I do apologise to wander once more onto geekier topics, but largely un-noticed today is World IPv6 Day. Which was hoping to make people more aware of IPv6 and the need to get ready for it – I’m not sure how well it’s done outside of people who already knew about it. Outside of the techy press the Gaurdian picked up on it and apparently Ed Vaizey said something about it. Despite it being a very low key event this is something you need to care about, as it will actually be terribly important. So get a cup of tea whilst I give a brief bit of back ground before I tell you why it matters.
So IPv6 is the 6th version of the Internet Protocol, currently the entire internet is running on version 4 (we don’t talk about version 5). The problem with IPv4 (or today’s internet) is that it was designed when people thought 640k was more memory than you’d ever need and that there was probably only the need for a half dozen super computers in the entire world. Fortunately for us, they were wrong and things have moved on a lot since then. Unfortunately the current system can’t cope with all those smart phones, smart TV’s, tablets and other internet connected dohickeys. So things are getting more crowded and people and web sites are having to share ever fewer addresses – this is a bad thing ™. To solve this enter IPv6 stage left – with vastly more space. Of course to handle this larger space requires larger addresses and well all the bits of clever computers that tie the internet together really weren’t built to handle that, so it all needs upgrading. This is neither cheap nor painless, so everyone has been waiting for everyone else to do something first and kind of hoping to retire before it became an actual problem.
Ok that’s the back ground over with, you can wake up again now – maybe go for a quick walk. Then I’ll continue as to why it matters.
Well for starters the Internet won’t grind to a sickening halt (not for a while) as we can all make better use of the space and share addresses and all that manner of clever stuff. This however is a bad thing(tm), mainly at least, as the more machines that share an address the less secure it all gets, and eventually the slower. Also to manage all that sharing the clever bits of kit run by your ISP and in places the government will have to pay more attention to who’s talking to what and maybe what they’re saying. Personally I’d rather the fewer people looking at my traffic the better. Of course the flip side is it’s also harder for them to prove who did what due to all the shared addresses (in much the same way pinning down who threw a cigarette butt out of a coach window is trickier than pining down who threw it out of a chauffeur driven limo). So as IPv4 runs out it will get harder for individuals to run their own servers, and we’ll be gradually squeezed into the equivalent of high rise tower blocks .
So that’s the bad, but moving to IPv6 has a lot of good especially for those of us that quite like to be able to communicate with each other without too much hindrance from the powers that be. Do you recall I said that the new system gave us more space – well I meant it a lot more space. No more than that much more than that. In todays world ISP’s charge you for a static IP and then charge more if you want a whole 5 IP addresses, in the new world the smallest number of addresses you can have is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (18 quintillion). Yes at home you’ll have enough address space to address all of your cornflakes and more. Now the downside of us all having nice (probably stable) public addresses, is that it’s easier to see who we’re talking to but due to inbuilt security it’s much much harder to see what we’re saying or interfere with it.
The really really interesting bit though is if we’re all on public addresses we can talk securely directly to each other, with no middleman (if we want to). If you want to set up a web server for you radical free hamsters on the land group no problems give it a public address you’ve still another 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 to play with. Given this is such an obvious use along with direct person-to-person networking you can be pretty sure that people will produce tools to make this as easy as calling a phone. In fact people are already working on it with things such as the freedom box aimed at letting you take back control of your social networking, your email and where you blog. You can run all of your email on a plug computer that costs less than 100 pounds (and the price is dropping), allowing you to exchange email securely directly with someone with a similar set up, without leaving any logs (subject to intercept laws) on your ISP’s mail servers. Keep it all on a small solid state disk and if you need to you can walk away with it all or destroy it. Plus of course no data mining of your email to improve the customer experience.
The thing is you don’t need to wait to be offered this, you can start playing with it today for free, using providers such as gogo6, Hurrican Electric or Sixxs. So whilst our great and good are making speeches, we can be building new infrastructure and ways of using it so they’ll be playing catch up so hard their on going attempts to limit what we say, how we say it and who we say it to, will make old Canute’s efforts look viable. Of course we’re still mainly stuck using centralised infrastructure, but there are ways round that as well if we feel like it.
So hopefully if you’re still with me, some of that has made sense. Go find a friendly geek if you need to and get onto the next generation of the internet whilst those that would control it are still talking about how to make it happen.
See you in the future – or maybe the past
