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Q: What is 3% of 4.3 Billion?
A: The number of internet addresses left for use.
Can't wait for the panic over this one!
Supply of Internet addresses runs low
By SCOTT CANON
The Kansas City Star
The Internet is on the verge of posting a “no vacancy” sign.
An international organization that doles out numbers to identify every gadget swapping data to and fro across the Web is getting down to the end of roughly 4.3 billion addresses. This week two of the few remaining batches of numerical labels were taken off the shelf.
There’s no shortage yet of domain names, the WhatWillTheyCallAWebsiteNext.com addresses we bookmark on our browsers.
Rather, this scarcity applies to the individual numbers embedded nearly invisibly in our PCs, Macs, cell phones, TiVos and myriad other electronics that sign on to the Web. Those so-called Internet protocol numbers allow those devices to find each other. Without the numbers, cyberspace wouldn’t work.
It’s a glitch born of success. We’ve seen geometric growth in products that tap into light-speed information to perform tricks unimagined when the numbering system for our devices was crafted three decades ago.
The shortage brings with it a whiff of Y2K fears that deeply embedded electronics might gum up the works of a techno-society feeling its growing pains.
“We’ll probably experience some minor hiccups,” said Dan Andresen, a Kansas State University professor of computing and information sciences.
But he said neither the world nor the World Wide Web is near the end. Even the authority in charge of handing out the numbers in the U.S. and Canada says home users don’t need to do anything.
Rather, companies that hook you up to the Internet must get under the hood to sort out where older electronics need retrofitting for coming changes. It will cost cable companies, wireless carriers and other businesses that work closely with the backbone of the Internet. Those expenses will likely be passed on to consumers in marginally higher bills, or in the rising cost of software and devices.
Still, the coming dearth of Internet identifiers underscores just how wired our world has become.
Internet protocol, or IP, addresses have been critical to computer-to-computer connections since the dawn of the Internet. You can’t connect without one. And depending on how your stuff is networked, you might have a different number for your desktop computer, your Xbox and your smart phone.
When the current system for handing out IP addresses sprang to life in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such info swapping was left to pre-chic geeks on college campuses stitching together the binary banter from one computer to the next.
Those wide-tied engineers could scarcely imagine thousands of computers joining the conversations, but they knew each machine would need its own address. So a 32-bit address — a pair of digits, a period, three digits, a period, three more digits, another period and two final numbers, e.g. 12.345.678.90 — seemed enough for generations to come.
The digital pioneers could have made the numbers more complex, but the numbers take up space on the data packets that make Internet back-and-forth possible. In those days of oh-so-slow connections, putting on longer addresses would have been like filling up a postcard with such detailed delivery instructions that there’d be no room left to say “missing you.”
Then came Yahoo and Google, Amazon and Netflix, Facebook and Twitter. The Internet drew Web surfers, gamers, bloggers and Skypers.
With each new clever, killer application, the desire to be wired grew as IP addresses for all manner of gizmos got gobbled up.
The virtual homesteading moved slowly at first, but the numbers have disappeared most quickly in the last five years. The start of 2006, for instance, saw more than eight times as many available as at the end of 2010.
“We are at a cusp, I think, in the IP address space,” Vinton Cerf, a Google executive and one of the fathers of the Internet, said last year. He even warned about the emergence of a black market for IP addresses if the move to a new system is too slow.
Now, although guesses vary, less than 3 percent of the some 4.3 billion addresses are unclaimed.
So computer engineers around the world are fine-tuning a plan to switch over to a new address numbering system. Doing so would essentially add real estate to the potential size of the Internet with a new numbering system.
And it would be a colossal expansion. The coming IPv6 (version 6) system would leap from the current 32-bit addresses to 128-bit addresses. In contrast to the 10-digit address, the new labels can look like this: 21DA:00D3:0000:2F3B: 02AA:00FF:FE28:9C5A.
That explodes the number of possible IP addresses to 340,282,366,920,938,463,463, 374,607,431,768,211,456. How big is that? Enough to allow for trillions of IP addresses for every square mile on Earth.
Most newer Internet-ready electronics have been built to switch to the new system. And older devices not yet ready for an IPv6 world could probably operate with a little jury-rigging that translates new-style numbers to the old-school gadgets.
But there will be some headaches along the way.
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority controls IP numbers. But it delegates, handing out huge chunks of numbers to organizations in North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.
On Tuesday, the IANA handed out two of the last few remaining blocs of numbers to the Asia-Pacific authority.
“Feb. 1, 2011, will go down as the day the Internet got too big for its britches,” wrote Canadian technology columnist Dan Misener. “The ’net has officially outgrown the scale of its original design.”
But he and others say an “IPocalypse” is unlikely.
In the U.S., we get our digits from the American Registry for Internet Numbers. ARIN says consumers don’t need to fret — in fact, the switch might boost both speed and security — but warns that many Internet businesses lag at updating their software to brace for the change.
“Businesses should do the responsible thing for their own organizations and the Internet community at large, and start preparations now,” said ARIN President John Curran.
Most analysts picture gradual adoption of the new IPv6 system alongside the old numbering system this year.
“The biggest hassle will be inertia,” said Andresen, the K-State computer scientist. Information technology workers “will have trouble tracking down the older devices. There’ll be little problems. There’ll be headaches.”
To reach Scott Canon, call 816-234-4754 or send e-mail to scanon@kcstar.com.
Posted on Wed, Feb. 02, 2011 10:36 PM
By SCOTT CANON
The Kansas City Star
The Internet is on the verge of posting a “no vacancy” sign.
An international organization that doles out numbers to identify every gadget swapping data to and fro across the Web is getting down to the end of roughly 4.3 billion addresses. This week two of the few remaining batches of numerical labels were taken off the shelf.
There’s no shortage yet of domain names, the WhatWillTheyCallAWebsiteNext.com addresses we bookmark on our browsers.
Rather, this scarcity applies to the individual numbers embedded nearly invisibly in our PCs, Macs, cell phones, TiVos and myriad other electronics that sign on to the Web. Those so-called Internet protocol numbers allow those devices to find each other. Without the numbers, cyberspace wouldn’t work.
It’s a glitch born of success. We’ve seen geometric growth in products that tap into light-speed information to perform tricks unimagined when the numbering system for our devices was crafted three decades ago.
The shortage brings with it a whiff of Y2K fears that deeply embedded electronics might gum up the works of a techno-society feeling its growing pains.
“We’ll probably experience some minor hiccups,” said Dan Andresen, a Kansas State University professor of computing and information sciences.
But he said neither the world nor the World Wide Web is near the end. Even the authority in charge of handing out the numbers in the U.S. and Canada says home users don’t need to do anything.
Rather, companies that hook you up to the Internet must get under the hood to sort out where older electronics need retrofitting for coming changes. It will cost cable companies, wireless carriers and other businesses that work closely with the backbone of the Internet. Those expenses will likely be passed on to consumers in marginally higher bills, or in the rising cost of software and devices.
Still, the coming dearth of Internet identifiers underscores just how wired our world has become.
Internet protocol, or IP, addresses have been critical to computer-to-computer connections since the dawn of the Internet. You can’t connect without one. And depending on how your stuff is networked, you might have a different number for your desktop computer, your Xbox and your smart phone.
When the current system for handing out IP addresses sprang to life in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such info swapping was left to pre-chic geeks on college campuses stitching together the binary banter from one computer to the next.
Those wide-tied engineers could scarcely imagine thousands of computers joining the conversations, but they knew each machine would need its own address. So a 32-bit address — a pair of digits, a period, three digits, a period, three more digits, another period and two final numbers, e.g. 12.345.678.90 — seemed enough for generations to come.
The digital pioneers could have made the numbers more complex, but the numbers take up space on the data packets that make Internet back-and-forth possible. In those days of oh-so-slow connections, putting on longer addresses would have been like filling up a postcard with such detailed delivery instructions that there’d be no room left to say “missing you.”
Then came Yahoo and Google, Amazon and Netflix, Facebook and Twitter. The Internet drew Web surfers, gamers, bloggers and Skypers.
With each new clever, killer application, the desire to be wired grew as IP addresses for all manner of gizmos got gobbled up.
The virtual homesteading moved slowly at first, but the numbers have disappeared most quickly in the last five years. The start of 2006, for instance, saw more than eight times as many available as at the end of 2010.
“We are at a cusp, I think, in the IP address space,” Vinton Cerf, a Google executive and one of the fathers of the Internet, said last year. He even warned about the emergence of a black market for IP addresses if the move to a new system is too slow.
Now, although guesses vary, less than 3 percent of the some 4.3 billion addresses are unclaimed.
So computer engineers around the world are fine-tuning a plan to switch over to a new address numbering system. Doing so would essentially add real estate to the potential size of the Internet with a new numbering system.
And it would be a colossal expansion. The coming IPv6 (version 6) system would leap from the current 32-bit addresses to 128-bit addresses. In contrast to the 10-digit address, the new labels can look like this: 21DA:00D3:0000:2F3B: 02AA:00FF:FE28:9C5A.
That explodes the number of possible IP addresses to 340,282,366,920,938,463,463, 374,607,431,768,211,456. How big is that? Enough to allow for trillions of IP addresses for every square mile on Earth.
Most newer Internet-ready electronics have been built to switch to the new system. And older devices not yet ready for an IPv6 world could probably operate with a little jury-rigging that translates new-style numbers to the old-school gadgets.
But there will be some headaches along the way.
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority controls IP numbers. But it delegates, handing out huge chunks of numbers to organizations in North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.
On Tuesday, the IANA handed out two of the last few remaining blocs of numbers to the Asia-Pacific authority.
“Feb. 1, 2011, will go down as the day the Internet got too big for its britches,” wrote Canadian technology columnist Dan Misener. “The ’net has officially outgrown the scale of its original design.”
But he and others say an “IPocalypse” is unlikely.
In the U.S., we get our digits from the American Registry for Internet Numbers. ARIN says consumers don’t need to fret — in fact, the switch might boost both speed and security — but warns that many Internet businesses lag at updating their software to brace for the change.
“Businesses should do the responsible thing for their own organizations and the Internet community at large, and start preparations now,” said ARIN President John Curran.
Most analysts picture gradual adoption of the new IPv6 system alongside the old numbering system this year.
“The biggest hassle will be inertia,” said Andresen, the K-State computer scientist. Information technology workers “will have trouble tracking down the older devices. There’ll be little problems. There’ll be headaches.”
To reach Scott Canon, call 816-234-4754 or send e-mail to scanon@kcstar.com.
Posted on Wed, Feb. 02, 2011 10:36 PM
Can't wait for the panic over this one!
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(sounds like an Apple gadget though)
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