Late last year, I had my AT&T Uverse residential gateway replaced. For reasons that truly baffle me, AT&T has decided that they are going to run unsupported equipment on their residential customer network. When the replacement was swapped in, my family noticed that video conference calls—Zoom and …

I saw it happen.

The contractor in the neighbor's back yard with the Ditch Witch trencher burying a cable. I was working outside at the patio table and just about to go into a Zoom meeting. Then the internet dropped out. Suddenly, and with a wrenching feeling …

This week's list of threads starts with a pointer a statement by the International Coalition of Library Consortia on the growing pressure between publishers and libraries over the appropriate rights and permissions for scholarly material. In that same vein, Joe Lucia writes about his vision for libraries and the cultural …

Wandering into public or semi-public wireless networks makes me nervous because I know how my network traffic can be easily watched, and because I'm a geek with control issues I'm even more nervous when using devices that I can't get to the insides of (like phones and tablets). One way …

Last week in DLTJ Thursday Threads I posted an entry about running out of IP addresses. Since I posted that, I've run across a couple of other stories and websites that bring a little more context to the consequences of last week's distribution of the last blocks of IP addresses …

This week of DLTJ Thursday Threads covers a wide range of topics. First, from a public policy perspective, is news that the U.S. Senate has a bill proposing the study of an internet "kill-switch" that some are speculating could behave like what happened in Egypt last week. Next, from …

Back in the early days of this blog, I had a post on Buzzwords Galore and Bandwidth that May Rival Your Station Wagon. The topic was a "hybrid optical and packet network" being deployed by Internet2 in 2006, and in the tail end of the post text I explained the …

My place of work has installed a VPN that moderates our access to the server network using the OpenVPN protocol. This is a good thing, but in its default configuration it would send all traffic -- even that not destined for the machine room network -- through the VPN. Since most of …

The famous 1993 cartoon from The New Yorker has the caption “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The question at the moment is: when you're on the internet, how do you know you are …

Via a weekly wrap-up post by Dion Almaer on the Google Code Blog comes mention of a Google Tech Talk video from their IPv6 Conference 2008. It is a panel discussion called "What will the IPv6 Internet look like?" and it offers insight into the difficulties of transitioning to the …

Dear future self,

If you are reading this, you are remembering a time when you ran into a really nasty interception proxy ((Version of the "Proxy Server" Wikipedia page when this posting was written)) and you are looking for a way around it. Do you remember when you were sitting …

A while back we created an LDAP directory to consolidate account information for various back-room services, and when we created it we decided to use the individual's e-mail address as the account identifier (uid in LDAP-speak). It seemed like the logical thing to do -- it is something that the user …

An e-mail from Leslie Daigle, chair of the Internet Architecture Board, crossed my inbox tonight through the IETF-announce list (excerpted below) that brought back memories of the mid-90s and the Internet growth explosion that spurred the deployment of NAT (Network Address Translation) devices, the shift in large scale Internet routing …