Geoff Huston
Geoff Huston is the Chief Scientist at APNIC, where he undertakes research on topics associated with Internet infrastructure, IP technologies, and address distribution policies. From 1995 to 2005, Geoff was the Chief Internet Scientist at Telstra, where he provided a leading role in the construction and further development of Telstra's Internet service offerings, both in Australia and as part of Telstra's global operations. Prior to Telstra, Mr Huston worked for the Australian National University, where he led the initial construction of the Internet in Australia in the late 1980s as the Technical Manager of the Australian Academic and Research Network. He has authored a number of books dealing with IP technology, as well as numerous papers and columns. He was a member of the Internet Architecture Board from 1999 until 2005 and served as its Executive Director from 2001 to 2005. He is an active member of the Internet Engineering Task Force, where he currently chairs two Working Groups. He served on the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society from 1992 until 2001 and served a term as Chair of the Board in 1999. He has served on the Board of the Public Internet Registry and also on the Executive Council of APNIC. He chaired the Internet Engineering and Planning Group from 1992 until 2005.
Pages created by Geoff Huston
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New gTLD Concerns: Dotless Names and Name Collisions
In the long discussions about the new generic Top level Domains (gTLD), there were two technical topics that were the subject of many assertions and little in the way of observed data. The first concerned the viability of a so-called "dotless" name, where the gTLD label itself contains an IP address in the DNS, and the second concerns the concept of "name collisions" between existing local use of a name and the same name being delegated as a new gTLD. This article explores these two topics, and adds some data to the debate in the way of observed behaviours of the way common operating systems and browsers handle names.
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Measuring Google's Public DNS
Much has been said about how Google uses the services they provide, including their mail service, their office productivity tools, file storage and similar services, as a means of gathering an accurate profile of each individual user of their services. The company has made a very successful business out of measuring users, and selling those metrics to advertisers. But can we measure Google as they undertake this activity? How many users avail themselves of their services? Perhaps that's a little ambitious at this stage, so maybe a slightly smaller scale may be better. Let's just look at one Google service. What I would like to describe here is the results of an extended effort to measure which of the world’s Internet user population are users of Google’s Public DNS Service.
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Valuing IP Addresses
The prospect of exhaustion of the IPv4 address space is not a surprise. We've been anticipating this situation since at least 1990. But it's a "lumpy" form of exhaustion. It's not the case that the scarcity pressures for IP addresses are evidently to the same level in every part of the Internet. It's not the case that every single address is being used by an active device.
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All IP Addresses Are Not The Same
One IP address is much the same as another – right? There’s hardly a difference between 192.0.2.45 and 192.0.2.46 is there? They are just encoded integer values, and aside from numerological considerations, one address value is as good or bad as any other – right? So IP addresses are much the same as each other and an after-market in IP addresses should be like many other markets in undistinguished commodity goods. Right?
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A Question of DNS Protocols
In this article we are looking at possible ways to prevent denial of service attacks. One solution could be to use TCP instead of UDP for large DNS responses. We conducted an experiment to find out what the resolution failure rate would be.
