With almost 400 registered delegates from the education, research and culture sectors, the 2012 ARNES Conference is aimed at a wide range of visitors, covering both user and systems aspects of the use of new technologies.

In 2012, ARNES celebrates its 20th anniversary. The last 20 years have witnessed remarkable progress in internet infrastructure and services, with the future promising the “Internet of things”. However, it is people who cooperate ever more readily thanks to this technology, and this cooperation gives rise to the development of ever-better technology. For this reason, we would like to mark the anniversary by recalling that we have been building a network of people, and not just of wires, for 20 years. At this year's conference, 22 Slovenian and foreign speakers will describe how we initially used the Internet, and what awaits us in future, with particular emphasis given to services that can help us in our work today (conference programme).

We have published pictures from the conference on the ARNES page on Facebook.

Thus the 10100th year of ARNES will see a series of presentations and workshops, rounded off with a final event in November, in which we will commemorate some of the more interesting shared steps and successes, present examples of good practice, and examine what sort of academic and research networks we will weave in future.

We will also launch Slovenia’s contribution to construction of the European education and research network, which began in the 80s, and highlight cooperation of the networked community as a driver for the development and use of technology.

Some of the more important events in 2012 to mark ARNES' connecting and networking of knowledge:

• An ARNES Conference will mark 20 years of the internet of people at the SIRikt 2012 international multiconference.
• In April we will be the local joint organiser of the 64th RIPE meeting, during which we will host more than 500 leading experts – internet service providers and network operators – from all over the world.
• As every year, we will again be involved in organising the Slovenian IPv6 summit, which is an important part of the success story in which Slovenia is a world-leader in preparations for IPv6.
• We will also be involved as joint organiser in the E-Dem 12 conference on electronic democracy.

We will also commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Slovenian national registry, which manages the .si top-level domain name, and the coming of age of SIX – the exchange for internet service providers and content in Slovenia, administered by ARNES.

Further information on individual events will be provided in later announcements. Come and join us!

The full conference programme can be found on the conference website. You can register for the conference from 1 February 2012 at prijava.sirikt.si. As we expect demand to be high, we recommend registering as soon as possible, as places are strictly limited.

The themes of the meeting, organised by Arnes, Go6 and LTFE, are security and mobility in IPv6.

The keynote speaker will be Eric Vyncke, Cisco, the author of numerous books and one of the leading experts on IPv6 security. He also developed a system for measuring and verifying the status of the introduction of the IPv6 protocol, which shows Slovenia continues to lead.

Randy Bush, a living legend and internet pioneer, is the lead researcher of Internet Initiative Japan. At the meeting he will present options for preventing theft of internet resources.

Mark Townsley, Cisco, author of the “IPv6 Rapid Deployment” (6RD) standard and the L2TP protocol, will present a better alternative solution for the operator translation mechanism (CGN).

Also attending will be Ron Broersma, chief engineer of the Defence Research and Engineering Network, and an internet development pioneer.

As well as foreign delegates, Slovenian experts - responsible for Slovenia being a world leader in readiness for the IPv6 protocol - will also attend and play an active role in the meeting.

The main event will be a panel debate, bringing together representatives of entirely different internet views and fields:

• Randy Bush, an internet pioneer who defends “traditional” internet values, such as simplicity, speed and avoiding complexity,
• Mark Townsley, a proponent of tunnel mechanisms which have resulted in the transition from packet-switched networks to circuit-switched networks, enabling operators to optimise network use,
• Dan Wing, one of the inventors and first proponents of operator-level translation mechanisms (CGN) and a leading representative of the community supporting translation as a current solution to the problem of insufficient internet space.

The aim of the debate will be to coordinate the differing views of these three giants of the internet industry and to lay the foundations for a joint solution that will lead to coordinated guidance for the internet industry and a standardization body, and will provide guidelines for future development of the internet as such.

We expect the debate, to be chaired by Jan Žorž of Go6, will generate considerable international interest, particularly among the internet community, standardization bodies (such as IETF) and major software and hardware providers.

The meeting will take place in Ljubljana Technology Park, starting at 9:00 a.m., and you can watch it online via Arnes’ VOX web conferencing. The meeting programme is available on the Go6 website.

According to analysis by Eric Vyncke, once again Slovenia proved to be one of the best-prepared countries for the introduction of the new protocol. The analysis measured how many of the largest web portals already provide their content via both protocols. On the day, coordinated in Slovenia by the Slovenian IPv6 initiative Go6, numerous Slovenian providers, such as Telekom Slovenije (www.siol.net, www.najdi.si), RTV Slovenia (www.rtvslo.si), POP TV (www.24ur.com), ARNES (www.arnes.si), APEK (www.apek.si), Simobil (www.simobil.si), T-2 (www.t-2.si), LTFE (www.ltfe.org) and others, prepared access to their content and services.

At the end of the 24-hour period, during which IPv6 traffic passing through the SIX Internet exchange at Arnes increased more than 15-fold, most providers concluded that there are no or only minimal difficulties in simultaneously providing content via both protocols (IPv4 and IPv6). Some Slovenian providers therefore decided to maintain access to their content via both protocols in future: for instance the contents of www.siol.net, www.najdi.si and www.rtvslo.si are today accessible via IPv6.

The main conclusions and findings of World IPv6 Day are that the Internet operated as expected, and that the infrastructure is not itself a problem. Jan Žorž of Go6, who spent World IPv6 Day together with 30 European experts in the RIPE-NCC and ISOC control laboratory in Amsterdam, believes that the human factor could be the biggest problem, if providers do not plan enough for the transition to what is essentially a simple protocol. The Laboratory for Telecommunications Faculty of Electrical Engineering (LTFE) has for some time offered its key web pages via the IPv6 protocol (www.ltfe.org …). Their experience suggests that the new-generation protocol operates perfectly, so that on World IPv6 Day they didn't encounter any difficulties or any other operational peculiarities. Here at Arnes we too did not encounter any particular difficulties on the day, as we actually began introducing the new protocol back in 2002, and many of our services, including the www.arnes.si website, have supported IPv6 since 2010.

Google, Facebook and other major providers are – according to Jan Žorž – satisfied with the test results, and are promising to provide some of their services soon via both protocols. He further adds that discussions are already underway for the World IPv6 Week, which should take place later this year.

To make the IPv6 protocol easier to understand, here at Arnes we have also recorded a short presentation video – IPv6 – Don't Panic.

Given the upcoming event, the theme of the meeting will be the problem of the transition of web content providers to the IPv6 protocol. We will investigate which content providers have the most to do in this area, and whether they are sufficiently prepared to offer their content via both protocols, IPv4 and IPv6.

The keynote speaker will be Ron Broersma, an Internet pioneer employed by SPAWAR (a division of the US Navy). He will share his wealth of experience from the transformation of the arpa.net military network into the Internet and the introduction of the IPv6 protocol in the largest existing IPv6 network of end users within a single organisation - the American military. He will also describe the US military's preparations for World IPv6 Day - do they anticipate any problems?

Gunter Van de Velde, senior Technical Leader at Cisco Systems and the head of the Belgian national IPv6 Task Force, will share his experience in setting up the largest high-capacity dual-stack network to date at the Interlop 2011 conference in Las Vegas.

On the first day of the meeting, organised by Arnes, the Go6 Institute and the Laboratory for Telecommunications Faculty of Electrical Engineering (LTFE), the keynote speech will be followed by talks expected to include leading Slovenian and foreign network-systems experts and reports on the IPv6 activities of Slovenian companies. The day will end with a technical discussion chaired by Davor Šoštarič. The theme will be the preparedness of web-content providers for World IPv6 Day and determining their level of awareness.

The second day of the meeting will feature two workshops. The first, on the topic of Transition Mechanisms, will be chaired by Matjaž Straus Istenič (Arnes) and Luka Koršič (LTFE), while the second, on IPv6 in Microsoft platforms and services, will be chaired by Luka Manojlovič, Microsoft MVP.

The IPv6-meeting will be streamed live online on Thursday 2 June 2011 from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Photographs from the meeting will be published throughout the meeting on the Arnes Facebook page.

For more information on the event, including the meeting schedule, visit the Go6 website.

One of the promoters of the participation of Slovenian service providers in World IPv6 Day is the Go6 institute, which is already preparing a list of providers that will support both IPv6 and IPv4 access to their services on this day. Also taking part will be ARNES, which has been providing access to its website and some services through the new protocol since 2010.

As part of the conclusion of the “Ljubljana – World Book Capital” project, Jāniš Kārklinš, assistant UNESCO Director General for communications and information visited Slovenia from 30 March to 1 April. UNESCO awarded Ljubljana the honorary title of “World Book Capital” for the period April 2010 to April 2011.

To mark the occasion, ARNES hosted a videoconference debate on Thursday 31 March between 3 and 4 pm on the topic of “Free flow of ideas and the universal right of access to information”.  During the debate, Jāniš Kārklinš described current UNESCO programmes in the area of communications and information. Other participants in the debate were Dr Sandra Bašić-Hrvatin of the University of Primorska, Simon Delakorda, director of the Institute for Electronic Participation (INePA), Dr Marko Ivanišin of the University of Maribor, Marko Bonač, MSc, director of ARNES, Vuk Ćosić, web strategist and Dr Marko Milosavljević of the University of Ljubljana.

The videoconferencing round table was chaired by Dr József Györkös, state secretary at the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology. You can view a recording of the videoconference at the ARNES video archive (PowerPoint presentation).

The fifth ARNES Conference will be held on 13 April 2011 at the Hotel Kompas in Kranjska Gora as part of the SirIKT conference, with the main theme of What does cloud computing hold in store? The conference is aimed at users in the research, education and culture sectors, covering both user and systems aspects of the use of new technology.

Foreign and Slovene speakers will try to answer what cloud computing actually is, how it benefits your work and what the pitfalls of this new technology are. Plenary talks will be linked with a talk and round table on simplifying access to services. The conference will end with two parallel sets of talks, one general and the other technical (conference programme).

As usual, you can expect interesting talks, friendly networking with ARNES staff and your colleagues, lunch and traditional cheese treats at the end of the conference.

You can register for the ARNES 2011 Conference online at prijava.sirikt.si. There is no registration fee. As space is limited this year, we advise you to register as soon as possible.