Category Archives: IPv6

Smart objects, dumb ideas: your hyperconnected future (Pew/Elon 2016)

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crestron-control-panel

We’re all going to hell in an IP-enabled handbasket.

The bland-looking control panel depicted above is the heart of a smart home – automated up the wazoo, so your fingers can play master of the universe with the lighting, audio system, appliances, heating and cooling, sprinklers, pool, spa, garage door – and your alleged security system.

Alleged because smart homes, cars and all the other items you’ll be connecting to the public automated-cat_feederInternet will offer unprecedented opportunites for hackers to infiltrate your life. Most personal devices like computers are already insecure enough. But so-called “smart” devices will be far more difficult for consumers to organize, update and secure than the familiar devices we can see and hold. (If you think any object in our lives will be spared, check out the automated cat feeder adjacent, courtesy Wikipedia.) Continue reading →

The Internet in 2025: the Internet/Cloud of Things (Pew 4)

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internet_map_2005_dataPartial map of the Internet cloud. Each line joins 2 nodes representing IP addresses. 

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Pew setup question

The evolution of embedded and wearable devices and the Internet/Cloud of Things – As billions of devices, artifacts, and accessories are networked, will the Internet of Things have widespread and beneficial effects on the everyday lives of the public by 2025?

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The visualization of the Internet you see above, while pretty dense and complicated, captures only a fraction of a certain class of networks as they existed nine years ago (i.e., less than 30% of the Class C networks reached by the Opte Project in early 2005). In the intervening time, the number of Internet-connected hosts has increased from less than 400 million to over one billion. But you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

google-glass

This past year marked the mainstreaming – in the public consciousness if not in our actual lives – of devices that are not only a) smart so they can compute, and b) small so they can be worn or embedded, but also c) networked so they can all communicate over the Internet. Judging by press coverage, I’d say the splashiest recent entries have been Google Glass and smart watches. Continue reading →

Feds tackling IPv6, office of Treasury Board Prez tells me

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Snippet from ISOC Web page

Credit where credit is due.

In January of last year I wrote 2 posts about the depletion of IPv4 addresses – IANA out of IPv4 addresses this week. In the course of my research, I discovered some members of Canada’s IT community were very unhappy with the federal government’s apparent inaction on the crucial IPv6 transition.

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Fun facts: IPv6 uses a 128-bit address system, i.e. 2^128, which = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses (a 39-digit string). So roughly 3.4*10^38, or 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses. IPv6 is big enough so that every square meter of the Earth’s surface could be assigned 6 billion billion billion addresses (6 octillion, or 6*10^27).

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Continue reading →