proudly posted by Rebekah - with a lot of help from Christine!
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| From 2013: Christine Maxwell, UTD staff member and student at the same time, and Rebekah Nix, two-time UTD graduate and current faculty member, had fun adding an IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) sticker from the first 2013 UT Dallas hosted IPv6 Conference, to the Manitou Springs zipline in Colorado this past summer. |
Continuing vTapestry's interests in the development and use of the Internet, we were thrilled that Christine Maxwell was inducted into the IPv6 Hall of Fame at the 2019 Global Network Technology Conference (GNTC) in Nanjing, China. We’re going to break that loaded sentence down for our own sakes, but first, please either take a look at her 2.5-minute ‘acceptance speech’ video and/or read the transcription below to join us in celebrating this global recognition and well-deserved (earned) honor!
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Hello. I am Christine Maxwell.
As one of the first women to be appointed to the Board of the Internet Society
in 1997, I have enjoyed making a contribution to the evolution of the Internet
during the six years that I was on the ISOC Board. I have always stayed keenly
interested in the advancement of the Internet for everyone, since I ran one of
the early Information broker companies in the 1980s and became an Internet
content pioneer when I invented Magellan and co-founded the company that
brought this early search engine onto the Home page of Netscape in the early
1990s.
I immediately recognized the
important advancement that IPv6 meant and continues to mean for improving
security and connectability for all ‘Internauts’ – particularly in relation to
enabling the Internet of Things to become a reality. As CEO today of an
iterative knowledge discovery software company, I appreciate the critical importance
of IPv6 to my own company’s vision and mission. This further motivates me to
continue my efforts to encourage educational institutions and businesses
everywhere, to embrace IPv6.
As I watch the evolution of Cloud Computing and IoT, I see that it is ever more critical for the Public to appreciate what IPv6 is and does. Security in this day and age matters more than ever – IPv6 through its use of OpenStack, when compared to something like AWS right now, is clearly the better choice from my perspective. I am extremely honored to be inducted into the IPv6 Hall of Fame for 2019. I see this honor as providing a key platform from which to specifically help businesses and the general public at large understand and appreciate what a huge impact the application of IPv6 is to a secure Internet and to the Internet of Things and for Cloud Computing in particular. Thank you. |
Along with the other new inductees and initial 2018 Hall of Famers (Dr Vint Cerf, VP and Internet Evangelist at Google and Honorary Chair of the IPv6 Forum since its creation; Dr. Wu Hequan, Academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering and Dr. Jun Murai, Father of the Internet in Japan and Founder of the IPv6 Promotion Council), we celebrate this recognition of her extraordinary contributions to the large-scale deployment of IPv6 around the world.
So, you’re likely still wondering: what the heck is ‘IPv6’?
As explained by Wikipedia, “Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion. IPv6 is intended to replace IPv4... IPv6 provides other technical benefits in addition to a larger addressing space. In particular, it permits hierarchical address allocation methods that facilitate route aggregation across the Internet, and thus limit the expansion of routing tables. The use of multicast addressing is expanded and simplified, and provides additional optimization for the delivery of services. Device mobility, security, and configuration aspects have been considered in the design of the protocol.”
Putting things into perspective, “The explosive growth in mobile devices including mobile phones, notebook computers, and wireless handheld devices has created a need for additional blocks of IP addresses. IPv4 currently supports a maximum of approximately 4.3 billion unique IP addresses. IPv6 supports a theoretical maximum of 2128 addresses (340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 to be exact!)”
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| The difference between IPv4 (orange) and IPv6 (green) - as conceptualized by Rebekah! In case you feel like something's missing here, aspects of 'IPv5' were integrated into IPv6. |
In English that I can understand (somewhat), the bottom line is that we’ve outgrown the original Internet (based on IPv4) and IPv6 gives us a new and improved Internet. See my constructivist interpretation of what that means in a Dec 2014 post called VIP Breakfast Centerpiece Notes! The current Internet addressing system, IPv4, only has room for about 4 billion addresses – not nearly enough for the world's people, let alone the devices that are online today and those that will be in the future: computers, phones, TVs, watches, fridges, cars, and so on. IPv6 is the new version of the Internet Protocol and expands the number of available addresses to a virtually limitless amount – 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses. Transitioning to IPv6 enables the Internet to continue to grow and enables new, innovative services to be developed because more devices can connect to the Internet.
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| Vint Cerf 'evangelizing' for IPv6! |
If you’re really into this, add the IPvFoo extension to your Chrome or Firefox browser to test your IPv6 connectivity! Here's what you might learn from the results:
You appear to have no IPv6 address.
It looks like you have only IPv4 Internet service at this time. Don't feel bad - most people are in this position right now. Most Internet service providers are not quite yet ready to provide IPv6 Internet to residential customers.
Many of the visitors to the site are new to what IPv6 is. If you don't know why IPv6 matters, see the Why IPv6 FAQ. This will give you a bit of background of what to expect with IPv4 in the coming months and years; and perhaps some incentive to ask your ISP when they will offer IPv6.
If you strongly believe you have IPv6, but we were unable to detect it: it means one of a couple of things. Either your organization is blocking the use of IPv6 to talk to the outside Internet through network policy; or perhaps what you see with IPv6 on your host is not a global address. Any address starting with "::", "fc", "fd", or "fe" are unable to work with the public IPv6 Internet.On a positive data tracking note, Google also collects statistics about IPv6 adoption, which is on the rise!
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| This
graph shows the percentage of users that access Google over IPv6. SOURCE: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html |
From a practical point of view, the IPv6 Forum is a world-wide consortium of international Internet service providers (ISPs) and National Research & Education Networks (NRENs) with a mission to promote IPv6 by improving market and user awareness, creating a quality and secure New Generation Internet and allowing world-wide equitable access to knowledge and technology. The key focus of the IPv6 Forum today is to provide technical guidance for the deployment of IPv6. IPv6 Summits are organized by the IPv6 Forum and staged in various locations around the world to provide industry and market with the best available information on this rapidly advancing technology.
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| Christine Maxwell, Vint Cerf, Rebekah Nix |
Now that you know all of that, you can appreciate the significance of Christine’s award and why it actually does matter to you and your world. Her genuinely valuable and on-going contribution to the Internet helps to take it to the next level, so it can continue to flourish in the service of mankind as the one and only true vehicle to empower people and progress our world to a far better and richer place.
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| Latif Ladid (left) seeing the difference. |
As IPv6 Forum President Latif Ladid surmised in the official IPv6 Forum press release: The IPv6 Forum is very blessed and proud to have attracted and won some of the finest and top IPv6 pioneers, experts and genuine volunteers around the world, quoting Vint Cerf, to upgrade the Internet from a “Research” Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) to a “Production” Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) to sustain the growth of the Internet to include everyone and connect any sensible device.
Congratulations – and THANKS –
to both Christine and the IPv6 Forum
for your on-going leadership.