"At Comcast, we strive to minimize passing expenses on to our customers. However, from time to time it is necessary to increase certain fees in order to keep pace with the costs of running our business," Comcast says on its website here. "In the last several years, we have made significant upgrades to our network, customer equipment and software in order to provide a fast and reliable experience for our Business Class customers."

Comcast is the largest home Internet service provider in the United States. It also offers cable television and telephone service to both residential and commercial customers. In January 2011, the Philadelphia based company acquired a majority stake in media conglomerate NBC Universal. Comcast has significant holding in several cable networks, including E! Entertainment Television, G4, Style Network, and The Golf Channel. The company is active in 39 states and the District of Columbia.

Comcast Online was launched in 1996 to manage operations revolving around broadband Internet service. After acquiring Sarasota Online, the largest Internet service provider in Florida, the company quickly expanded into over 30 cities. Today, Comcast Online has about 17.8 million Internet subscribers. Comcast holds the Consumerist 2010 Worst Company In America award, which led competitor Verizon to publicly congratulate its rival via the Verizon Twitter feed. Comcast acknowledged the “award” immediately and promised to improve its customer service.

"This has the potential to shift the arms race regarding censorship to be in favor of free and open communication," said J. Alex Halderman, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at U-M and one of Telex's developers. "The Internet has the ability to catalyze change by empowering people through information and communication services. Repressive governments have responded by aggressively filtering it. If we can find ways to keep those channels open, we can give more people the ability to take part in free speech and access to information."

Today's typical anticensorship schemes get users around site blocks by routing them through an outside server called a proxy. But the censor can monitor the content of traffic on the whole network, and eventually finds and blocks the proxy, too.

"It creates a kind of cat and mouse game," said Halderman, who was at the blackboard explaining this to his computer and network security class when it hit him that there might be a different approach, a bigger way to think about the problem.

Halderman envisions that user could download Telex software from an intermittently available website or borrow a copy from a friend. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) outside the censoring nation deploy equipment called Telex stations. When a user wants to visit a blacklisted site, he or she would establish a secure connection to an HTTPS website, which could be any password-protected site that isn't blocked. This is a decoy connection. The Telex software marks the connection as a Telex request by inserting a secret-coded tag into the page headers. The tag utilizes a cryptographic technique called "public-key steganography."

"Steganography is hiding the fact that you're sending a message at all," Halderman said. "We're able to hide it in the cryptographic protocol so that you can't even tell that the message is there."

The user's request passes through routers at various ISPs, some of which would be Telex stations. These stations would hold a private key that lets them recognize tagged connections from Telex clients. The stations would divert the connections so that the user could get to any site on the Internet. Under this system, large segments of the Internet would need to be involved through participating ISPs.

"It would likely require support from nations that are friendly to the cause of a free and open Internet," Halderman said. "The problem with any one company doing this, for example, is they become a target. It's a collective action problem. You want to do it on a wide scale that makes connecting to the Internet almost an all or nothing proposition for the repressive state."

The researchers are at the proof-of-concept stage. They've developed software for researchers to experiment with. They've put up one Telex station on a mock ISP in their lab. They've been using it for their daily web browsing for the past four months and have tested it with a client in Beijing who was able to stream YouTube videos even though the site is blocked there.

Turning the whole web into a proxy server could make it virtually impossible for government to block individual sites or services such as YouTube, for example. Today's typical anticensorship schemes are more like a game of chess, allowing users to create a uncensored route through an outside proxy until the censor catches up. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

"The early adopters typically started using cloud solutions in parallel with their existing IT, but in 2010 we have seen more companies starting to migrate existing solutions to the cloud and to create roadmap for future migration," said Mette Ahorlu, Research Director of IDC's European services group. "We don't expect everything to go to the cloud, but the early adopters are likely to move a majority of their IT to cloud within the next five years, and the vast majority will follow suit within a few years. The new IT environments will have elements of traditional IT, private cloud, and public cloud, and management and integration will become a challenge for which European enterprises will typically choose to hire an external service provider, driving further growth in the cloud professional services market."

New outsourcing contracts include cloud services, and as much as 25 percent of cloud professional services will be delivered as part of outsourcing contracts, IDC says. Providers offering related services should be able to manage both the traditional and new environment under one contract while migrating large parts of existing infrastructure to the new environment during the life of the contract.

"There is a huge migration and integration task ahead, which is good news for service providers, who can expect their traditional revenue to start falling because cloud services are so standardized. Even consulting and migration are standardized and therefore cheaper than traditional consulting and integration services,” said Ahorlu. “This is also very good news for the customers - they will get more value for money. Some believe that cloud is just plug and play, but that is not the case for the more complicated existing or new solutions. So professional services will not go away, but they will change and in the longer run beyond 2015 - when migration is complete - account for a much smaller proportion of IT costs.”

Service providers should prepare for the rapidly growing request for cloud professional services and have the resources needed available. “Right now, demand is mainly for business cases and roadmaps, requiring both business competence and architectural competence, but on a limited scale,” said Ahorlu. “But in a just slightly longer time frame, most if not all consultants need to understand cloud. Vendors have substantial investments ahead of them in creating the necessary capabilities to support this rapidly evolving market.”

Over the next four years, European enterprises will rapidly move their existing infrastructure to cloud-based computing. IDC predicts that spending on related consulting and migration services will increase to $8.2 billion by 2015. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

Chances are some things will break but that most internet users won't notice. Some web sites might temporarily disappear because some networks may try, but be unable, to connect to the new-style addresses. The real purpose of the test day is to discover the impact of a large-scale shift to IPv6 on the millions of servers, routers, and switches that make up the internet.

The inertia that has resisted the deployment of IPv6 for years is finally being overcome by a simple reality: The 4 billion or so internet addresses available under the older IPv4 protocol have been exhausted. IPv6 offers an address pool that is, for all practical purposes, bottomless even if every person on earth has billions of devices that need network addresses.

IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long, compared to 32 bits for IPv4. A computer with an IPv4 address of 192.168.1.12 (a typical "private" address on a home network) might get an IPv6 address of 2001:0000:4137:9e76:100c:0bf4:3f57:fef7. That's a base-16, or hexadecimal, number; the letters a-f represents digits for 10 through 15.

But the new protocol offers additional advantages. It has built-in provisions for security, particularly data encryption, that are missing from IPv4. Devices assign themselves addresses automatically when they connect to a network, eliminating the need for a server to keep track of assignments. IPv6 is designed to let devices connect to multiple networks simultaneous, making home networking and mobile communications easier.

The trick remains getting from here to there. Most large enterprises should be largely or completely IPv6-enabled, since all computers and operating systems from the past few years are compatible with the new protocol, as are many commercial routers and other network gear. Homes and smaller businesses are more problematic. The computers are mostly ready, but home networking gear may not be. Residential internet service providers are also far from ready; and success is dependent upon IPv6 being available on their networks, so many home based users and small businesses may have to upgrade and test their equipment.

Until now, the great majority of servers on the internet have been running only IPv4. Test IPv6 servers typically have names like ipv6.server1.test-ipv6.com and are invisible to the IPv4 network. On June 8, participating companies including most of the biggest players in the tech industry will turn on IPv6 addressing on their regular servers, meaning that both addressing schemes will be active simultaneously on the same machines. In theory, devices using IPv4 addresses should reach these servers using the older protocols and the relatively few systems using IPv6 will connect with the new protocol. In practice, some systems will probably try to use IPv6 and will run into a roadblock somewhere along the way. It's those network problems that the test is supposed to detect.

Eventually, some servers and sites on the net will become IPv6 only. Fortunately, there are tools that will allow IPv6-enabled systems to connect with each other by tunneling through IPv4 networks. But that is not likely to become an issue for at least a year or two. In the end, the conversion to the new addressing system is likely to take place out of the sight of most internet users. But the result will be a better and more efficient network for everyone.

Many ISP’s and enterprises will switch their servers to the new Internet Protocol IPv6 on Wednesday, June 8, to discover bottlenecks and other issues that may arise. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

The new platform represents is a workload-optimized solution that integrates hardware, storage, networking, virtualization and service management software to create a private cloud environment, IBM says. At the core of the new cloud offerings is the new Service Delivery Manager which automates the deployment, monitoring and management of cloud computing services for the IT staff.

"Automating IT resources to support new applications is critical because at most companies, a business user typically must wait weeks to get access to new IT resources due to the manual processes required to set up resources," said Lauren States, vice president, Cloud Computing for IBM Software Group. "IBM CloudBurst automates the manual processes to dramatically speed a business's time-to-market."

The new platform is based on IBM Power 750 servers and can support from 160 up to 2,900 virtual machines while delivering greater security to keep the data in those applications separate.  IBM estimates that private clouds built on Power systems can be up to 70 percent less expensive than stand alone x86 servers. Clients can also run the IBM Service Delivery Manager on their current hardware to deploy a cloud computing solution.

"It will be of interest to our joint customers, including hosting providers, for building their enterprise cloud," said Kaj van de Loo, senior vice president, Technology Strategy, SAP.  "It will be of significant value that the end-to-end cloud solution and support will come from a single vendor, thereby lowering risk and time to market for deploying mission-critical applications on an enterprise cloud."

Oracle, Dell, and Hewlett Packard have developed similar platforms (ip-192.com reported on Oracle’s Exalogic Elastic Cloud here and Microsoft’s cloud computing alliances here) to help customers to deploy private clouds.

Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com