The Internet is going to run out of IP addresses in one year. That is what John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, and Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, are saying. The 32-bit IPv4 system currently in use is limited to just over 4 billion unique addresses. With the explosion of mobile devices, internet aware products, and 4G integrated technologies the IPv4 system has a mere 234.37 million addresses left for allocation. The next generation IP address protocol — IPv6 — is a full 128-bits, and has enough allocatable addresses to provide “every person on the planet [with] over 4 billion addresses.” The move to IPv6 has been slow, however larger companies like Google and Facebook have already started implementing the new protocol. Some companies are claiming this impending IPcalypse is merely the next Y2K type scare, and 10 years from now we will still be using IPv4. What do you think? Hit the jump to watch Google’s Vint Cerf — a man who, to us, looks like The Architect from The Matrix — explain why he is concerned.

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The NYT reports that Nokia plans to sell its wireless modem business to Japanese company Renesas for $200 million. The NYT cites falling prices (the average cost of a modem is down to 30€ from 120€) and competition from Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE. In an official statement, Nokia wrote:

“The planned transfer of Nokia’s wireless modem business enables Renesas Electronics to maximize the value of Nokia’s technology assets and engineering expertise in delivering advanced mobile platform solutions to the market by combining them with Renesas Electronics’ market-proven multimedia processing and RF technologies.”

Most European wireless ISPs give away mobile wireless modems to their customers, making the margins in the wireless modem business extremely small. Nokia did emphasize that it would stay committed and focused on wireless LTE and HSPA+ technologies, which account for “17% of all broadband connection in Europe,” after the sale.

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Cisco’s annual networking conference, Cisco Live!, is in full swing and the networking giant is unveiling the initial details on several upcoming video-oriented products. For consumer video camera buffs, Cisco is working on a Wi-Fi-enabled version of its popular Flip Video camera. Details are sparse but senior vice president of emerging technologies, Marthin De Beer, did hint that the portable camera may launch in time for the holidays. Cisco is also developing an enterprise-level video transcoding service, called the Media Experience Engine, that would allow companies to internally distribute video to a variety of platforms on the fly. Last but not least, Cisco is planning to release an iOS 4 video client for the Apple iPhone and is exploring opportunities to integrate its technologies into Apple’s FaceTime video conferencing tool.

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The Wi-Fi Alliance and the Wireless Gigabit Alliance have been working diligently on the next generation of high-speed, consumer Wi-Fi…and its name is WiGig. WiGig, which will run on the 60 GHz  (yes, Gigahertz) spectrum, can reportedly reach speeds of up to 7 gigabits per second. In all likelihood the 60 GHz band will be used for short-range, extremely fast transfers within a local network, while the more familiar 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz channels (802.11 g/n) will be used for backwards compatibility, improved Wi-Fi range, and connection stability.  “We have practically all of the Wi-Fi chip manufacturers on board,” boasted WiGig Alliance President and Chairman Ali Sadri. The Alliances hope to see the new hardware in routers and computers within the next one to two years.

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Look, we’re pretty sure most of you out there have tried this a couple times or are at least familiar with the concept — you use a VoIP service which routes your call through a server that’s usually using Asterisk — you can have any number show up on the outgoing caller ID. Unfortunately for you malicious and deceiving individuals out there, Congress has just passed the Truth in Caller ID Act of 2010, and it makes it 100% illegal to use a service like this. Here’s the breakdown:

To cause any caller ID service to transmit misleading or inaccurate caller ID information, with the intent to defraud and deceive.

There are exceptions for blocking your own caller ID and for law enforcement usage. In the past, as we’ve understood, this was a grey area, but it was still considered against the law to spoof someone else’s number. Though, we had heard that if you spoofed your own number, it wasn’t illegal (say you’re at the beach drinking a Mojito and need to call a client, you can spoof your office phone number from your cell phone), so we’ll have to see how this pans out. Sorry, SpoofCard.

[Via Ars Technica]

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Some good news for ardent supports of WiMAX today, as big names like Intel, Motorola and Samsung gathered to announce their support for and the expansion of the protocol with the formation of the WiMAX 2 Collaboration Initiative (WCI). Based on the IEEE 802.16m standard, WiMAX 2 is fully backwards compatible with its predecessor and is capable of delivering theoretical speeds of up to 300Mbps all the while offering better support for VoIP services and lower latency. It’s a bit strange that Clearwire and Sprint are not members of the WCI, but then again it was only a few weeks at when Sprint CEO Dan Hesse admitted he is keeping an open mind about moving the Now Network over to WiMAX’s 4G rival LTE.

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The net neutrality movement received a huge blow today when the US Court of Appeals sided with Comcast in its claim that the Federal Communications Commission lacks legal authority to demand ISPs shape internet traffic. Over the past few years, the FCC has grown increasingly concerned that ISPs would throttle connection speeds for things such as peer-to-peer file sharing and streaming media in order to dedicate more bandwidth to services it can better capitalize on. Comcast first challenged the FCC on net neutrality in 2008 when the FCC reprimanded Comcast for throttling the connections of clients who used a large amount of bandwidth through P2P networking.

As a rule of thumb, we at BGR are not in favor of government agencies (whether independent or not) imposing rules upon industries, although in this instance we’re actually finding ourselves disappointed if only for the fact we believe net neutrality must become a reality.

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Just because we might associate the company with loveable characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck doesn’t mean the characters who are running the show at Warner Bros. Entertain UK have similar personalities. After all, they’re the ones that came up with the brilliant idea of hiring a student intern, paying him or her £17,500 ($26,212 USD) over the course of a year and having them engage in a bit of digital espionage. The intern, who is to be “IT literate” and currently enrolled as a student pursuing a degree in computer science, will be charged with infiltrating torrent sites and creating bots which sniff out media which Warner Bros. and NBC Universal hold the copyrights to. Here’s a snippet from the job description:

During the 12 month internship, duties will include: monitoring local Internet forums and IRC for pirated WB and NBCU content and in order to gather information on pirate sites, pirate groups and other pirate activities; finding new and maintaining existing accounts on private sites; scanning for links to hosted pirated WB and NBCU content and using tools to issue takedown requests; maintaining and developing bots for Internet link scanning system (training provided); preparing sending of infringement notices and logging feedback; performing trap purchases of pirated product and logging results; inputting pirate hard goods data and other intelligence into the forensics database; selecting local keywords and submitting local filenames for monitoring and countermeasure campaigns and periodically producing research documents on piracy related technological developments. Various training will be provided.

Yikes.

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A circulating rumor suggests that Cisco is developing a new technology to give the Internet a major speed boost. Details on this rumored technology are sparse but Cisco claims it will “forever change the Internet” and will “show what’s possible when networking gets an adrenaline boost.” The new technology will target telecommunication service providers and will be marketed as a means of improving the customer’s high speed Internet experience which we hope translates into 100Mbps speeds with no throttling and no bandwidth caps. Cisco’s new technology will be revealed on March 9th, slightly ahead of the March 17th unveiling of the National Broadband Initiative plan, a plan which not so coincidentally will push for minimum Internet data transmission speeds of 100Mbps and will require telcos to pipe this high speed service to 100 million homes in the US within ten years.

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With little fanfare, Comcast launched a new online file backup service called Secure Backup & Share for its broadband internet customers. The new service utilizes Mozy, an online backup solution that is currently managed by Decho Corporation, a subsidiary of EMC. Using a tool installed on your PC and soon Mac, the service will backup selected files to a secure online location that can be accessed from any web browser, including your web-enabled mobile phone. Three tiers of storage are available including the Standard 2GB plan which is free, the Preferred 50GB plan which is $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly, and the Premier 200GB plan which is $9.99 monthly or $99.99 yearly. Apparently Comcast forgot about its bandwidth cap and “network management techniques” when offering these plans as the 200GB plan comes dangerously close to the 250GB monthly cap and the uploading process will definitely cause you to max out your connection for more than 15 minutes which may result in your connecting being throttled. Comcast does not state whether the cap or throttling is waived for those accounts that purchase a storage plan, so we must assume that both are still in effect, a situation that certainly diminishes the attractiveness of these plans. It also begs the question, if Comcast’s network is so strained that it has to enforce a cap and utilize “network management techniques”, why are they offering a bandwidth-intensive online storage solution?

[Via CNET]

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Back in 2007 and 2008, internet service provider Comcast was accused of throttling packet data traveling over its network; more specifically, packet data that was deemed to be P2P traffic, a la BitTorrent.  The story goes: Comcast denies the whole thing, the Associated Press, smelling blood, launches an investigation, and customers’ suspicions are confirmed. After the AP published its report — stating Comcast was indeed throttling, or in some instances outright blocking, data flowing over ports commonly used by P2P sites and programs –  Comcast suddenly remembered that it was, perhaps, doing a little “network management.” Class action lawsuits suits ensued (pun intended). Today it looks like Comcast has settled one of the suits, filed out of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, for a cool $16 million. The ISP maintains the settlement is to “avoid a potentially lengthy and distracting legal dispute that would serve no useful purpose”…right. Now, those who enter into the class action settlement aren’t going to be on easy street as they are guaranteed no more than $16 for their troubles, but can you really put a price on damning the man?

[Via Ars Technica]

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Debate global warming all you want, but no one can argue that CO2 is an extremely toxic pollutant which is very bad for our health. When we think of how CO2 gets into our atmosphere we tend to think of millions of cars whipping down highways or of factories whose smoke stacks spew black, acrid smoke while producing consumer goods. But have you ever thought of Google? Harvard University Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross has calculated that a simple Google search emits 7g of CO2, about half of what is given off when boiling a pot of tea. While 7g of CO2 isn’t an awful lot in the grand scheme of things, considering that Google handles over 200-million searches per day you can forgive us for double checking our calculators when we calculated this out to be 1,400,000kg of CO2 per day or well over 511,000,000kg in a year. Google denies the aforementioned figures and said on its official blog that the actual CO2 emissions per search are more like 0.2g, but that stat is difficult to accept considering how many servers are involved with a single search (you know, that and the fact that Wissner-Gross has a Bachelors in Physics, Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from MIT along with a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard). Numbers aside, emissions aren’t a good thing and Google obviously recognizes this having co-founded Climate Savers Computing, a group comprised of the who’s-who of the tech world with the goal of halving its CO2 emissions by 2010; a noble effort indeed.

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Seesmic, the quasi-popular video micro-blogging site, just announced the release of their app for the Nokia N95. The app will allow you to record videos with your phone and upload them so you can have video conversations with all your buddies – well, all your buddies who happen to own N95s or are registered on Seesmic, which aren’t that many. According to Wikipedia, there are only 20,000 users to date and about 70,000 viewers per month. But who knows? Maybe this app will become huge and you’d want to get in on it early, or perhaps it might be no different than YouTube except the video conversations are threaded and aren’t in real-time. There is a neat Twitter feature that allows you to notify all your Twitter-stalkers about the new videos you’ve recently uploaded. Why it’s only available for the N95, we don’t know, but if you’d like to give it a shot and let us know what it’s like, you can downloaded via your mobile browser at http://m.seesmic.com.

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It has been a few weeks since Hulu became available to the general public and so far the internet video service has been met with open arms. Often times when a service leaves private beta and sees a huge amount of popularity, development can become stagnant for a while. Hulu however, appears to be the real deal. Sharing, social networking and life-blogging is all the rage with the kids these days and the Hulu folk are embracing it. Sharing via email and video embedding are nothing new with the online video provider, but just this morning Hulu has announced some new enhanced functionality that makes it very simple for users to share Hulu videos with a variety of popular social sites. A new Share button to the left of Hulu’s video player UI will pop up a sharing screen. Users can then select all or part of a video and instantly share it with popular sites like Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon and a few others. Pretty cool if you’re into that sort of thing. Many Hulu videos are time sensitive though; in other words they are only up on the site for a predetermined amount of time before being pulled. We wonder what will happen to the shares once a video is dropped – replaced by an ad block? Hulu has also jazzed up its RSS feeds a bit by allowing video embedding. This way, users can watch Hulu clips right from within their feed reader of choice. Bravo Hulu, keep it coming.

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