Yahoo wants two-faced DNS to aid IPv6 deployment

Many systems that purport to have connectivity to the IPv6 Internet, well, don't. According to measurements done by Google 18 months ago, about a third of a percent of all Web users' systems think they have IPv6, with huge regional differences. In reality, it doesn't work for 27 percent of those users. Last week at the IETF meeting in Anaheim, engineers from Yahoo proposed to solve this problem by only exposing a server's IPv6 addresses if a DNS query comes in over IPv6.

Today, the 0.09 percent of Web users with broken IPv6 suffer significant timeouts if they, for instance, aim their Web browser at an IPv6-enabled site. The browser will first try to connect over IPv6 for upwards of a minute before giving up and retrying over IPv4. This is a big problem for important Web destinations such as Google and Yahoo, because they don't want to lose 0.09 percent (or more, as IPv6 use increases) of their visitors and therefore, revenue.

Google has "solved" this problem with its Google over IPv6 program which requires DNS server operators to get whitelisted. Users of whitelisted DNS servers subsequently receive google.com's and youtube.com's IPv6 addresses as well as the usual IPv4 addresses when they perform a DNS query for the addresses that go with those DNS names. Everyone else gets only the IPv4 addresses. Apparently, Google, Netflix, and Microsoft have been exploring the possibilities of a shared, industry-wide IPv6 whitelist.

However, Yahoo is taking a different approach. If a user is performing DNS queries over IPv6, then obviously his or her IPv6 connectivity works. So exposing IPv6 addresses to users sending DNS queries over IPv6 should be fairly risk-free. Everyone agrees that this solution, like the whitelist solution, is rather ugly. This means implementing "two-faced DNS": a DNS server that gives different answers to different people performing the same query. Obviously, such practice isn't particularly DNSSEC-friendly. (But that can be solved by also giving DNSSEC enabled users the IPv6 information.)

There are two problems with Yahoo's approach. First of all, mechanisms for computers to learn the IPv6 addresses of nameservers are lacking. Unlike IPv4, IPv6 often doesn't use DHCP (many systems, such as Windows XP and Mac OS X don't even support IPv6 DHCP). One alternative mechanism to learn IPv6 DNS server addresses, RFC 5006, is even less widely deployed. So most systems that have both IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity perform their DNS requests over IPv4.

The other issue is that there is at least one other server between a Yahoo user's computer and Yahoo's DNS servers. If that server is operated by people who are oblivious to IPv6, it's unlikely that they will configure it such that it only gives out Yahoo's IPv6 addresses to users who send queries over IPv6. So the whole thing hinges on the cooperation of those network operators who are breaking IPv6 connectivity in the first place.

If this is the only way that content networks such as Yahoo and Google are prepared to become IPv6-capable, it's still better than nothing. And perhaps this downside will be addressed when the Yahoo engineers work out the details of this proposal, which is so far just a set of presentation slides.

In the meantime, it would be nice if network operators wouldn't arbitrarily block IPv6 packets inside IPv4 packets, thereby disabling "IPv6 tunnels," and for people who enable IPv6 to make sure it keeps working after the initial excitement of running the new protocol wears off.

Source: Arstechnica.com

EU, US approve, Microsoft + Yahoo! search partnership is go

After announcing the search deal in July 2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft have finally received regulatory clearance from both the US Department of Justice and the EU. Under the agreement between the two companies, Yahoo! will use Microsoft's search platform to power its search results and paid search listings. Yahoo! will handle customer relations with high-volume advertisers for both companies. Self-service advertisers will continue to deal with Microsoft directly. A similar deal between Yahoo! and Google was abandoned after the Department of Justice threatened an antitrust lawsuit.

For Yahoo! users, the visible difference will be that Yahoo! search results will be identical to those of Microsoft's Bing. Yahoo! will continue to offer its own content to web users to provide more than just search results. The companies believe that this partnership will enable them to better compete with the dominant Google.

Google's dominance is indeed the reason that this deal was permitted where the Yahoo!-Google deal was not; with Yahoo! having only 7.4 percent of the search market and Microsoft's Bing only 3.2 percent, the tie-up will not make the search market substantially less competitive. Bing's market share has been increasing, especially in the US, but much of this growth has occurred at Yahoo!'s expense. The ten-year deal will provide Microsoft with considerably more access to the search market, and the company will also take on some 400 Yahoo! employees.

For its part, Yahoo! will receieve the lion's share of the advertising revenue—88 percent for the first five years—as well as cash payments totaling $150 million from Microsoft to help pay for the transition to the Bing technology. Yahoo! predicts annual operating profit growth of up to $500 million as a result of the partnership.

The technical aspects of the integration are likely to start within days. Yahoo! US should be using Bing by the end of the year; a full global transition will take longer, and is not expected to be complete until early 2012.

Source: Arstechnica.com

Ubuntu's default search engine to change in deal with Yahoo

Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, revealed today that it has established a revenue sharing agreement with Yahoo. As part of the deal, the Firefox Web browser that is shipped in Ubuntu will be configured to use Yahoo as the default search engine.

Rick Spencer, the leader of Canonical's desktop team, announced the search engine change today on a public Ubuntu mailing list. The specific terms of the agreement have not been disclosed. According to Spencer, the new default will appear in the development version of the distribution "as soon as reasonably possible" and will be in place in time for Ubuntu 10.04, which is scheduled for release in April. They have not indicated whether the change will be applied retroactively to existing installations of the current stable version, but it seems unlikely.

The change will encompass both the search provider in Firefox's toolbar and the default start page. Users will still be able to quickly change the default search service by clicking the search provider icon in Firefox and selecting the search service of their choice from the dropdown menu. In order to make it easier for users to switch completely, Canonical is customizing the browser so that switching your default search provider will also change your start page if you haven't already set one.

Canonical is unusual among major commercial Linux distributors in the sense that it doesn't sell an "enterprise" or "pro" version of its software. In an effort to make this approach sustainable, Canonical is experimenting with a number of different business models, including commercial support for end users, subscription-based Web services, and integration support for hardware makers. In the announcement about the search engine change, Spencer says that Canonical's partnership with Yahoo will help to fund the ongoing development of the distribution.

"I am pursuing this change because Canonical has negotiated a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! and this revenue will help Canonical to provide developers and resources to continue the open development of Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Platform," he wrote. "This change will help provide these resources as well as continuing to respect our users' default search across Firefox."

Canonical currently gains a portion of the revenue from Google searches, so the change means that Yahoo offered a better deal. Search partnerships have become increasingly common. The development of Firefox itself is largely funded by Mozilla's relationship with Google and other search providers. Hardware vendor Dell already ships Yahoo as the default search engine in its Ubuntu-based systems due to its own revenue sharing deal with the search company.

It's worth noting that Yahoo's data retention practices are more privacy-friendly than Google's. Yahoo search records are anonymized after 90 days, a practice that will continue in the future. Google, on the other hand, keeps the data for three times as long and has faced criticism for its allegedly inadequate anonymization.

The move has generated a bit of controversy among some Ubuntu enthusiasts who are concerned by the adoption of a default that doesn't represent the general preference of a majority of the users. In practice, the ease with which the default can be changed largely mitigates any potentially detrimental implications. As long as Canonical's efforts to monetize the desktop doesn't escalate into the kind of crapware epidemic that has infected the major PC makers, it's not going to be a problem. Selling the default search seems like a fairly uninvasive and practical way for Canonical to boost its revenue, thus helping to ensure that the company can continue to provide its software to users at no cost.

Source: Arstechnica.com