For an advanced technology that we all depend upon, it sure seems that the Internet has more than its fair share of problems: spam, viruses, malware, spyware, phishing, worms, trojans, DDoS attacks, hijacks, DNS cache poisoning, botnets, keystroke loggers, etc. We need an entirely new vocabulary just to talk about this stuff. Most of it appears to come out of the blue, forcing the rest of the world to react. But the good news is that there is at least one problem we can do something about in advance. Unfortunately, not everyone has been taking the problem seriously enough and we are about to hit the wall.
I’m talking about the impending exhaustion of IP addresses, IPv4 addresses to be exact. Every computer on the Internet needs access to at least one unique address in order to be connected. Around the dawn of the Internet, 32-bit IPv4 addresses, which allow for 4,294,967,296 different possibilities, seemed like more than enough.
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