The internet has (kind of) run out of space

[shockwave]

I found this little tidbit on CNN.com and thought I would share it with you guys. I had heard about this years ago and was suprised it took this long to run out.

CNN) -- On Thursday, the internet as we know it ran out of space.

The nonprofit group that assigns addresses to service providers announced that, on Thursday morning, it allocated the last free internet addresses available from the current pool used for most of the internet's history."This is an historic day in the history of the internet, and one we have been anticipating for quite some time," said Raul Echeberria, chairman of the Number Resource Organization.But fear not. The group has seen this coming for more than a decade and is ready with a new pool of addresses that it expects to last, well, forever.

John Curran, CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, said the old pool of Internet Protocol addresses had about 4.3 billion addresses."A billion sounds like a lot," Curran said Thursday morning. "But when you think that there's nearly 7 billion people on the planet, and you're talking about two, three, four, five addresses per person (for some Web users), obviously 4.3 billion isn't enough."

The new pool, which has technically been ready since 1999, has so many IP addresses that most non-mathematicians probably don't even know the number exists -- 340 undecillion. That's 340 trillion groups of one trillion networks each. Each network can handle a trillion devices. If the current pool were the size of a golf ball, the new one would be the size of the sun."I hope this is the only transition we ever have to do," Curran said.Curran said most internet users won't see any effect from the transition. Businesses or others with their own websites may want to contact their providers to make sure they're linked to a new address to ensure that future users can visit as easily as possible.

Most people access websites by their domain names, or URLs. Those are usually word-based, like CNN.com.But the actual address of sites and devices is a string of numbers and decimal points. The new system uses a much longer string, and has numbers and other characters.Internet addresses aren't limited to websites; every internet-connected device has a built-in IP address. Curran said that the numbers started running out much more quickly once smartphones and other mobile devices became more popular around the world.

The Number Resource Organization is an umbrella group for five regional nonprofits, including Curran's, that parcel out addresses. On Monday, it handed out two packets of current addresses to the group in the Asian-Pacific region.

That triggered a plan to divide the last five packets between the NRO's five groups on Thursday.
A few addresses using the new address pool -- it's called IPv6 and the current one is IPv4 -- have already been parceled out to service providers who requested them.
Curran said it will probably be six to nine months before the addresses already handed out are all used up.

Source: The internet has (kind of) run out of space - CNN.com

 

[Frit0z]

so long as businesses dont think they need to run on IPv6 because that would be a hell of alot of work for both my jobs, readdressing every copier/slot machine manually. IPv4 should still be used for intranets since they will never reach the limit for it.

 

[CryptKickR]

OMG! We're all gonna die!

Been waiting for IPv6 for some time. Read a lot of peripheral stuff, but I've yet to ever see it in action. Be interesting to see it in action, how it translates globally, how backbone providers route it globally, and how well it translates for bottom line users. One interesting observation might simply be which nation states will be the first to be assigned ( what I can only assume was decided some time ago ) their predetermined blocks and how much trouble there might be for lesser developed geographic areas, etc.

Also curious to see if this will finally settle the issues that force some local providers to issue dynamic IP addresses instead of static. Static IP addresses would really begin to help a lot of issues for people who identify others by IP alone.

Though, at the lower tiers, this could get very interesting for groups like PB Bans or other anti-cheat groups. More than once their information has been used to hang people because the average person runs over there, punches in a name, sees a linked IP address, and thinks that the end of the day... Genius! Now take that "half-figured-out" way of thinking and apply it to a much broader scale beyond gaming. That's why I hope the provides a platform to begin using static IP addresses instead of dynamic ones for live users. Let the frackin iPods, blackberry's, and printers stick to the dynamics. It will be interesting to see if ( and how ) this translates at lower levels...

( Speaking of the problem with anti-cheating and IP addresses, this why I liked doing anti-cheat stuff in America's Army so much. We controlled the servers and server access, which meant we recorded users MAC addresses, which allowed us to zero in on machines. There wasn't much getting around the truth on that one. Most people don't know how to spoof their machines MAC address, and many can't spoof an IP or they wouldn't be playing video games. Anti-Cheat efforts for EA games and the like are so much of a headache that... Well, my hat is off to those of you with the patience. )