accused of developing nukes
3. Obama makes a deal with Russia to trash a third of their combined nukes
4. We have Countdown to Zero, The Nuke Movie

If #4 had been on top and had cost 5$ in the theaters, to cover the costs, then I would see the movie, and also put a lot of trust in it. But when it’s so obvious that it just surfs on the public focus on nukes, it just doesn’t work for me.

Todays standard login-procedure on websites is your email and your password. If you use superstrong different passwords on every site, then you’re pretty safe. For now..

But people tend to use the same passwords again and again, so if you hack an account on one site, then you also have access to a lot of other sites. And it’s quite easy to hack a password these days.

So I was thinking, how this could be done better.

First of all, different passwords on different sites. On Mac’s you already have a password-protected keychain, in which you can put passwords. Using different passwords for each site, is as easy as hammering your fingers on the keyboard, doing a copy/paste to the keychain, or chosing “Save password in keychain” on the website, and you’re all set. An alternative is 1Password, which is a bit more fancy, as it can autofill formulars on websites and stuff.

But that’s just passwords, and what if you don’t have your keychain with you? So, if you instead use different rememberable passwords AND different usernames, you’re essentially going schizofrenic, and appears as different persons on all sites. However, most sites don’t use 2 different names, one for login and one for your nickname, but this could change.

Now, how about adding a third field. Imagine that as part of creating your account, you would enter a security-question. Not for password-recovery, but for logging in. This way you could still use the same username/password on many sites, but use different security-questions on each site. That’s an even bigger boost to security. It would look like this:

Username/email:

Password:

My dogs name:

And that’s still just using non-fancy technology. Anyone remember those RSA SecureID-tags that surfaced years ago? They were the big hit, however, they were only used in high-security facilities. These days smartphones is tumbling down on us, able to run a RSA-keygenerator for us, and thereby giving us the ability to use 2-factor security all over, just as with the SecureID-tags. This way, you could still use the same username and password, as you would need your phone and a pincode generated on it, to access the site.

I’d really like to see some of these suggestions implemented on a large scale on popular sites. Imagine Facebook and Gmail using such authentication, I’m sure that could show the rest of the big sites, how it could be done.

Today on my journey through my daily websites, I noticed an add on Facebook. Perhaps you’ve noticed, you can now ‘like’ adds, and see if any of your friends like a certain add.

Anyway, I noticed an add for almost free digital TV with access to 3500+ channels. I was pretty sure it was a scam driven by affiliations, and after a few google-searches I was 100% sure. But to my surprise, a friend of mine liked this add.

So, what to do? I notified the Facebook-crew, but will they do anything? Shouldn’t a site like Facebook protect it’s users from this sort of scams? Or perhaps it’s so close to legal, since they actually do sell some software, but this software doesn’t deliver on it’s promises. I bet it’s only the public available channels you can see, and not the 3500+ they say in their adds.

Well, don’t buy the software, it’s a scam.

During the last couple of months, the Danish politicians have seen a lot of new questions in their mailboxes. Questions derived from stories in a newspaper or tv-show, which due to popularity has made it all the way to the top of the Danish society.

Some examples..

A few weeks ago a story about a family of 2 parents and 9 kids surfaced. One of the children had been abused for a long time, which is terrible. This story starts a political debate on how tracking of families with social problems should be better.

Last week a story about how 2 danish chocolate-factories using cocoa which was partly produced by childlabour. I’m pretty sure that those companies doesn’t approve of that and can take proper action, but once again, our dear politicians has to mingle with popular press and starts talking about laws to prohibit this from happening.

And to top it all off.. Well, I hardly believe it but… In Denmark we have a talentshow called X-factor, which is pretty much the same as Idols, Britain’s got talent etc. So, one of the favorites is voted off, thoughts of cheating with SMS-votes arise and now.. Socialdemokratiet wants to have a hearing with the other parties ministers and see what can be done about this ‘cheating’ or if SMS-votes should be published.

I think it’s about time our primeminister takes action, and puts a stop to this hugely popularity-driven agenda. I’m pretty sure more important issues is at hand, at least our politicians shouldn’t take action on a single popular case, but instead ask for a detailed report on the problem.

It’s like calling Steve Jobs and ask him to do something about the candy in the vending machines.

There’s news from around the world.. There’s tons of kitchen-shows, learning you how to make all kinds of dishes.. There’s shows showing how to build your own bed, closet and garage.. Shows about teaching your pet how to sit and fetch the newspaper..

But there’s no shows about the Internet or computers, why??

I’d really like to see a weekly show about the Internet and how to use it. Show what Facebook is about and how to add friends. Learn people about Twitter, installing antivirus-software, showing of GoogleApps, how to edit a Word-document, using a spreadsheet for the household-planning and more. There’s lot’s of topics to cover, and I’m pretty sure the Internet isn’t going away

Let’s get some public attention to a show like this, and raise the bar for peoples knowledge on the technology that everybody uses.

I really like AutoStitch on my iPhone, and it does such a nice job. Here’s a few pictures I did last year.

Yesterday I read a story about how the Danish ministry of  culture (danish), was looking at a proposal to put tax on the internet. The tax is supposed to pay the rightful owners of all the pirated movies, music and software, that danes obviously download all the time.

I don’t know who came up with this stupid idea, but someone is really not living in the same world as the rest of us. Or at least the world that I live in

For years now, it should be obvious to everybody, that hitting on the sites that spread torrents, host mp3′s and movies etc, is not changing anything. New sites just pops up or new technologies will be used, that keeps the mill running.

Instead, how about making it easier to obtain the things that people download illegally, in a legal way.

iTunes is a good example. You can get all the music you want, rent or buy tv-shows or movies and buy applications for your iPhone. It’s easy, it’s cheap and it’s legal. Unfortunately, Europe isn’t included in the tv-show/movies buying/rental, so … We download it instead.

A major step forward would be, if EU could get some common rules going, so sites like Hulu, NetFlix and iTunes, could distribute their content legally in Europe. I’m very sure a lot of people would rather pay $20/month for the same content, rather than going through downloading fakes, riscing viruses/malware and cheap screeners.

Anyway, putting a tax on the internet to pay the copyright-owners, that’s plain stupid. It’s like accepting the problem and instead of working on a solution, let’s just pay the people that loses money on the illegal downloads. Stupid stupid stupid, and a total lag of understanding of how the internet and people work.