CBC Radio tech column: The IPocalypse

This week’s CBC tech column is all about IPv4 exhaustion, and the so-called IPocalypse. The column and audio are up at cbc.ca, and archived below for posterity. Download MP3. [audio:http://blip.tv/file/get/Dmisener-MisenerTechColumn20110201IPocalypse798.mp3]

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In my books, Feb. 1, 2011, will go down as the day the internet got too big for its britches. The net has officially outgrown the scale of its original design.

Earlier in the day, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the international organization that hands out IP addresses on a global scale, handed out two of the very last IP address blocks to APNIC, the internet registrar for the Asia-Pacific region.

This is the beginning of the end of IP addresses as we’ve known them, or as some have dubbed it, the first days of the IPocalypse.

So what exactly are we running out of? IP addresses.

If you don’t know exactly what an IP address is, there’s no need to worry, because it’s a pretty simple concept.

Basically, an IP address is a unique number assigned to every device that’s directly connected to the internet. Your computer at home, if it’s directly connected to the internet, has an IP address. Your wireless router probably has an IP address. Your smartphone probably has an internet IP address. IP addresses are a big part of how devices on the internet are able to talk to one another.

4.3 billion addresses not enough

But here’s the thing: there are only so many IP addresses that are possible. It’s a finite number, about 4.3 billion addresses. And the last two big chunks of available IP addresses were just handed out.

So what happens when we run out of IP address? From the perspective of an internet user like you or me, nothing happens. The internet keeps on working.

But behind the scenes, there’s a trickle-down effect, which will start to affect consumers in a few months. To understand what that means, you need to know a little bit about how IP addresses are distributed.

At a global scale, the world’s 4.3 billion IP addresses are managed by an organization called IANA.

IANA divides those IP addresses among five different geographical regions: Africa, North America, Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East, and Latin America.

Much like fruit distribution

At the regional level, those IP addresses get divided among internet service providers, universities and large corporations. Finally, internet service providers divide their share of IP addresses among their customers.

Or, to put it another way, imagine we’re talking about apples. Delicious tasty apples.

Let’s say I run a giant apple farm, and I’m in charge of the apple supply for the whole world. I divide up all the apples. I send some apples to Europe, to Africa, to Latin America, to North America and to the Asia-Pacific. These apples go to a warehouse, where they’re distributed to markets and grocery stores and bodegas. Finally, they end up in your fridge.

If I suddenly shut down the world’s supply of apples, there wouldn’t be an immediate effect, because there’d still be some apples in the warehouses, there’d still be apples in the grocery stores, and there might still be apples in your fridge.

Obviously, apples and IP addresses are two very different things. Once you eat an apple, it’s used up. IP addresses can be used again and again. But the distribution is similar.

At the end of the day, these developments in the world of IP addresses will stunt the growth of the internet, limiting the number of devices that can connect to it. Our appetite for internet-connected devices is growing. Many of us have computers, smartphones, tablets, internet-enabled television. The list goes on.

An unpronouncable number to come

The good news is that computer scientists have known about this limitation for years.

To prepare for it, they created a whole new addressing scheme, called IPv6 (or simply v6), which allows for a huge number of IP addresses.

In addition to the current 4.3 billion addresses, IPv6 allows for 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. So, a lot.

Even though this new IPv6 system has been around for a while, most of the internet as we know it isn’t ready for IPv6. ISPs have been particularly slow to adopt the new system.

The other really tricky bit is that the old IP address scheme and the new IPv6 address scheme aren’t compatible with one another. It’s likely that both systems will run alongside one another for years to come.

Another possible solution to IP address exhaustion is something called “Carrier-grade NAT,” which allows existing IP addresses to be shared. Instead of me having my own IP address and my neighbour having her own IP address, we might share a single address.

That solution comes with its own set of challenges, some of which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever shared a single phone number, or used a party-line telephone. Sharing can be tricky.

IPv6 seems to have the most momentum behind it. This June, a number of heavy-hitters like Google, Facebook and Yahoo are getting behind something called World IPv6 day, which is a sort of large scale “test flight” for the system.

Tips for the consumer

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, has spoken out publicly about the importance of switching to IPv6. That said, IPv6 has its critics, particularly around the cost of implementation, security and surveillance. Security-wise, researcher Samuel Sotillo says IPv6 “creates as many new security problems as it solves old ones.”

Unless you own or operate an internet service provider, there’s not a lot you can do to impact the larger IP address landscape.

What you can do, though, is look at devices that you own to see if they’ll work with these new IPv6 addresses. If and when your ISP starts to hand them out, you’ll want to be ready. Start checking your computers, your smartphones, your home routers, your printers and your modems for IPv6 compatibility.

In some cases, you can get IPv6 support simply by updating your device’s software. For instance, early versions of the iPhone didn’t support IPv6, but the latest version of the software does.

Technical details aside, I think the most interesting thing about running out of IP addresses is what it says about where the internet is in 2011.

When IP addresses were first invented, the engineers never thought we’d need more than 4.3 billion. Yet, here we are, perilously close to that number.

IPocalypse or not, the internet is now bigger than its founding architects ever planned for.

An animated Homer

The Compass (“The Newspaper of Trinity and Conception Bays”) has a lovely feature article on my pal Tristan Homer called An animated Homer:

In his time with 9 Story Entertainment, Homer has been able to work on several popular shows, including Max and Ruby and Wibbly Pig. The latter was nominated for a Gemini Award in 2010, representing a career highlight for Homer, who was a line producer on the show.

“It didn’t win, but the Polkaroo (from the long-running kids series Polka Dot Door) was at the awards ceremony, and that was pretty fun,” he says.

Agreed. Decent consolation prize.

Stranger Danger

One more reason not to talk to strangers, at least on Facebook. They’re launching a new feature called social authentication, and if your friends list is full of people you don’t actually know, you could be locked out of your account:

Instead of showing you a traditional captcha on Facebook, one of the ways we may help verify your identity is through social authentication. We will show you a few pictures of your friends and ask you to name the person in those photos. Hackers halfway across the world might know your password, but they don’t know who your friends are.

The problem with this, of course, is that if you may not know who your friends are, either. +1 for my new favourite Gmail filter.

CBC tech column: Groupon, Google Offers, and targeted social shopping services

This week’s CBC tech column is all about Google Offers and online social shopping services. The column and audio are up at cbc.ca, and archived below for posterity. Download MP3. [audio:http://blip.tv/file/get/Dmisener-20110125_misener_googleoffers486.mp3]

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Thirty-nine dollars for a three-hour meditation session. Sixty-five per cent off a Speed Reading Class. Twenty nine dollars for a 45-minute microdermabrasion facelife. Those are just a few of the daily deals that have flowed into my e-mail inbox this week from the likes of Groupon, TeamBuy, and LivingSocial.

When I first signed up for these services, I loved the novelty of a new, time-limited local deal every day. But over time the novelty wore off, and gave way to daily deal fatigue.

Now, online behemoth Google plans to add to that daily deluge of deals.

Late last week, tech website Mashable got its hands on a confidential document that outlines Google’s plans for the new product called Google Offers. I followed up with Google, and it replied with a statement: Yes, it said, they’re “communicating with small businesses to enlist their support and participation in a test of a pre-paid offers/vouchers program.”

This isn’t Google’s first try at getting a piece of the daily deals pie. Last year, Google tried to buy Groupon, and the New York Times reported that the acquisition could have cost as much as $6 billion. But the deal fell through.

How could Google’s service differ from the existing social shopping services?

In a nutshell, through integration with existing Google services.

Advertising is at the core of Google’s business, and it is really good at selling highly targeted ads based on the things you search for, what’s in your e-mail inbox, and where you are in the real world. In my case, Google already has access to my e-mail, contacts, search history, and GPS coordinates. Groupon doesn’t.

When you look at Google’s existing product lineup, it seems primed for an email-based local advertising system. The company already runs Gmail, the Google Checkout payment system, and a slew of location-based services like Maps, Places, and Latitude. A highly-targeted daily deal service fits in quite nicely.

Well, when I first read about Google Offers, I called my friend Thomas Moran. Thomas runs a canvas printing business with his father, and over the past year they’ve worked with with Groupon, TeamBuy, LivingSocial, WagJag … the list goes on.

Thomas told me that Groupon is the 800-pound gorilla of these services, and that from his perspective, it has two things going for it. First, its reach. Groupon has huge numbers of subscribers on their city-based mailing lists. Second, its sales team. Groupon has a very large staff of salespeople who spend most of their days reaching out to local businesses.

As a Groupon competitor, Google definitely has reach. But it’s not clear how it plans to reach out to small businesses. Google’s existing AdWord system is very self-serve, which may not appeal to small business owners who expect some hand-holding.

Targeted advertising, which is Google’s speciality, doesn’t come without privacy concerns. Am I worried that Google uses my web search history and e-mail conversations to deliver ads? Yes, of course. Am I worried that a huge part of my time online is mediated by a single company? Yes. But am I willing to set aside some of those concerns so I can get 50 per cent off a pair of pants? I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but yes.

So that’s the trade-off. Better targeted deals in exchange for a kind of technological surveillance.

Of course, it’s not hard to imagine a world where I use my Google Android phone to look something up on Google Maps, and I’m presented with a Google Offer. So I sign in with my Gmail account, and pay through Google Checkout. And I completely understand why some people would be concerned about that kind of online concentration.

At this point, it’s hard to say how Google Offers will be received. After all, it hasn’t been officially announced yet. But I think it’s important to remember that for all its wild successes, Google also has a history of trying to break into existing markets, and failing.

Last year, Google tried to take on Twitter with Google Buzz. That product was met with much criticism. In 2003, Google went up against Friendster, one of the original social networking sites, with a product called Orkut. Orkut is still around, but outside of Brazil and India, it doesn’t have much market share compared to sites like Facebook.

Right now, we have the 800-pound gorilla of search and online advertising, Google, squaring off against the 800-pound gorilla of email-based social shopping, Groupon. It’s going to be very, very interesting to see if there’s room for both of them.

I’ll be watching, credit card in hand.

Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

Via Gabe and the wirelesstoronto discussion list, a link to Won’t You Be My Wireless Neighbor? It’s a lovely essay about sharing (some might say “stealing”) your neighbours’ wireless internet. In it, confessed WiFi-moocher Helen Rubinstein fondly remembers SSIDs gone by, and laments the loss of an open, unprotected network called Belkin_G-Plus_MIMO. She closes with this:

Perhaps the solution is a simple, old-fashioned gesture. Just knock on a neighbor’s door, and ask if she might be able to spare some wireless.

I can’t agree more. Here at Queen and Parliament, my neighbours and I have happily shared a single wireless network for years now. It’s wonderful. We simply bought a bunch of Meraki mesh repeaters (back when they were $50 apiece), and split the monthly internet bill a few different ways.

But here’s the thing: Here in Canada, many ISP user agreements prohibit you from sharing your internet connection. Here’s what Rogers’s Acceptable Use Policy says about the matter:

Without limitation, you may not use (or allow anyone else to use) our Services to […] use the Services for anything other than your own personal purposes (such as reselling the Services, providing Internet access or any other feature of the Services to any third party) or share or transfer your Services without our express consent

And from Bell’s Service Agreement:

You may not sell, market, provision, resell, re-market, directly or indirectly transfer, distribute or in any way exploit any portion of the Service.

Here on our corner, where we happily share our wireless internet access with anyone in reach of the signal, we use Teksavvy, a company whose Customer Agreement & Internet Usage Policy doesn’t explicitly forbid sharing or redistribution. I wish Helen’s proposed solution was as simple as it sounds, but at least here in Canada, it isn’t.