by Kristina Bjoran, Technology Review
The collective Internet is reluctant to move on from the dying Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), according to Akamai’s newest State of the Internet quarterly report. Every piece of hardware connected to the Internet—such as Web servers, PCs, cell phones, or printers—gets a unique number assigned by this protocol, which lets devices locate and contact each other. For the past several years, we’ve been warned that IPv4 was running out of numbers. The protocol’s successor, IPv6, provides an enormous pool of new numbers, but adoption has been very slow. The official exhaustion of IPv4 came and went earlier this year, when every possible IPv4 number had been generated and allotted. Many unclaimed IPv4 addresses have clearly now been assigned; Akamai reports that there are 5.2 percent more unique IPv4 addresses in use than there were in the fourth quarter of 2010.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/27038/?p1=blogs
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