Standard Mischief

I was driving around last night listening to WTOP news radio station. There was a short segment about a “new computer language” called IPv6, and how it could be used to track “hackers” back, not just to their neighborhoods, not just to a specific house, but to a palmtop in a hacker’s pocket.

I then managed to spend an obscene amount of time on the web trying unsuccessfully to find that quote that says something like “everything you hear on the news is absolutely true, except for the one story that you have first hand knowledge about”.

Since the first rule of blogging is that pointing out the blunders of the Mainstream Media never, ever gets old, I just had to write about it. I’m just disappointed that WTOP doesn’t have transcripts on their website.

I’m sure the reporter spent a good five minutes trying to understand that IPv6 is a protocol that computers use to talk to each other, so it must be a “computer language”. Then he swallowed completely what the pro-IPv6 Washington based talking head guy said about tracing “hackers” back to their vest pockets.

WTOP reporter guy: While it’s true that IPv6 does allow for many more unique IP addresses, so many that it’s practical for every single phone, palmtop, and PDA, (and Microwave, MythTV box, and MAME cabinet), to have it’s very own unique IPv6 address, this will not in any way doom Private networks, nor will it end the use of zombie computers or botnets or proxy servers. It won’t magically end spam by letting us trace it back to it’s source. People in the know will still be able to forge address headers and spoof return addresses. It’s merely the suggested “cure” for IP address exhaustion.

But hey, if it sells more sanitary tees for the Federal Government and it’s contractors’ tubez of int3rwebz, I suppose he figures that is a good thing.