Internet addresses

·         In July 2008 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development predicted that “digital doomsday is round the corner. In exactly 1,273 days there will be a web chaos in the world as we run out of Internet addresses”.

·         More than 85 per cent of the available addresses have already been allocated and the rest will run out by 2011

·         These are not the normal web addresses that you type into your browser’s window. These are the numerical internet protocol (IP) addresses that denote individual devices connected to the Internet.

Mission IAS’2009

·         They form the foundation for all online communications, from e-mail and web pages to voice chat and streaming video.

·         IP addresses are so basic to the success of the Internet that you really do not need to know a website’s domain name if you know their IP.

·         In fact, domain names are only a convenience for people who have better luck remembering to type, say, www.google.com, than they would have trying to remember Google’s IP address of 216.239.39.99.

·         When the current IP address scheme, called Internet Protocol Version 4 (Ipv4), was introduced in 1981, there were hardly 500 computers connected to the Internet. The address makers at that time allowed four billion addresses, thinking they would last for ever.

·         They have been nearly gobbled up in just under 30 years! As addresses run dry, we will all feel the pinch: Internet speeds will drop and new connections and services will either be expensive or simply impossible to obtain.

·         The solution to the shortage is to upgrade to a new address protocol.

·         The Internet protocols are prepared by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and smooth operation of the Internet.

·         It is already prepared for the doomsday. It has devised a replacement system called IPv6 more than a decade ago providing enough addresses for billions of devices as well as improving Internet phone and video calls, and possibly even helping to end e-mail spam.

·         Countdown clock for the doomsday is at penrose.uk6x.com.