geekosystem

Welp, I guess it's time to head out Californee way. I hear they got a whole mess of internets out there and we're all dried up. You see, the world's run out of IP addresses on the old standard, IPv4. Luckily, said world has also been working on transitioning to the new standard: The bright and shiny IPv6. The launch of IPv6 compatibility across major internet service providers and home networking manufacturers is set to go down this coming Wednesday, June 6, 2012.

Happy IPv6 Day, the Internet is coming to an end! Not really, but IPv4, which stands for Internet Protocol version 4, has all but dried up, as the last IP addresses were handed out some time ago. Luckily, this doesn't mean the Internet has run into a wall or that no new devices can be connected to the purveyor of funny cat videos and 140-character messages regarding the sandwich someone just ate for lunch -- we have IPv6 waiting in the wings and today just so happens to be the day that some of the world's major organizations will be offering their content over IPv6 as part of a 24-hour test drive. As you can see from the above screenshot, Geekosystem is doing everything it can to participate in IPv6 Day.

For all their wisdom and foresight in other areas, the creators of the Internet missed the mark when, in devising IPv4, they thought that 4.3 billion IP addresses would be sufficient. But they weren't counting on so many telephones and cars being assigned their own IP addresses, or the Internet explosion in the developing world. Which is why this year, with the official depletion of available IPv4 addresses, the switch over to IPv6, with its 340 undecillion addresses, is more pressing than ever. But if 2¹²⁸ addresses seem a trifle too many to exhaust, well, ever, stuff like this at once shows a) that some people are still trying hard to do so and b) the potential outcomes, good and bad, available when IP addresses become a truly unlimited resource. A company called NXP wants every single lightbulb in the world to have its own IP address, and it recently rolled out an initiative to that end.

Referring to the exhaustion of available IPv4 addresses as an "extinction" or an "apocalypse" has always seemed a wee bit melodramatic -- it doesn't mean the Internet will shut down until the IPv6 switchover is complete, only that a secondary market in IPv4 addresses will be created, similar to that which already exists in domain names. Microsoft nicely illustrated that latter point while (unintentionally?) giving a nod to the former in a recently announced transaction, when it shelled out $7.5 million for 666,624 IPv4 addresses from a bankrupt networking company called Nortel Networks. Microsoft not only bought a quantity of IPv4 addresses roughly equivalent to 1,000 times the Number of the Beast; at $11.25 per address, it also paid more than the average market rate for a .com address, which is about $10 per. According to Domain Incite, this is "the first publicly disclosed sale of an IP address block since ICANN officially announced the depletion of IANA’s free pool of IPv4 blocks last month." While it seems logical and inevitable for IPv4 addresses to become subject to the market laws of supply and demand now that they are a scarce resource, ICANN, which regulates Internet protocol addresses, officially looks down on this sort of so-called "grey market" transaction in IP addresses. It anticipates that this sort of thing won't happen too often in the future, but this sale could set a major precedent. (via Domain Incite, WinRumors)

The end of the Internet as we know it drew yet nearer today with the announcement that two of the remaining seven blocks of IPv4 addresses have been allocated to APNIC, the Asia Pacific region's regional Internet registry. Based on a longstanding agreement, this means that each of the regional Internet registries will receive one of the five /8 blocks left over; while each of these blocks contains over 16 million IP addresses, in an era when phones, cars, and e-readers have IP addresses, it won't be long before every one of those addresses has been allocated. According to APNIC, it "expects normal allocations to continue for a further three to six months. After this time, APNIC will continue to make small allocations from the last /8 block." Thus, as we recently wrote, the IPv4 Internet will run out of address space "within weeks." The solution, as we've known since it was standardized in the '90s, is IPv6, which will create trillions of IP addresses to IPv4's relatively puny 4.3 billion. But because many existing devices are fluent in IPv4 but not in IPv6, the transition will be tough. And there are social resistances in place as well. A Web researcher tells eWeek:

“IPv6 is a chicken and egg problem ... To lower the number of IPv4 addresses in use, a full IPv6 public backbone is required. It is assumed that this will take around 10 years – and we’ve left it too late now.” “IPv4 address scavenging is the only way forward now – we have to be able to harvest addresses that are not being used and be very careful in how we make these available for use ... Mass spammers and other blackhats using IPv4 addresses for a matter of minutes have to be a prime target.”

Everyone who's anyone on the Internet has an IP address. Literally, every web-connecting device has a unique IP address in its interactions with the big ol' World Wide Web. And if you're reading a blog called Geekosystem, there's a decent chance you already knew that. But what fewer of you may know is that we're running out of these IP addresses, and quickly. Experts currently project that we will run out during or shortly before summer of next year. The current IP protocol, IPv4, provides for about 4 billion IP addresses, which probably seemed like a lot at the time, but now with phones, computers, televisions, cars, and every other piece of technology people own connecting to the net, it's proving to be a very small number. Right now, there are an estimated 232 million left. The Sydney Morning Herald reports this should last approximately 340 days.