Carolyn Duffy Marsan

A growing number of U.S. carriers and enterprises are hedging their bets on IPv6 by purchasing blocks of unused IPv4 addresses through official channels or behind-the-scenes dealmaking.

The U.S. government, Internet policymakers and leading content providers such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo are encouraging network operators to adopt IPv6. In particular, proponents of the new version of the Internet Protocol are promoting World IPv6 Launch Day, an event scheduled for June 6 that requires participants to permanently enable IPv6.

Embattled by hactivists, cybercriminals and foreign rivals seeking to steal proprietary information, U.S. corporations are ramping up their hiring of cybersecurity experts, with open jobs reaching an all-time high in April.

The need for cybersecurity experts spans all industries, from financial services, manufacturing and utilities to healthcare and retail. Among the major U.S. companies trying to fill cybersecurity-related positions are Boeing, Baylor Health Care System, Verisign and Office Depot.

Apple Computer came under fire for back-pedaling on its support for IPv6, the next-generation Internet Protocol, at a gathering of experts held in Denver this week.

Presenters at the North American IPv6 Summit expressed annoyance that the latest version of Apple's AirPort Utility, Version 6.0, is no longer compatible with IPv6. The previous Version, 5.6, offered IPv6 service by default.

Comcast has moved into the next phase of its IPv6 roll-out, becoming the first U.S. broadband ISP to enable next-gen Internet services for residential customers that use home gateways.

Comcast plans to announce its IPv6 service for home gateway users later this month, but company officials released a few details about this service at the North American IPv6 Summit held here this week.

DENVER - IPv6 appears to have found a new killer app: business continuity.

This replacement for the Internet's main communications protocol has been searching for a business driver that would propel ISPs and enterprises to make investments and upgrades since it was created 15 years ago.

Approximately 40% of federal government agencies are out of compliance with a regulation that requires them to deploy an extra layer of authentication on their Web sites to prevent hackers from hijacking Web traffic and redirecting it to bogus sites.

It's been more than two years since federal agencies were required to support DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) on their Web sites. However, two recent studies indicate that around 40% of federal Web sites have not yet deployed this Internet security standard.

CIOs are waking up to the reality that they've lost control over access to data stored in software-as-a-service applications purchased by other departments.

"By the time an organization buys its sixth or eighth SaaS application, it's in trouble," says Jackie Gilbert, vice president and cofounder of SailPoint, which sells software for bringing these applications back into compliance with company policy. "We're poised to see more auditor attention and more security directed at this problem."

In honor of National Data Privacy Day this Saturday, Jan. 28, we've put together a list of the 15 worst Internet privacy scandals of all time.

These high-profile privacy scandals involve many underlying technologies, from search to social media, e-mail to voice mail, mobile phones to Webcams to GPS. But at the heart of all of these privacy scandals are companies collecting personal data without the user's knowledge or consent and then either sharing it with third parties or simply failing to keep it safe.

Several of the world's largest ISPs and websites have committed to permanently enabling IPv6 -- the next-generation Internet Protocol -- on their products and services starting June 6, 2012.

AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable were among seven global ISPs that have committed to this deadline, along with some of the world's most popular websites including Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing.

2012 is poised to go down in Internet history as one of the most significant 12-month periods from both a technical and policy perspective since the late 1990s, when this network-of-networks stopped being a research project and became an engine of economic growth.

This year the Internet will face several milestones as it undergoes its biggest-ever technical upgrade, from Internet Protocol version 4 to version 6. In addition, key contracts that the U.S. federal government controls for Internet infrastructure and operations are being re-bid. Taken together, these events could result in monumental changes in both who operates the Internet infrastructure as well as how these operations are handled:

Debate around a controversial plan to add hundreds of new domain name extensions to the Internet infrastructure has reached a fever pitch in the nation's capital, as critics engage in a last-ditch effort to scrap or delay the plan, which is scheduled to launch Jan. 12.

Both the Senate and House of Representatives have held hearings in the past two weeks on the plan by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to greatly expand the number of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) such as .hotel and .paris.

The nation's best undergraduate computer science programs are bracing for a record number of applications this fall, as more high school seniors are lured by plentiful jobs, six-figure starting salaries and a hipster image fostered by the likes of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.

Early admissions are piling up at elite tech schools, including Carnegie Mellon University, Harvey Mudd College and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology - all of whose undergraduate computer science and engineering programs are rated tops by U.S. News & World Report, the de facto college ranking in the United States.