No Such Weblog

For no good reason in particular, I started looking into IPv6 this week-end. The quick summary first: It works. It's not really difficult to set up. But it's not easy enough, either.

The first realization was that the Macintoshs on the network here had been hapiily chatting IPv6 among themselves while I wasn't looking; link-local addresses had configured themselves, and multicast DNS had glued things together seamlessly. Kudos to Apple for that.

Now, the first thing to try was of course telling the MacBook to open a 6to4 tunnel. That's supposedly all that's needed to connect a host to the ipv6 Internet, and it's really easy. Except, well, you need a publicly routed IPv4 address, static if you want to get routed ipv6 addresses from one of the tunnel brokers out there. Bummer.

Next thing to look at, the NAT box. It's actually in a reasonably good position to set up these things, but, alas! -- there's a plethora of firmware options out there, some without IPv6 support, some with broken IPv6 support, some with outdated documentation. The firmware that's installed doesn't support IPv6, and I wasn't in a device-bricking mood.

The solution that I went for was two-tiered: First, IPv6-enabling the server that runs this Web site. Second, setting up Debian on a spare machine here and connecting it to that server through OpenVPN.

Every once in a while, I'm at risk of falling for the iPhone -- it's a really nice device after all, and from day one, the user interface had something going for it. The first generation of the device was just too expensive for my taste, and it didn't have either 3G or GPS. It was also a closed platform, but presumably, that was going away at some point, so I guess I was willing to compromise on that point.

The 3G variant pretty much looks like the phone I'd take; the price range (including the one of the subscription that I'd need to change into) works for me, and the feature set (except for the camera's resolution, but hey, it's rare that any cell phone camera leads to great photos, so that's not a big deal at all) is what I'm looking for; the UI looks like they have taken care of many of the subtleties that I heard others complain about (e.g., you can now navigate the address book by initials).

But what really keeps me away from that phone is Apple's attitude of keeping applications off the device for competing with Apple, or for having an interpreter built in, or for whatever other reason they come up with, depending on the phase of the moon.

What we're seeing in action here is an environment that's tightly controlled, and in which innovators indeed need to ask for permission from some company that thinks it's competing with them. So I'll stick to Nokia for now, where I can run applications like Joikuspot to my heart's content. (Now, if Nokia would just finally get its act together and release decent desktop software for any platform other than Windows...)

ICANN has just published an exchange of letters with the US Department of Commerce, around a proposal to deploy DNSSEC in the DNS's root.

• Letter from Paul Twomey to Meredith Baker, 2 September
• Letter from MEredith Baker to Paul Twomey, 9 September