Computer tech

Comcast and Time Warner Cable, two major Internet service providers, will participate in the World IPv6 Day testing June 8 to help test readiness for the next-generation Internet Protocol.

Because the two companies are crucial gateways to the Internet for millions of people, their test will be an important--both for trying their own technology and for supplying some IPv6 users who can help other's setup. The companies announced the test today.

Internet Protocol version 6 supplies a vastly larger address space for attaching computers to the Internet than IPv4, which was established with a paltry 4.3 billion addresses … Read more

What do you get if you pile up all those USB thumb drives, CDs, chip-enabled credit cards, moldering videocassettes, library books, and Babylonian clay tablets?

About 295 exabytes of storage capacity, that's what. So conclude Martin Hilbert and Priscilla Lopez, researchers at the University of Southern California, who today published in the journal Science their estimate of just how much information humans can store at present.

That number is, of course, big. An exabyte is 1,000 petabytes, and a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, and a terabyte is about what you'd get in a desktop PC hard … Read more

An interface coming with the forthcoming Honeycomb version of Android will open up a new ability for programmers who want to tap into hardware power unlocked by low-level programming.

The new interface, is called Renderscript, said R. Jason Sams, an Android performance and graphics programmer at Google. He didn't say so in so many words, but the goal for the feature has to be better games on Android. It's a broader feature, though: it's used in Honeycomb's YouTube and Books apps.

"The target audience is the set of developers looking to maximize the performance of … Read more

For years, companies in the oil and energy industry have been the victims of attempts to steal e-mail and other sensitive information from hackers believed to be in China, according to a new report from McAfee.

The attacks, to which McAfee gave the sinister name "Night Dragon," penetrated company networks through Web servers, compromised desktop computers, bypassed safeguards by misusing administrative credentials, and used remote administration tools to obtain the information, the security firm said late yesterday. McAfee and other security companies now have identified the method and can provide a defense.

"Well-coordinated, targeted attacks such as … Read more

Nigel Tufnel's amp goes up to 11, but Drobo's newest storage system outdoes the Spinal Tap guitarist with a new 12-drive model.

The new Drobo Elite B1200i, geared for small businesses, is a central storage system that connects to people's computers via the iSCSI technology for building a storage area network. It's matched by a similar 8-bay iSCSI model, the B800i, and a related network-attached file storage model, the B800fs.

The models are a new high-water mark for Drobo, a company that got its start with much smaller desktop storage systems that attached to personal computers … Read more

Microsoft's search engine will be one of the major Web sites available in a synchronized effort to iron out problems moving to a vastly more spacious Internet based on the coming IPv6 standard.

"On June 8, we will enable worldwide IPv6 connectivity to Bing.com, for the purposes of a one-day test," Bing program manager Kevin Boske said. "Consumers with IPv6 Internet capabilities will automatically access this new method of connectivity. This necessitates both a device that supports IPv6 (like a Windows 7 PC), and support from your Internet provider."

IPv6, or Internet Protocol version … Read more

The Internet's overseers bid adieu to the last 83.9 million addresses needed to connect devices to today's Net--then took advantage of the moment to evangelize the next-generation Internet and the dangers of life support for today's Net.

Today's Internet is wired up with a technology called Internet Protocol version 4, or IPv4, which comes with 4.3 billion addresses to send data from one computer to another. That's a lot, but it's not enough, so now the move to the vastly more accommodating IPv6 is beginning in earnest.

"This is one most … Read more

Today is the beginning of the end of the Internet as we know it.

That's because the rules that govern how data is sent across the Net, a standard called Internet Protocol version 4, just became significantly more obsolete. The central Net authorities just handed out the last batches of IPv4 addresses at a ceremony today in Florida, beginning the cascade of scarcity that eventually will mean the computing industry must make the painful transition to the newer but incompatible IPv6.

It's not an urgent problem for average consumers with broadband or even for many businesses with lots … Read more

Mozy, the online backup service provider and EMC subsidiary, plans to announce today that it's dumping its subscription permitting customers to store unlimited data.

The reason is not hard to guess: with ever-growing quantities of photos and videos, the unlimited plan is financially unsustainable, the company said. In other words, it's my fault.

You see, I'm a Mozy customer. I spent $82 for a two-year subscription and started inflicting my hundreds of gigabytes of photos and increasingly videos as well. I'm a photo nerd, so each 21-megapixel photo in raw format sucks up something like 20MB … Read more