The Google Science Fair takes the traditional science fair and moves it to the Web. Participating students both build and submit their projects online - using Google Docs, Sites, and YouTube, for example - for all aspects of their research projects - from the data collection to the final presentation. Students from all over the world are encouraged to participate - from Paris, Texas to Paris, France, from Venice, Italy to Venice Beach.

To run this science fair, Google is teaming up with some of the most well-known names in science, technology, and education: CERN, LEGO, National Geographic, and Scientific American. And the judges for the event are just as prestigious, including the founder of the FIRST robotics competition Dean Kamen, the leader of National Geographic's Genographic Project Spencer Wells, Nobel prize winner Kary Mullis, and the "father of the Internet" Vint Cerf.

The prizes (oh, the prizes) include some once-in-a-lifetime opportunities: a trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer, a trip to Switzerland to visit CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, a chance to work on the development of a new LEGO robotics project.

Encouraging the Next Generation of Scientists

The Google Science Fair is an effort to help encourage students' interest in science and technology. "Google's origins are in scientific experimentation," Google's Tom Oliveri told ReadWriteWeb, noting that it was a hypothesis of two young computer science students back in 1996 that the information on the web could cataloged and searched.

To enter, you can register online and create your project as a Google Site. Registration is open through April 4, and the announcement of the semi-finalists will happen in early May. Oregon high school student Tesca has created a great sample site so you can see what an online science fair project might look like.

With the number of Internet-enabled devices particularly mobile phones soaring, very few IP addresses remain vacant, and with only about 20 per cent of the world connected to the Net, that's a problem. And consumers, if you think this doesn't affect you, think again. That latest gadget you bought - is it IPv6 compatible?

To fully understand IPv6 we need to take a look at TCP/IP and this means a quick trip back in time.

It all started way back in 1969, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was using a transmission protocol known as the Network Control Protocol(NCP) to transmit data across networks. Protocols, if you think of them as languages, are needed so that networks and computers can talk to one another.

Expensive, cumbersome and slow, NCP was found to be limiting and in 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a research program, known as the Internetting project, to develop a better communication protocol.

The networks which emerged from this research became the basis for what we know as the Internet, and the protocols developed during this time became known as the TCP/IP Protocol Suite.

At its most basic level, the IP part ensured packets were routed to the right place by providing unique identifying numbers to all hosts connecting to the network, and the TCP part managed the transfer of that data.

On January 1, 1983 NCP was deemed obsolete when the ARPANET switched over to the new TCP/IP protocol suite, and as a result, marked this date as the official birth date [for some] of the Internet.

Getting to V1 from V6

According to the Living Internet, after Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn designed TCP/IP, DARPA contracted with three sites to develop operational versions: BBN, Stanford and the University College London, and four increasingly better versions of TCP/IP were developed: TCPv1, TCPv2, which then split into TCPv3 and IPv3. Stability finally arrived with TCPv4 and IPv4; the standard protocol we know and use today.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses, which limits the address space to 4,294,967,296 (232) possible unique addresses. But, as some of these are reserved for specific purposes, it reduces the total number available.

IPv6 with its 128 bit addresses increases the number of potential unique addresses to 3.4e+38 (a little bit more than 340 trillion, trillion, trillion). Additionally, it is designed to rectify issues found with IPv4 such as data security.

IPv6 is expected to slowly replace IPv4, with the two protocol systems expected to run simultaneously for many years.

But, what happened to IPv5?

Typically, the most often asked question when talking about IPv4 and IPv6 is what happened to IPv5? IPv5 was known as an experimental streaming audio/video protocol. According to Raffi Krikorian, a protocol named ST, the Internet Stream Protocol was created in the late 1970's and two decades later revised to become ST2, at which point it was implemented in commercial projects by IBM, NeXT, Apple and Sun. ST and ST2 were already given that magical "5" notes Krikorian. Given it had little to do with the fundamental structure of IP addressing, IPv5 is not commonly recognized.

We're running out of IP addresses

While the establishment of a single networking protocol was an important step toward maintaining order in the then new internetworked world, no one could have guessed the growth of the Internet, nor the number of IP addresses required to cover the ever growing demand.

"My only defense is that decision was made in 1977, at a time when it was uncertain if the Internet would work," Cerf said recently, adding that a "128-bit address space seemed excessive back then."

Watch our video below to get Cerf's take on IPv6 - and why switching over is so important.

Recorded at SMX West 2009 by ReadWriteWeb
Vint Cerf image: Vint Cerf playing Spacewar on PDP-1
Credit: Flickr Joi

Speaking at the SMX Conference in Santa Clara, Cerf discussed his concerns about the current state of the Internet and gave us a glimpse into his hopes for its future.

While companies are competing to make a bigger, better, larger cloud service, fewer people are concerned with the basic mechanics of the inter-cloud and how we ensure that it all works efficiently, reliably, and securely.

"I'm seeing a possibility of inter-cloud problems mirroring the Internet problems we had thirty or forty years ago," Cerf said.

According to Cerf, and many others, inter-cloud communication issues such as formats and protocols, as well as inter or intra-cloud security need to be addressed urgently.

Analogous to the pre-Internet period when Cerf along with Bob Kahn were finding a way of connecting the ARPANET to other independent networks, Cerf points out that today, cloud computing brings similar challenges. "You build these clouds and they know about themselves and they know about their own resources, but they don't know about any other cloud. So the question is: how do you say 'send this information to this cloud over here' if there isn't any way to call it," Cerf asked.

And the challenges don't end with inter-cloud communication. There are other issues to consider, such as security and portability, particularly with financial and health services turning more and more to the cloud. What metadata needs to move with the data in order to protect it?

One of the biggest issues people have with the idea of the cloud is loss of privacy. But, according to Cerf, privacy is relative. "Let's suppose that our medical records are online and we're in a strange city and we have some medical problem and we came to the emergency room. At the moment that you're in the medical room, it's very likely that the last thing on your mind is the privacy of your medical records. And the first thing on your mind is making sure the doctors in that emergency room have every piece of information they could possibly need in order to fix your problem."

The caveat, Cerf explained is the ability to offer "finite time control over access to that information," for instance, giving the emergency room a limit of 24 hour access, while allowing your primary care physician to have longer access.

IPTV and the Future of Advertising

With IPTV, Cerf explained, most people assume streaming is the way of the future, but he's not convinced. "I'm still thinking that as we get higher and higher speed access to the Internet that downloading and playing back might turn out to be just as easy and perhaps more convenient."

Comparing video to audio, Cerf pointed out that you don't listen to music while downloading a song onto your iPod; you store it and play it back whenever you want.

This might in part explain YouTube's recent announcement to test the viability of downloads from the site. Instead of being locked into watching something as it is being transmitted, which is what the classical television model is based on, today, we can store things and play them back; removing that particular binding in the television medium. Today, Cerf said, you can "shift time."

But he also explored another possibility. Television advertising of old is invasive, and the tactics are stale. Commercial breaks are inserted into key moments of television in the hope of keeping the viewer from changing channels, a tactic he considers annoying.

"What Google has learned about advertising is that people don't treat information as annoying advertising if they're actually interested in the information," Cerf said.

"In the search engine world we offer advertising information which users can select if they want to - or not - and we don't charge the advertisers unless somebody actually selects to look at it. We have given control of advertising back to the consumer so why not do that in the video world as well."

Using an example he warns may not be "technically sensible right now" Cerf discussed the possibility of a smarter, more consumer and advertiser friendly form of product placement.

"What would happen if we can sensitize an image so that if you were interested in it, you could click on it?" he asked. Taking this theoretical idea further, he continued: "Maybe stop the video entertainment at that point; a window opens up and says: "Hi I see that you're interested in this little Macintosh that's in the field of view; that's the MacBook Pro. Oh, I see you're online right now, there is an Apple store which is six blocks away that has six of these in inventory; would you like to buy this one right here?"

Dealing with the 'Bit Rot' Problem

"It's conceivable that all the bits that are pouring into the Internet will eventually become rotten in the sense that the application that was needed to interpret the bits is no longer available," Cerf warns of growing problem he's taken to calling "bit rot."

With the enormous growth of user generated content appearing on the Internet, and the variety of formats used when uploading content to the Internet, Cerf believes that there is a real need to determine a strategy for preserving the ability to interpret the digital information that we are currently accumulating for future generations.

"Imagine it's the year 3000 and you've just done a Google search and you turn up a 1997 PowerPoint file, and you're running Windows 3000," Cerf explained, "The question is, does it know how to interpret the PowerPoint file? The answer is probably no."

In order to preserve this information according to Cerf, we need to find ways of preserving application software, operating systems and even potentially the emulation of the hardware so the application knows how to interpret this.

"I visited the library of Alexandria in January this year in Egypt," Cerf said, "and inside that library are manuscripts that are over a thousand years old; they are still fully accessible."

"If we don't do the same [ensure data is accessible in the future], what will our descendants wonder about us and the 21 century? We'll just be a big pile of rotten bits to them."

As this article only covers a very small part of the discussion, we'll provide a link to the video as soon as it is available from SMX.

Indeed, the demand for telecommuting is on the rise as a result of rising energy costs. While not all jobs can be done from home, one study found that if every worker in the United States who could telecommute -- 53% of white collar workers -- did so twice per week, 9.7 billion gallons of gas and $38.2 billion would be saved annually. Another recent study found that 37% of IT workers in the US would be willing to take a 10% pay cut if telecommuting were offered as an option -- 22% would take a pay cut to work form home in the UK. A bill requiring federal workers in the US who are eligible to work from home be allowed to at least 20% of the time recently passed in the House of Representatives and a similar bill is making its way through the Senate.

So how does that help the web? More home workers, means a larger market for applications designed to help remote workers collaborate. Things like Google Docs, Basecamp, Dimdim, and PalBee will all benefit from a larger contingent of home workers.

Do you work from home? Would you be willing to take a pay cut if you were given that option? Do you agree with Cerf, will the high cost of oil will force more people to work via the web rather than face to face? Let us know in the comments below.