BBC finally catch on about IPv6

Sun Oct 26 12:05:16 2003

Tackling the net's number shortage

According to this article, experts are planning to create something called IPv6 that will enable us to have billions more IP addresses. They give the impression that this is a completely new thing that boffins are working on as we speak.

In fact there has been an RFC about IPv6 since at least 1995, 8 years ago. The only problem has been one of adoption. There have been many reasons why it has not caught on. One has been the slow rate of porting applications to the new APIs for resolving these longer addresses. The other has been simply lack of depend, given that everyone now uses RFC1918 addresses, and simplify their firewalling in this way.

Maybe the BBC writing this article will tell more people about IPv6 and speed its adoption. It would be a lot easier if everyone used IPv6, and we could all address the individual computers behind a single ISP-supplied network connection. It would make thinking about firewalling more important for a lot of home users, so I am not overly convinced that it will be a good thing in the short term. Currently a lot of home PCs running older versions of Windows are protected by being NATed by ADSL routers and similar. This leaves them without an Internet accessible IP address, and so shields them from direct attack.

Overall this article is probably a good thing, even if it does come about 5 years too late.