"By mandating redirection, PROTECT IP would require and legitimize the very behavior DNSSEC is designed to detect and suppress," the paper states. "[A] DNSSEC-enabled browser or other application cannot accept an unsigned response; doing so would defeat the purpose of secure DNS. Consistent with DNSSEC, the nameserver charged with retrieving responses to a user's DNSSEC queries cannot sign any alternate response in any manner that would enable it to validate a query."

Even worse, Huston said, legislation like SOPA could encourage the formation of "darknet" alternative DNSs.

"This will not switch off the content, but will provide impetus for the formation of 'alternate' DNS worlds which include the blocked domain names," he wrote.

"To what extent these alternative worlds will then be populated by 'fake' banks, 'fake' governments and all other kinds of attempts at trickery is an open question, but it is unlikely that the darker alternate DNS world will be any better than what we have today. So in effect, they argue, these attempts to suppress bad content through mucking around with the DNS encourages other forms of mucking around with the DNS, and that's not a good thing."

Nor will the measures proposed in SOPA actually block the content, since users will still be able to locate the "banned" resource directly using the IP address, by running a local resolver, using a foreign resolver, or by editing their hosts file.

As Sandia states, "Even non-technical users could learn to bypass filtering provisions."

Montevideo, 3 February 2011 ? The Number Resource Organization (NRO) announced today that the free pool of available IPv4 addresses is now fully depleted. On Monday, January 31, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated two blocks of IPv4 address space to APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific region, which triggered a global policy to allocate the remaining IANA pool equally between the five RIRs. Today IANA allocated those blocks. This means that there are no longer any IPv4 addresses available for allocation from the IANA to the five RIRs.

IANA assigns IPv4 addresses to the RIRs in blocks that equate to 1/256th of the entire IPv4 address space. Each block is referred to as a ?/8″ or ?slash-8″. A global policy agreed on by all five RIR communities and ratified in 2009 by ICANN, the international body responsible for the IANA function, dictated that when the IANA IPv4 free pool reached five remaining /8 blocks, these blocks were to be simultaneously and equally distributed to the five RIRs.

In the global race to see who can offer the fastest Internet service, an unlikely challenger has emerged: Chattanooga, Tenn.

The city-owned utility, EPB, plans to announce on Monday that by the end of this year it will offer ultra-high-speed Internet service of up to one gigabit a second. That is 200 times faster than the average broadband speed in America.