[glorgau]

IPV6 is slowly on the way. no difference for the average user, but lots of work on the infrastructure underneath the hood.

[Cyber Liberty]

As much of the world nears an Internet address crunch, North America stands as an island apart, threatening to fragment plans for the biggest overhaul of the Web in decades.

I see it's somehow become North America's fault.

[D. Brian Carter]

The resulting list of IP addresses is two googols long

This is the first time I've seen the use of the word googol outside of being used as the answer to a trivia question or in an anecdote as an oddity. That is, indeed, a tremendous number.

[Moose4]

So how are IP addresses represented in v6? No more 255.255.255.255-style addresses?

}:-)4

[D. Brian Carter]

And here is a googol (not Google) bump for you.

[D. Brian Carter]

And now that I'm on a googol kick, something interesting from the googol.com website:

Googolhedron - A 3 dimensional shape bounded by 1 x 10^100 similar polygons. This shape would look very much like a sphere. Having this many sides or facets would make it smoother than any man made object. Although, you could never have a googolhedron because there are not a googol particles in the universe.

I find it quite amazing that we're actually dealing with a number here (with IPv6) that outnumbers the amount of particles in the universe. I'm not a mathematician, I'm blonde, and easily impressed, but this just boggles my mind.

[steveo]

threatening to fragment plans for the biggest overhaul of the Web in decades.

Yeah it's needed an overhaul for at least a decade or two...

[ko_kyi]

Established five years ago, IPv6 creates enough IP addresses for every person on Earth to have 1,000 Web-enabled devices

I think somebody missed a few zeros. 1000 x 6 billion is 6 trillion, yes? Isn't that a whole lot less than 2 googol?

[tracer]

"....which some fear could run short of addresses in Asia and Europe within the next few years."

Well, boo-freaking-boo-hoo!! The US should speed up the process and let the developing world, which we should take to mean all of Europe and Asia, get an idea of how many different ways there are for them to taste the long-overdue sword.

And let's begin with France, the clymer-wipe nation who so arrogantly has banned the term "e-mail" from its sainted vocabulary..................

[chilepepper]

I throw this thought out for discussion: comments please

IMHO IPv6 is totally unnecessary because of -- NAT

it seems to me that security has driven the typical network configuration of N machines into a secluded subnet hidden behind a NAT (network address translation proxy router/firewall/etc), which allows N machines to use far, far fewer IP addresses.

So, is this going to be enough to make IPv6 irrelevant? there is NO question that it has slowed it down tremendously. I distinctly recall shrill warnings that the much ballyhoed IP crunch was upon us... then nothing!

has NAT been enough, or will Microsoft, the Communist Chinese and the US Security Agencies try to push through IPv6 as a trojan horse to foist this change upon us, in order to control licenses, dissent or terrorism as deemed important not necessarily in the latter order as deemed important by the former order of interested parties?

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

One thing worth pointing out is that there's probably not going to be one day when the whole world drops IPv4 and starts using IPv6 (like there was supposedly one day in Sweden when they switched from driving on the left like the Brits to driving on the right like us). It's probably going to be a much more complex and fluid situation with IPv6 being tunneled inside of IPv4 packets, and vice versa.

[Jay D. Dyson]

This whole mess is due primarily to the idiot practices of network mapping in Asia. It is not the fault of the United States in any way. At present, IPv4 can accommodate over FOUR BILLION unique IPs. Were this applied intelligently with NAT'd LANs, this address space could easily last us at least another 20 years.

Sadly, the Asian nations have gone out of their way to p!ss away all the address space they've been allocated and have been snapping up Class A netblocks like they're going out of style. (As a consequence, the entire IPv4 space is going out of style!)

Hell, the Japanese only recently acquired the 43/8 Class A netblock and already they're spewing spam like there's no tomorrow! These people are either so corrupt or so incompetent that they can't even control the network space they already have. Putting them on IPv6 space is going to be like putting an alcholic in charge of a winery.

Ah well...eventually we'll all switch over to IPv6. That's fine with me. I'm already scripting out how I'm going to blackhole all of Asia when that time comes.

-Jay

[Lazamataz]

That means more jobs.

All outsourced to India.

[Paleo Conservative]

It's great that when Al Gore invented the internet, he allocated 70% of the addresses to the US.

[boris]

"Backers of the address-system change said new technologies that give Web access to unlikely devices will accelerate the depletion of the IPv4 address pool even in the United States."

The Japanese invented the internet-connected toilet. It takes your pulse, your blood pressure, your weight, and a urinalysis and e-mails it to your doctor or hospital.

My question: what if hackers gain access to your toilet?

Gigantic rolling sign in Times Square: "JOE SMITH HAS BOWEL MOVEMENT..."

--Boris

[asformeandformyhouse]

IPV6 is slowly on the way. no difference for the average user, but lots of work on the infrastructure underneath the hood.

I'm against it. If IPv4 was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me. :)

[Fiddlstix]

BTTT

[TChris]

I think part of the problem is akin to some of the silliness going on in Microsoft O/S's: Not everything belongs on the Internet!

When the everything-should-have-an-IP-address insanity boils off and more people understand NAT (My employer, for example, is only NOW beginning to transition away from a network of all-Internet-legal-IPs-for-everything to a 192.168.x.x private network) the problem will probably just go away.

Even a googol-googol addresses won't be enough if ignorance abounds.