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IPv6 Roundup: Address Syntax on Windows

2008 Jan 9, 11:34

IPv6 address syntax consists of 8 groupings of colon delimited 16-bit hex values making up the 128-bit address. An optional double colon can replace any consecutive sequence of 0 valued hex values. For example the following is a valid IPv6 address: fe80::2c02:db79

Some IPv6 addresses aren't global and in those cases need a scope ID to describe their context. These get a '%' followed by the scope ID. For example the previous example with a scope ID of '8' would be: fe80::2c02:db79%8

IPv6 addresses in URIs may appear in the host section of a URI as long as they're enclosed by square brackets. For example: http://[fe80::2c02:db79]/. The RFC explicitly notes that there isn't a way to add a scope ID to the IPv6 address in a URI. However a draft document describes adding scope IDs to IPv6 addresses in URIs. The draft document uses the IPvFuture production from the URI RFC with a 'v1' to add a new hostname syntax and a '+' instead of a '%' for delimiting the scope id. For example: http://[v1.fe80::2c02:db79+8]/. However, this is still a draft document, not a final standard, and I don't know of any system that works this way.

In Windows XPSP2 the IPv6 stack is available but disabled by default. To enable the IPv6 stack, at a command prompt run 'netsh interface ipv6 install'. In Vista IPv6 is the on by default and cannot be turned off, while the IPv4 stack is optional and may be turned off by a command similar to the previous.

Once you have IPv6 on in your OS you can turn on IPv6 for IIS6 or just use IIS7. The address ::1 refers to the local machine.

In some places in Windows like UNC paths, IPv6 addresses aren't allowed. In those cases you can use a Vista DNS IPv6 hack that lives in the OS name resolution stack that transforms particularly crafted names into IPv6 addresses. Take your IPv6 address, replace the ':'s with '-'s and the '%' with an 's' and then append '.ipv6-literal.net' to the end. For example: fe80--2c02-db79s8.ipv6-literal.net. That name will resolve to the same example I've been using in Vista. This transformation occurs inside the system's local name resolution stack so no DNS servers are involved, although Microsoft does own the ipv6-literal.net domain name.

MSDN describes IPv6 addresses in URIs in Windows and I've described IPv6 addresses in URIs in IE7. File URIs in IE7 don't support IPv6 addresses. If you want to put a scope ID in a URI in IE7 you use a '%25' to delimit the scope ID and due to a bug you must have at least two digits in your scope ID. So, to take the previous example: http://[fe80::2c02:db79%2508]/. Note that its 08 rather than just 8.

PermalinkCommentsroundup ip windows ipv6 technical microsoft boring syntax

Worse Than Failure - Character encoding WTF

2007 Oct 19, 4:10FTA: 'This letter was sent to a Russian student by her French friend, who manually wrote the address that he received by e-mail. His e-mail client, unfortunately, was not set up correctly to display Cyrillic characters, so they were substituted with diacrPermalinkCommentsencoding charset unicode language humor article

Wikipedia Tools

2007 Sep 12, 6:54I'm visiting Wikipedia more and more recently but I always find myself reading the referenced webpages to get the full context of quotes and for more info. Basically I use Wikipedia as an introduction and a place to look for links. For times when I'm looking for opinions rather than facts I like to use Everything2. No need to check references there.

There's the much hyped WikiScanner tool which reports who has been making anonymous (thought to be anonymous at the time anyway) edits to Wikipedia. Its humorous and interesting in a few cases, but in general I think its stretching to say that because an IP address range is owned by a corporation and someone edited Wikipedia on an IP in that range that you can attribute that edit to that corporation. If I edited Wikipedia I'd probably do a bit of that during my lunch break, but that wouldn't mean that Microsoft wants the Wikipedia pages for Weird Al, Dave Risney, URIs, or whatever else I would edit on Wikipedia changed.

Also, via Everything Is Miscellaneous I found the tool Wiki Dashboard. Wiki Dashboard proxies Wikipedia and on each page shows a timeline view at the top with who made edits and when. Its nice to see a gentle curve down from an initial spike at the beginning for topics you don't imagine to be controversial. As the canonical test page for this service I looked up 'Elephant' the Wikipedia page Stephen Colbert suggested folks vandalize on his show on 2006 July 31st. If you look at the Wiki Dashboard Elephant page you can see a very large spike in edits on that date. That's all I need to see.

As a side note, for the link on Stephen Colbert suggesting folks vandalize Wikipedia I linked to a Wikipedia article. Is it inappropriate to provide info about Wikipedia being vandalized and thus incorrect via a link to a Wikipedia article?PermalinkCommentswikidashboard stephen-colbert wikality wikipedia wikiscanner colbert-report

Wiimote wiissues

2007 Jun 7, 5:29The other day I had the best idea for my Wii remote. Clearly I should use it to control the rotation of Tetris pieces in my N-dimensional Tetris game Polytope Tetris. One of the issues I described with Polytope Tetris is user input. Given a Wii remote the user could rotate a piece through 3 dimensions in a manner that's much easier to adjust to than particular keys on the keyboard.

Anyway, I did a little research into how this might work. I knew that the Wii remote used infrared for absolute positioning and Bluetooth for everything else (LEDs, speaker, accels.) I bought a Bluetooth adapter for my PC after realizing that none of my computers had one already. I used GlovePIE to ensure that my Wii remote could connect and successfully communicate with my computer. GlovePIE is actually pretty cool -- it provides a simple script layer over the Wii remote to control things like your mouse.

Since Polytope Tetris is in Java I looked for and found a Java library for operating with the Wii remote and a long forum thread discussing its use. I then read up on Bluetooth in Java. Apparently JSR 82 is the name of the standard that describes the API a Bluetooth stack should expose in Java. That is, to get Bluetooth working in Java one needs an additional package for Java that actually implements the Bluetooth Java API. This package would depend on the system so I suppose I can't fault Sun for not including it... Where to find such a package? I found a comparison list of implementations and tried the ones that support javax.bluetooth. None of them worked for me because none can address USB devices it seems or they cost money and I couldn't get the trial version working. I also tried bluesock (not listed on the previous list) which seemed promising and could produce an address for my Wii remote as a connected device but couldn't use that address.

And I thought that after I found the Wii remote Java library it would be easy... Oh well...PermalinkCommentsjava bluetooth wii technical remote jsr82 tetris polytopetetris wiimote

The Internet of Things: What is a Spime and why is it useful? - Google Video

2007 May 13, 5:11An presentation on 'spimes' objects that are Internet addressable and produce information about themselves and their surroundingsPermalinkCommentsspime google video presentation cyberpunk uri information web technology future

Opera Speed Dial Code-less Hack for IE7

2007 Apr 17, 11:45Opera (the fifth most popular web browser) has a new feature named Speed Dial (video of it in action). Whenever you open a new tab you get your Speed Dial view which consists of nine thumbnails of user-settable pages. Its like a quick-favorites that appears every time you open a new tab. I think this is a neat idea and was considering how I might do that in IE7. The following is my hack-y and ugly but no coding required version of Speed Dial for IE7. I like my hack and I'm about to expound upon it in unnecessary detail so skip to the last paragraph if you're afraid of losing interest.

By default in IE7, whenever you open a new tab you navigate to 'about:Tabs'. As noted in wikipedia the result of navigation to 'about:Tabs' is determined by values in the registry. Specifically, values in the key in "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs". Usually this fact is exploited by malicious software to hijack "about:blank" and show you ads but we can hijack it too in order to display our Speed Dial-ish page.

Of course since this is a code-less hack we've got limited options on what to change 'about:Tabs' to display. It should have the following requirements.
  1. Something local so that our 'about:Tabs' doesn't disappear when we go offline and so that its relatively fast.
  2. The user should be able to modify its content.
  3. Show links that the user uses.
  4. Show thumbnails of those links
  5. Provide easy to use drag and drop interaction and generally look cool.
Now, I use del.icio.us which allows me to store all of my favorites online and which provides RSS feeds that list my saved links. New in IE7 is an RSS platform that will, among other things, cache RSS feeds locally. So, by pointing about:Tabs to my del.icio.us feed 'http://del.icio.us/rss/sequelguy/quickreference' I get (1) from IE7's RSS support, and (2) and (3) from del.icio.us. Of course requirements (4) and (5) are missing but hey, I said this was ugly.

In summary, if you change the registry value "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs!Tabs" to point to an RSS feed of your favorites you can get a hack-y version of Opera's Speed Dial. I should note that although its referenced on pages such as wikipedia changing your 'about:Tabs' URI in the manner I describe is not documented and not supported by Microsoft. There could be all kinds of horrible repercussions from this change of which I'm not aware. Yeah, actually you know what? Forget I said any of this. Pretend I never wrote it...PermalinkCommentsbrowser technical hack

IP Address Pictograph - Leave your mark

2007 Feb 8, 3:34Creates image from IP address to make it easier to associate anonymous comments with the authors.PermalinkCommentsarticle news blog ip privacy identity images

RFC 2462 (rfc2462) - IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration

2005 Nov 30, 3:46PermalinkCommentsipv6 rfc reference internet ip

RFC 4007 (rfc4007) - IPv6 Scoped Address Architecture

2005 Jul 3, 1:45PermalinkCommentsrfc ip ipv6 reference specification internet

RFC 4291 (rfc4291) - IP Version 6 Addressing Architecture

2005 Apr 29, 11:55PermalinkCommentsrfc reference ipv6 ip internet

Phishing

2004 Aug 19, 2:52I received an email from verification@citibank.com the other day with the subject "Fraud Check Verification". Or at least that's what someone at the jumphk2.net domain would have me believe. The whole official looking email was very convincing at first glance. There's the Citibank logo image up in the left corner, the reassuring TrustE image in the opposite corner, and just the right amount of legal-ese on the bottom. The text requested me to follow a link in the email to update and verify my information. At closer examination however it becomes apparent that this is a scam. Little things start to catch your eye. The TrustE image is hosted on ebay and the Citibank logo is hosted at 65.108.92.50. Both images one might expect to be hosted on Citibank's site. The link in the email looks like its taking you to https://www.citibank.com/saw-cgi/citibankISAPI.dll?PlaceCCInfo but in fact its taking you to a page hosted at 65.108.92.50 again. The following sentence appears in the email:

If your account information is not updated within 48 hours then your ability to sell or bid on Citibank will become restricted.

Oh shit! My bid on Citibank might not go through! Seriously, they might have gone to a little more effort than just copying and pasting a scam letter meant for EBay. And the number one fact revealing the email for what it is -- I don't have a Citibank account. I had received an email exactly like this several months ago and just deleted it, but for some reason, perhaps I was in a foul mood, I decided to do something this time around. I emailed abuse at my domain, the ISP controlling their IP address, and Citibank. My domain told me there was nothing they could do. Citibank has yet to respond. As for their ISP, the following day I received an email from Leon at Alabanza's Abuse department informing me:

This account has been locked down and is now on schedule for deletion. If we can further assist you please let us know.

Fuck yeah! This was a lot better than anything I had expected. I anticipated no response from any of the letters I sent. The page is gone now. Leon rocks!PermalinkComments

Post-School Plans

2004 Apr 22, 3:52I actually have something to say which I thought would be appropriate for the LiveJournal format. Why I haven't posted to the LiveJournal for such a great length of time can be saved for later. I spent Easter weekend and the Monday following, in Washington, the state. Microsoft paid for me to fly up and stay in Washington so I could do the technical portion of the interview with them. I hung out with my friend Jeannie and she showed me all around Seattle on Saturday and Sunday. Each night we had somewhat expensive dinners, all paid for by Microsoft. It was cool. On Sunday I stayed at a nice hotel in Redmond and the next morning I spent just short of eight hours being interviewed by five different people from different groups within Microsoft. Each sub interview consisted of two portions. First there was the general portion where they would ask me why I wanted to work there, ask about my previous experience, and those sort of non technical questions. The second portion would take the majority of the time and it would be me trying to solve some technical problem they'd present. By the end of the interview my hands were gray with dry erase marker ink because apparently everybody's got a whiteboard and they all want me to write code on them. I have to go to class soon and I might post some more stories related to this trip, but mostly I wanted to say that last week I received a great offer from them and I'll probably be moving up to Washington sometime (weeks or months?) after graduation. Also, I've changed my AIM name from SequelGuy to SequelDave. My email address will also have to change soon, but I don't know to what it will change.PermalinkComments
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