June 6 is World IPv6 Launch day. It comes roughly a year after World IPv6 Day, which ultimately helped raise awareness of IPv6 implementation. Launch day aims to push real IPv6 connectivity to the masses, with quite a few ISPs and online entities flipping the switch for customers.
To find out if your ISP or favorite online service is participating, head on over to the Participants page on the World IPv6 Launch website. For cable Internet subscribers, accessing the IPv6-enabled Internet will probably mean equipment upgrades — namely, a DOCSIS 3 gateway.
The personal identification number. Boy, doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside? My very own number, designed to uniquely identify me as myself to a system. A secure four-digit identifier. No one would ever know.
Other than their rock-solid security, what else about PINs makes me giddy? They are so stunningly great that I will never, ever forget them. Even though I spat out those four numbers years ago when I opened that account, purchased that first cell phone, or signed up for that service, they are all of such value that I will remember them ’til my death.
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If you have a Tomato firmware-capable router and a few spare minutes, you can join World IPv6 Launch Day on June 6th even if your ISP does not yet offer native IPv6. Not too familiar with IPv6? This bit on Wikipedia should at least get you acquainted with the addressing scheme.
You’ll first need to register a Tunnel Broker account, if you haven’t done so already. It is free, and it enables to you to create up to 5 IPv6 tunnels for yourself. The default prefix for a tunnel is /64 (around 18 quintillion addresses), however /48s are available as well (a lot, lot more address space than a /64).
The flooding in Thailand which resulted in hard drive shortages last year has undoubtedly been felt by computer enthusiasts and businesses alike.
In June of 2011, I purchased three one-terabyte hard drives for my home NAS. One of those drives has been producing flakey checksums during my weekly ZFS scrub. So, I curiously perused my purchase history on Newegg to remember how much I had paid for them. The three drives totaled just over $200 — not bad.
Wikipedia and some other web services will be going dark tomorrow in protest of SOPA and PIPA. When that happens, and if you find yourself affected, please take the time to read those bills as well as educated legal interpretations of them. Don’t take the media’s interpretation (in favor or against) for granted. The best thing you can do is make an effort to understand how they may change the Internet, the most powerful platform for the expression of free speech that has ever existed. Please educate yourself.