Solipsus

I miss-heard the radio the other day, or they got their news wrong, but when they said that there is only 14% of web addresses left in the world and we will soon run out. I was quick off the bat to slate it and rant that it was absurd to think we can run out of web URL addresses when:

1. How many words are there in the dictionary?
2. Think about the number of combinations that can be made with those words.
3. We can make up words (take Solipsus for example, or Jemjabella)
4. Then multiply them all by the fact there are a vast amount of suffixes (.com/.co.uk etc) which means each one can be duplicated with a different suffix.

Of course, when I went to read up on it, I found that we aren’t running out of of web addressed, but in fact we are running out of IP addresses. It has been quoted that “every computer and online device is assigned a unique IP address, but the pool of unallocated numbers is about to dry up.”

Both an interesting and worrying thing. It shows that in such a short amount of time, the internet has boomed to the extent that a 32 binary digit number with numerous variables is about to run out. The problem is how we are going to get around this problem, because with the constant introduction of more online devices we will eventually run out. My first through was that, it is not like we can simply add a couple more digits onto the end of the IP address and so forth because it would then throw every existing IP address out of sync, but apparently we can:

An IPv6 (we are currently on IPv4) system is awaiting to be implimented which means that each IP address has 128 bits and would provide us with - wait for it…. - 34 trillion, trillion, trillion different combinations. This should in turn last us ‘quite a few decades’ according to The Times, and whilst this will help, surely it would slow everything down as our computers have to pass more information? I suppose we will just have to wait about a year to find out.

Ben