09 December, 2010
"Progress" is not always for the better
I see the Grumpy Old Twat has posted the current IP address of Wikileaks, just in case their new DNS provider gets cold feet or receives a bit of "friendly advice" it can't ignore. The GOT quotes
the address registered to wikileaks.ch
Just as well IPv6 has never really caught on, then or, we would be typing in monstrosities like
I've always felt that IPv6 was one of those projects, like the OSI 7-layer model and, in its day, IBM Project Stretch, which set out to solve not just the problem at hand plus maybe a little speculative slack to allow for the unexpected, but instead try to anticipate all conceivable problems between now and the end of the universe, "unknown unknowns" and all. In consequence it collapsed under its own weight. Yes, we'll finally outgrow the capacity of the current structured 32-bit address space sooner rather than later — there's eventually a limit to the efficiencies you can achieve with RFC 1918 and CIDR — but the sudden jump from 32 to 128 bits — enough to provide a million IP addresses for each square millimetre of the Earth's surface, or whatever the barmy statistic is, was a jump too far for real-world IT.
Mind you, it would have suited TPTB down to the ground, wouldn't it? He who controls DNS controls the Internet. Maybe.
the address registered to wikileaks.ch
Just as well IPv6 has never really caught on, then or, we would be typing in monstrosities like
http://FE80:0:0:0:202:B3FF:FE1E:8329/
(Random example from Wikipedia for illustrative purposes — bog all to do with the real-world IPv4 address quoted above.)I've always felt that IPv6 was one of those projects, like the OSI 7-layer model and, in its day, IBM Project Stretch, which set out to solve not just the problem at hand plus maybe a little speculative slack to allow for the unexpected, but instead try to anticipate all conceivable problems between now and the end of the universe, "unknown unknowns" and all. In consequence it collapsed under its own weight. Yes, we'll finally outgrow the capacity of the current structured 32-bit address space sooner rather than later — there's eventually a limit to the efficiencies you can achieve with RFC 1918 and CIDR — but the sudden jump from 32 to 128 bits — enough to provide a million IP addresses for each square millimetre of the Earth's surface, or whatever the barmy statistic is, was a jump too far for real-world IT.
Mind you, it would have suited TPTB down to the ground, wouldn't it? He who controls DNS controls the Internet. Maybe.
# posted by Edwin Greenwood @ 13:52 
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