The Lair

So, ICANN switched the root servers over to IPv6 a few days ago. This is a big deal, because although IPv6 has been “officially” deployed since 1999, adoption has been extremely slow. The most commonly used existing addressing scheme (IPv4) is estimated to run out in 2-3 years. Then again, analysts have been screaming about peak oil for a while too, so perhaps it’s all hyperbole.

Part of the reason for the slow adoption rate is because everyone (myself included) has the “if it ain’t broke yet, why bother fixing it” mentality. That’s pretty much why GoPHP5 was started, that’s also why a large number of websites still use Apache 1.3 over Apache 2.0 or 2.2. Anyway, I decided that I would figure this mysterious IPv6 thing out and did a bit of digging.

The problem is, even without knowing that I do - I tend to be quite reliant on the existing addressing scheme. How so? Let me count the ways.

One application area that has seen a fair few advances (for IPv4 addresses) is geolocation technology. For example, it’s currently easy to identify the geographic location of an IP address (see zonefiles - I use this as a quick and easy geolocation service). More comprehensive services are also available ie:, ip2location, hostip.info and the daddy, Maxmind’s GeoIP. With the vastly larger address space of IPv6, the geolocation mapping will need to be reconstructed; and even then the sheer size of addresses may allow a descent into anarchy. The IANA (which governs over IP address allocation) will probably be far less inclined to rigourously police the assignment of IPv6 addresses.

Another spiffy application area that will take a hit (at least in the short term) is the DNSBL system (DNS blacklists) - which publish a set of unsavoury IP addresses. I rely on quite a few of those services (project honeypot, botsvsbrowsers and sorbs) to help head off spammers at the pass. With more addresses than you can shake a stick at, denying by IPs is going to get a little bit harder too.

So, I want IPv6 to turn up soon, yet I don’t. The problem is, there isn’t an easy way yet to test out how IPv6 will work. Most of the internet doesn’t actually seem to know how to route things to and from the spiffy new IPv6 adddresses. That’s where places like Sixxs and Hexago come in. They allow IPv6 addresses to be tunnelled via the existing IPv4 infrastructure.

So, I’m off to get myself a IPv6 tunnel set up.

In this story, a scientist (or several thousand) huddle in a dusty laboratory somewhere. After years of hard work (aided and abetted by a manservant with a Slavic name and questionable clothing tastes); the scientist finally makes a breakthrough discovery. “It’s alive, [name of Slavic origin]”; he shrieks in triumph. Only the discovery happens to be something that turns around and does him in.

Frankenstein? Almost. This little discovery is called personalization.

A couple of weeks ago, I read The Polarization of Extremes - arguing that the internet makes it incredibly easy to self sort, or find a website/news outlet which caters to precisely the editorial slant that you prefer. In the old days, this was considered a good thing. Your news, your way. The article, however, paints a very different picture. It is now possible to swan from one site to another without ever seeing a dissenting or alternative point of view. If your push button issue happens to involve the birth of someone two thousand or two thousand five hundred or however many years ago, if you believe that the aliens will take us all away, if you believe that the Bush dynasty is good, bad or something other than ugly - well, there’s apparently a site or two dozen on the internet just for you.

Is this a bad thing? Well, if it stopped there - then maybe it isn’t. However, there is another interesting effect described.

The creation of enclaves of like-minded people had a second effect: It made both liberal groups and conservative groups significantly more homogeneous — and thus squelched diversity. Before people started to talk, many groups displayed a fair amount of internal disagreement on the three issues. The disagreements were greatly reduced as a result of a mere 15-minute discussion. In their anonymous statements, group members showed far more consensus after discussion than before. The discussion greatly widened the rift between liberals and conservatives on all three issues

So, what they’re really saying is that people actually discuss things within their own group and come to a consensus. Not bad, huh? Or, I suppose left unsaid, they leave the group and find somewhere more amenable. But it doesn’t end there either.

A key consequence of this kind of self-sorting is what we might call enclave extremism. When people end up in enclaves of like-minded people, they usually move toward a more extreme point in the direction to which the group’s members were originally inclined. Enclave extremism is a special case of the broader phenomenon of group polarization, which extends well beyond politics and occurs as groups adopt a more extreme version of whatever view is antecedently favored by their members

Does this sound familiar? Having observed a few online communities, it certainly struck a chord with me.

Clearly, despite its fairly recent lack of popularity, holding an extremist position is not all bad - the article cites a few instances where holding an extremist, contrary position was a good thing (ie:, the antislavery movement). Then again, a counter example can be found in the actions of some of the more militant environmental campaigners. Even a good stance can be diluted, dismissed or simply made easier to ignore by the actions of extremists. (Use your own examples here. There are lots).

The problem is, can people who have held an extremist position change? Dunbar’s Number seems to indicate that, the larger the community - the less likely the chances of change.

There are times when three hours of fascinating clicking on Wikipedia links can produce something useful. This is most likely not one of those times.

Update: I found this link which I really really like - it breaks down and quantifies Dunbar’s number into other spheres of activity.

There are lots of things that you’d want computers to simplify for you - but the obvious methods for simplification don’t actually work. For example, finding out if a user entered email is actually valid. The description and code involved (see here and the monstrous chunk of code here) belies the apparent simplicity of the task.

So it was for my own little task. What I wanted to do was write a general purpose method (in PHP, actually - but the language itself is unimportant) to infer the blog address, given a permalink. So, given any post URL - I wanted to find the address of the blog itself. You’d think that this was a relatively straightforward task. But, if the preamble didn’t alert you already, it wasn’t quite as simple as I first envisaged.

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