Stories about: IETF

On June 30, US federal government officials expect to declare an early victory on the IPv6 front. But they admit that meeting their much-heralded June 30 deadline for IPv6 compatibility is just the opening salvo of a long-term battle to get their networks ready for the Internet of the future.

Technology we take for granted today was new not so long ago, and somebody had to name it. Though sometimes it's hard to pin down exactly who deserves credit -- or blame -- here's a shot a some of the more familiar ones.

Cisco's approach to unified communications is a network-based, hardware-intensive implementation designed to provide support for more environments - like point-of-sale systems, non-PC workgroups and mobile device platforms - than desktop- or server-based strategies.

Early and extensive deployment of firewalls gave internet users "a false sense of security" and compromised the ideal end-to-end transparency of the internet, says former Internet Engineering Task Force head Brian Carpenter.

Jonathan Zittrain is an internationally known cyberlaw scholar and technologist with a giant resume. He is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford Internet Institute and also teaches at Harvard. Zittrain is co-founder of the Chilling Effects Web site (a watchdog site) and holds patents on wireless and network devices. Zittrain has been making headlines with his latest book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It , in which he argues that closed-systems devices like the iPhone are potentially harmful. In a chat, Zittrain explained how he feels about the iPhone and the dangers posed to the Internet as a whole.

Trusted Computing Group has expanded its interest in NAC to include the way devices behave once they have been admitted to networks, and the group is demonstrating this capability at Interop Las Vegas.

Unified communications offers the potential for anywhere, anytime connectivity between employees and the enterprise. But as the InteropLabs hotstage team found in piecing together more than a dozen commercial and open-source voice, data and messaging platforms, the technology is still at a relatively early stage, and today represents more promise than practice.

Fighting insomnia one night, all Robert Topolski wanted to do was send digital recordings of 19th-century barbershop quartet music to some friends.

While no one predicted a "Mad Max"-style apocalyptic catastrophe, experts at FutureNet this week nonetheless said that Internet architecture will face stiff challenges over the next few years that could put significant strain on the Web's effectiveness.

At this year's RSA Conference, there were fewer sessions and displays devoted to NAC than at previous conferences, but interest in the technology still seemed to run high among 2008 attendees.

Is the iPhone killing the 'Net? That's the question posed by Oxford University Professor Jonathan Zittrain in his new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It .Â