Stories by: Carolyn Duffy Marsan

Once a joke, belt phones, pen phones and wristwatch phones are now a reality.

iPhones, broadband and gamers give reason for economic hope.

For a decade, IPv6 has been the classic chicken-and-egg conundrum: There has been little North American demand for IPv6, so US carriers haven't introduced IPv6 services; without commercial IPv6 services available from carriers, US government agencies and businesses can't migrate to the next-generation Internet technology.

The Internet engineering community will be eating its own dog food tonight. For one hour, the 1,250 network experts at the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting will be able to access the Internet only through IPv6. The IETF created IPv6 in the mid-1990s, but this upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol has not yet been widely deployed -- even by the technology's biggest proponents here. Network World National Correspondent Carolyn Duffy Marsan talked with IETF Chair Russ Housley about the group's IPv6 experiment, why the transition to IPv6 is taking so long, and whether the IETF leadership is starting to panic about IPv4 addresses running out. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

The Internet's leading standards bodies have joined forces to clarify a set of next-generation network transport specifications that critics warned could cause massive interoperability problems for service providers.

Internet policymakers are considering sweeping changes to the way they distribute IP addresses that could allow network operators to make money by transferring unused blocks of IPv4 address space to others in need. One result could be lessened incentive to move to IPv6 any time soon.

Spoofers, spammers and phishers, beware. There's a new gun in town, and some of the Internet's most powerful companies -- including Yahoo, Google, PayPal and AOL -- are brandishing it in the ongoing battle against e-mail fraud.

Who's afraid of IPv4 address depletion? Not IT professionals, according to a new survey due this week by BT INS, a Californian consulting firm.

Members of the Internet engineering community have raised several new security concerns about Teredo, a mechanism for sending IPv6 traffic over IPv4 networks that comes turned on by default in Microsoft's Vista software.

The Internet has 1.3 billion users, but that's not enough for Lynn St. Amour. As CEO of the Internet Society, she is expanding the nonprofit group, which promotes development of the Internet globally. St. Amour doubled the group's staff in 2007 and beefed up its outreach activities in Africa, South America and Asia in her bid to add another billion Internet users worldwide. National Correspondent Carolyn Duffy Marsan sat down with St. Amour this week at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, an ISOC-funded standards group. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

Verizon Business and Level 3 Communications will share a multibillion contract to provide local telecommunications services to US federal agencies in the Washington, D.C. area.