Well, just when the Internet ™ was working well, here is the bad news. After a decade of putting off the inevitable, the IPv4 address space is officially exhausted. No more 1.2.3.4 for you!
Since moving to the linode server, I enabled IPv6 and sat back waiting for something to happen. About a week ago, I got the first attempt at hacking the server via ipv6 (or the first one I caught!)
IPv6 was a very bad idea designed by committee. It may well never actually see use by everyone, but be replaced by an yet un-designed IPv5. With Ipv6, literally every atom of matter in the universe could have its own unique IP address. For those who care, the Ipv6 version of this server is located at:
2600:3c00::f03c:91ff:fe50:d253
For the insanely curious, an ipv6 address has 128 bits, rather than the 32 bits of IPv4. The 128 bits is made of 8 groups of 16 bits – if a number is zero, it can be omitted… so making it a little more readable
2600:3c00:0000:0000:f03c:91ff:fe50:d253
LiNode has been assigned
Net Range 2600:3C00:: – 2600:3C03:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF
CIDR 2600:3C00::/30
which is potentially 19,807,040,628,566,084,398,385,987,584 unique IPv6 IP addresses.
Problem solved!
Great. More garbage for the Internet. Remember when it was free? People chatted and surfed and looked at things – all without shelling out a single dollar. Add money and you have crime, greed, government and other vermin involved.
And our light bulbs will be spying on us, and the refrigerator will nag us to take our government mandated medications
While it is impossible for a human to remember an IPv6 address, it’s what computers do easily. With essentially an infinite number of addresses, the idea of a temporary IP and NAT (network address translation) is not needed. Every device you use on the Internet will be directly traceable to you.