The launch of IPv6 for Netflix was all about making sure nobody lost their service while they made the change. That’s why they focused exclusively on the PC/Mac platforms for the launch because they met all the requirements needed for the switch. The interesting part is the problems they ran into.

Due to the large amounts of data they process, it was found that there was a leak in the IPv6 code that caused the cache that processes the IPv6 to hang. It just goes to show you that IPv6 can not be treated the same as IPv4 when programming for it. In a similar vein, they wanted to use a program that bypasses DNS on IPv4 on IPv6, but found that they are not compatible.

It’s important to note that IPv6 is still largely prone to bugs and other mishaps. Netflix had to start with only one state getting IPv6 support and then expanding it as things began to go well. Switching to IPv6 is not as simple as flicking a switch and Netflix’ experience proves that.

IPv6 is growing steadily and Netflix can be thanked for that. It was found that they contributed to the highest gains in IPv6 traffic when it launched. They also have the second largest domain processing IPv6 traffic.

IPv6 is the future of the internet and it’s here to stay. It’s pretty awesome to see consumer applications like Netflix are leading the charge instead of the more tech-savvy applications. It shows that demand for IPv6 is strong and consumers are pushing the trend.

Now that it’s been a few weeks since the launch of IPv6, the fine people over at World IPv6 Launch have thrown together an infographic that explains the importance of IPv6 and which companies have made the switch so far.

As you all probably know by now, IPv4 was pretty much tapped and has been for the past few years. According to estimates, the Asia Pacific region ran out of IPv4 addresses back in April 2011 and Europe was going to run out in August of this year. Something needed to be done and IPv6 was the answer.

IPv6 is pretty amazing because it greatly expands upon the amount of IP addresses that are available to us compared to IPv4. IPv4 only had 4.3 billion IP addresses where as IPv6 has 340 undecillion (that’s 38 zeroes) IP addresses. To put that into even better perspective, that’s 4.3 billion IP addresses for every star in the known universe.

So who’s using all those IP addresses? During the launch on June 6, over 3,000 Web sites took the charge to make the switch. Some of these companies include AOL, Bing, Facebook, Google, Mozilla, NASA, Netflix and others. On top of all of those companies, 65 network operators including AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner and others all made the switch. For consumers, five home router vendors – Cisco, D-Link, NEC Access, Yahama and Zyxel – updated their hardware to be IPv6 compliant.

More and more Web sites and companies will begin deploying IPv6 over the coming months and years. It will soon usurp IPv4 and become the new standard to which we connect to the Internet on. Once we reach that milestone, it will be a day just as important, if not more, than June 6, 2012.

To help facilitate the move to IPv6, Microsoft has made Windows 8 compatible with all three forms of IP networks – IPv4, IPv6 and dual-stack. On IPv4-only networks, Windows 8 will use a technology called Teredo that translates IPv6 packets into IPv4 packets. This will be especially helpful for those trying to access networks that are exclusively on IPv6.

The most common form of network that we’re probably going to see over the next few years is the dual-stack network. IPv4 and IPv6 are not compatible with each other which led to the creation of dual-stack networks. This allows devices to have both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address. For Windows 8 on dual-stack, the OS will prioritize IPv6 connections when available to help push the protocol into being the standard. Don’t worry, however, as Microsoft promises that Windows 8 will provide the best user experience in regards to the Internet regardless of the transition.

Continuing with dual-stack networks, Microsoft details their efforts in creating a new network detection algorithm that they call address sorting. It allows Windows 8 to sort through the connections available to it and choose the one that will get the job done faster than all the rest. In layman terms, it means that Windows 8 won’t spend a long time trying to connect to an IPv6 address that’s not functioning. It will be able to detect such a problem immediately and rever to IPv4.

If you’re on a device that’s IPv6 only, Windows 8 has you covered as well. When connecting to an IPv4 address through IPv6, Windows 8 will use NAT64. The only problem is that it’s extremely buggy and can cause problems with P2P connectivity. To that end, Microsoft has started to upgrade all of its services to IPv6. Starting this month, Bing will exclusively serve traffic over IPv6.

While it’s fantastic that Microsoft is being so aggressive in pushing IPv6, their insistence that all of their services use it right away might cause some issues for those on older hardware. Bing is the one to watch with it moving exclusive to IPv6 later this month. It will be interesting to see if anybody has problems accessing Bing or finds that the service is slower than usual.

On a final note, Microsoft has provided a neat widget in the blog post that tells you whether or not you have IPv4, IPv6 or dual-stack. We’re exclusive on IPv4 here so we’ll let you know if we experience any anomalies as we march towards the future of the Internet.

The doodle comes with some appropriate sound effects and video (including an Android dashboard figure, a monster movie and the intermission screen). The only thing missing is a couple making out, though a girl does put an arm around her boyfriend. It ends with a popcorn tub that says, “Google”.

Google has uploaded the video to YouTube if you want to just watch it here:

When you click the doodle, Google shows you “The history of the drive-in theater” as the top result. It’s an Inventors page on About.com, which gives us a lesson on this classic form of entertainment:

Richard Hollingshead was a young sales manager at his dad’s Whiz Auto Products, who had a hankering to invent something that combined his two interests: cars and movies.

Richard Hollingshead’s vision was an open-air movie theater where moviegoers could watch from their own cars. He experimented in his own driveway at 212 Thomas Avenue, Camden, New Jersey. The inventor mounted a 1928 Kodak projector on the hood of his car, projected onto a screen he had nailed to trees in his backyard, and used a radio placed behind the screen for sound.

According to this account of the drive-in theater’s history, the drive-in opened on Tuesday June 6, 1933 on Crescent Boulevard, Camden, New Jersey, and it cost 25 cents for the car and 25 cents per person to get in.

Update: Google is now showing a Wikipedia result over the About.com result. This result says: “Hollingshead’s drive-in opened in New Jersey, June 6, 1933, on Admiral Wilson Boulevard at the Airport Circle in Pennsauken, a short distance from Cooper River Park.” It cites The New York Times as the source of this info.

As Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points out, some people are complaining that Google chose to go with this doodle instead of a D Day Google, as today is also the anniversary of that.

Google is also plugging IPv6 (the next version of the Internet) from the homepage. Google released the following video about it this week:

Here’s the page that Google is linking to on IPv6.

IPv6 is the response to a problem that’s been in the making ever since the Internbet began – its exponential growth. In the beginning, there were only a few thousand IPs floating around and all was good. More and more people began to connect to the Internet in more ways than ever before. The 4.3 billion IP addresses afforded by IPv4 were no longer enough. IPv6 has been in the works since the early 90s to address the problem that we now face today.

With the launch of IPv6, a crisis has been averted. So how many addresses does IPv6 support? One would think maybe a few more billion addresses because the Internet isn’t really that big, right? Well, the Internet is a constantly evolving network with more and more addresses coming online all the time. This is why IPv6 has been granted the capacity to hold 340 undecillion addresses. I could list in arabic numerals how large that number is, but I don’t think you want to see 36 zeroes.

There’s obviously enough room for all the IPv4 addresses currently in use as well any new IP addresses that will be assigned as we march forward towards progress. Of course, you may be wondering if the introduction of IPv4 is going to force you off the Internet until you switch over to IPv6. Worry not as we’re all in this together and IPv4 will still work alongside IPv6 for years to come.

Just because IPv4 still works doesn’t mean that you should just ignore IPv6. PCWorld caught up with Tri Nguyen at ZyXEL and he explained that IPv6 offers a host of improvements over IPv4 that should have many people wanting to make the switch. The biggest reason being security. IPv6 packets are encrypted thus making it harder to actually breach a network that’s on IPv6.

Unfortunately, more secure just signals a challenge to those that launch attacks on Web sites. It was reported back in February that the number of DDoS attacks were beginning to rise on networks using IPv6. It proved that even the increased security of IPv6 could not stop all of the attacks, but security groups saw it as a perfect excuse to begin studying attacks on IPv6 addresses to develop new safeguards for the future.

Barring cyber attacks, you’re probably liking the sound of this IPv6 thing. So what does a strapping young net savvy individual have to do to prepare for the switch? Absolutely nothing. You heard that right, folks. ISPs, Web companies and equipment manufacturers are doing all the hard work for us. They will be overseeing the switch to IPv6 so that you don’t have to.

While everybody is going to have to switch over to IPv6 sooner or later, a number of companies are already switching over starting today. In our report yesterday, big players like AT&T and Google were listed among those that are fully embracing IPv6. Google has been especially proactive in regards to the switch by having Vint Cerf talk up the need for IPv6. You can see Cerf talking about IPv6 in the video below:

As you can see, IPv6 is not threatening in the least bit. In fact, it’s the best thing to happen to the Internet since, well, the Internet. The best part about it is that we don’t have to worry about it. IPv6 will be moved to new areas as needed. The only thing that people should be aware of is that any device or computer they buy should have support for IPv6. Considering that my laptop from 2004 has IPv6, the average consumer should be good.

It’s an exciting time of growth and innovation for the Internet. IPv6 is just the newest expansion that will increase the speed and security of the Internet. It’s these kind of innovations that make the Internet something to be protected from those who would rather limit it to protect their own interests, like the UN.

The list includes the following:

Committed ISPs:

Committed equipment manufacturers:

Web companies participating:

But what is IPv6 you ask, and why is it necessary. To address this, Google has been front and center, first conducting a Google+ Hangout that featured, among others, Vint Cerf, who discussed the reasons why the new Internet Protocol is necessary. If you missed that, fear not, because Google has also created an IPv6 information page that attempts to answer any concerns web users may have. The page also includes an explanatory video, featuring Cerf himself:

The problem is that 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. More than 4 billion devices already share addresses. As IPv4 runs out of free addresses, everyone will need to share.

If IPv4 gives us a little over 4 billion addresses, how many will IPv6 provide? The answer is more. A lot more. Try 340 trillion trillion trillion, something Google is nice enough to put in a numeric format, just to drive the extra space IPv6 creates home:

340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That’s a lot of IP addresses for us to use and abuse, or, as Google puts it, “that’s a number big enough to give everyone on Earth their own list of billions of IP addresses.” With that in mind, the changeover from 4 to 6 only makes sense, especially when you consider just how many people currently access the Internet, even more so when you consider the future generations who will soon be connected.

For the SEOs out there worrying whether or not the changeover is going to ruin years and years of work, Matt Cutts has you in mind:

Any thoughts or fears you may have about the impending IPv6 changeover?

The announcement came on Yahoo!’s corporate blog, where Yahoo! IPv6 Evangelist Jason Fesler stated the company’s commitment to ensuring “the long-term health and growth of the internet.” From the blog post:

The Internet is more than just a web address or an email address. Each time you visit www.yahoo.com, your computer looks up the proper number that will connect your web browser to our web server. Your computer does this for every single site it accesses.

The original Internet design is now running out of these unique numbers. Just like phone numbers, it is difficult to share the same number with several people (or several web sites). The main feature of IPv6 is to extend the Internet’s numbering system. This will allow more people, more devices, and more applications and web sites to join the Internet.

Yahoo is participating in World IPv6 Launch Day on June 6 along with other companies including Google, Bing, Facebook, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast. The event is organized by the Internet Society, a global initiative devoted to the open development and use of the web. The switch to IPv6 is needed because addresses for IPv4 will run out in the near future. Though most internet users with modern browsers will not notice any difference come June 6, Yahoo! has provided an IPv6 help page that includes a browser test.

The company announced yesterday that Facebook is now gearing up for the worldwide IPv6 launch on June 6 of this year. This means that users will have access to most of Facebook’s HTTP and HTTPS endpoints. To that end, Facebook will enable IPv6 access on beta.facebook.com on May 18 so that developers have time to find any issues that need fixing.

There is also a change coming to the JavaScript SDK. They are aiming to make it more “modular and strict” which means the inclusion of the “fb-root element and correctly initializing the SDK with FB.init. Here’s how it will look:

If you need more information on fb-root, you can read the official documentation here. Just be sure that you call FB.init if you are using FB.api, FB.ui or FB.Canvas.

The breaking changes are still the same from last week with them going into effect on May 2. The bug report is similar with 205 bugs being reported with 13 of them being fixed.

On a side note, the Facebook Developers page has been issuing a warning for the past few days that the Android SSO is having issues. The last update was made yesterday with the company saying that a fix has been made and is in the process of being pushed.

In what Arbor Networks called “A Milestone in IPv6 Development,” they detail on their blog the first distributed denial of service attacks on the IPv6 Internet. According to their Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, respondents said that they had seen DDoS attacks on their networks.

A bar graph from the report that details IPv6 security concerns lists DDoS attacks as the fourth major concern among users. It’s only behind what you would usually see as major concerns which are inadequate IPv4/IPv6 feature parity, visibility and misconfiguration.

The rise in DDoS on IPv6 can be attributed to the fact that there are now more networks using IPv6 according to Arbor. This creates more targets for those who use DDoS attacks to bring down Web sites. IPv6 is seen as a valuable asset for network operators and therefore is seen as valuable to the people who wish to attack them.

A major contributor to the rise in attacks is the number of sources to launch the attacks from. To launch an attack on an IPv6 network, the attack must be launched from the IPv6 Internet. Until now, that has been relatively hard to do as there were not a lot of injection points for the attacks to come from.

Funny enough, there apparently was a security group in Washington in the ‘90s that banked their entire existence on IPv6. They declared that the inherent security of IPv6 would lead to their jobs becoming obsolete. They disbanded under the false hopes that network security would no longer be needed.

Arbor points out that IPv6 is no more secure than IPv4. In fact, IPv6 may be more open to attack because everybody has been focused on fixing the security vulnerabilities in IPv4 since the creation of IPv6 in the mid-90s.

All of this is a good thing, however, as it highlights that IPv6 has reached the point in time where people can start developing ways to counteract DDoS attacks. You can’t very well know how to stop an attack until you live through one, so the increased number of attacks has been nothing but helpful for security groups looking to fix holes in IPv6.

The blog post suggests that networks still on IPv4 need to develop an IPv6 security game plan. This is because IPv6 vulnerabilities can exist in what they call, “apparent IPv4-only deployments.”

Internet security is constantly evolving to meet new threats. Let’s just hope that our lawmakers do their research on these emerging trends before proposing national cybersecurity bills.

In a post earlier today from their official blog, Google announced that they have joined Internet Society to coordinate a world-wide launch of the next-generation Internet protocol later this year, IPv6. The post explains the urgency of this launch:

IPv6 is the replacement for the current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4, which is quickly running out of addresses. The original IPv6 specification was published more than 15 years ago, but for the entire career of most Internet engineers its deployment has always been in the future. Now it’s finally here. The widespread deployment of IPv6 paves the way for connecting together the billions of devices that permeate our livesーboth fixed and mobile, from the largest cloud computing services to the smallest sensors.

For Google, World IPv6 Launch means that virtually all our services, including Search, Gmail, YouTube and many more, will be available to the world over IPv6 permanently. Previously, only participants in the Google over IPv6 program (several hundred thousand users, including almost all Google employees [PDF]) have been using it every day. Now we’re including everyone.

Google’s been active in preparing World IPv6 since last year, but IPv4 has been “officially depleted” since they started working with Internet Society. Previously, websites only switched over to IPv6 for a 24-hour dry run, but now the plan is that IPv6 will be here to stay come June. By promoting World IPv6 Launch, Google hopes to persuade websites, ISPs, network device manufacturers, and other online entities to make the permanent switch to IPv6 together.

Although Google says that most users can expect a seamless transition and likely won’t notice anything different after IPv6 turns on, they do encourage people to check out their connections using Google’s test page just to be on the safe side.