Make-Up Posts 1: Thursday: Holy Immense IP Iterations, Batman!

This might seem a little strange for someone who plans to be immersed in the world of high-tech, but maybe, just maybe we don't need to be growing as big or as fast as we are doing now. Surprisingly enough, the thing that really has got me thinking about this is the concept of subnetting.

I just heard the brains of everyone not into networking shut down for a second. Don't worry, you don't need to know much about it, but here's a quick synopsis.

In orders for computers to talk to each other on a network, they need to have an IP address. But you might only want one set of computers to be able to talk to another set of computers, so you might put them on a different subnet(work) from the other computers they shouldn't talk to. Now IP addresses are ultimately the mailing system of the internet with the IP address saying that this bit of information needs to go here, and vice-versa. This means that each seperate network has to have its own IP address.... and so on. You get the general idea, right?

Now we're on IPv4. The IP address is 4 decimal octets whose values can range from 0 to 255. There are 4,294,967,296 unique addresses and we're running out fast. Thanks to subnetting, supernetting and other networking technologies, we are able to conserve addresses and essentially allow duplicate addresses on private networks that might match other unattached networks' addresses. Anyway... sounds like a lot doesn't it?

IPv6, however, will be a brand new beast. It will be a 128-bit addressing scheme composed of 32 hexadecimal characters (that's right, base-16!!!). The result: 430 quintillion (4.3 × 10²⁰) unique addresses per square inch, or 670 quadrillion (6.7 × 10¹⁷) per square millimeter, of the Earth's surface. To get a grasp of these numbers, please follow the links to Wikipedia, which has a great explanation on these large numbers. Also, for a more comprehensive explanation on IPv6 itself, please check out the Wikipedia link here.

What could we possibly need this many addresses for? I'm not sure, honestly. Even if you were to slap a computer and cell-phone in the hands of every living person on the face of the planet, one office computer per government official, one per computer per corporate officer, and toss in an additional one per every person on the planet, we're still only really hitting the 20 billion or so mark.

If you listen to the alternative media which I encourage you to do (and occassionally the mainstream media), you will hear talk about implanting RFID chips into people for tracking purposes. Yes, I do believe its coming. Yes, I do believe it will likely be against our will. But think about it... that many unique IP addresses, that many RFID chips.... it'll make things pretty easy to route and / or track all that movement and data.

I'm not trying to scare people, but it's something to think about.