Routers, switches, and cable modems have buffers to temporarily store packets that can't be transmitted right away. As the buffers get bigger, however, latency gets worse. Ars explores the problem, some misconceptions about it, and what needs to be done to mitigate it.
Read the article - posted 2011-01-07
The Internet Engineering Task Force has been around for a quarter century. That translates to 70 Internet standards and 155 best practices—all without a single vote.
Read the article - posted 2011-01-18
Ars looks at how Egypt "turned off" the Internet within its borders and whether that could be accomplished in countries like the US and western Europe. The Internet is surprisingly hard to kill, but if a government is willing to power down routers, turn off DNS, and kill interconnects, it can be done.
Read the article - posted 2011-01-30
This document describes stateful NAT64 translation, which allows IPv6-only clients to contact IPv4 servers using unicast UDP, TCP, or ICMP. One or more public IPv4 addresses assigned to a NAT64 translator are shared among several IPv6-only clients. When stateful NAT64 is used in conjunction with DNS64, no changes are usually required in the IPv6 client or the IPv4 server.
Read the article - posted 2011-04-27
DNS64 is a mechanism for synthesizing AAAA records from A records. DNS64 is used with an IPv6/IPv4 translator to enable client-server communication between an IPv6-only client and an IPv4-only server, without requiring any changes to either the IPv6 or the IPv4 node, for the class of applications that work through NATs. This document specifies DNS64, and provides suggestions on how it should be deployed in conjunction with IPv6/IPv4 translators.
Read the article - posted 2011-04-27
"In 30 years, Ethernet conquered networking and accelerated from 3Mbps to 100Gbps—and Terabit Ethernet might not be far off." My Ars Technica feature about the history (and some future) of Ethernet, reprinted by Wired.
Read the article - posted 2011-07-16
Story about the history (and future) of Ethernet, published by Wired and (first) on Ars Technica.
Permalink - posted 2011-07-16
About the history and the inner workings of IEEE 802.11, written with Jaume Barcelo.
Read the article - posted 2011-10-10
The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) has a very long history, and despite the fact that today other options exist to perform file transfers, FTP is still in common use. As such, in situations where some client computers only have IPv6 connectivity while many servers are still IPv4-only and IPv6-to-IPv4 translators are used to bridge that gap, it is important that FTP is made to work through these translators to the best possible extent.
Read the article - posted 2011-11-05