Oh IPv4, the pain you have brought me with your limited address space.
For those who don't know, IPv4 is a protocol to assign a unique address to every computer connected to the Internet. There's a lot more detail that can be given here, but that's not important. What one needs to know is that the addresses can range from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255, with some of them not allowed. This gives us just about 4 billion address to work with.
I have my issues with the way technology is portrayed in TV and movies. They are disgustingly inaccurate. You don't have to hire a consultant to get it right. At this point, you just have to throw all common sense out the door and portray it inaccurately practically on purpose.
I cringe every time I watch TV (I do watch a lot of TV though...) and something with tech comes up, because I just know it's going to be all wrong. One of my favorite shows, Person of Interest, doesn't do as good of a job as I hoped (but it's still a really good show from just about every other aspect).
On a side note, I seriously want to create a movie or TV show and go through painstaking effort to make it technologically accurate. But that's for another time.
If and when I create a Reddit account, one of the first subreddits I'm subscribing to is "/r/itsaunixsystem" so I can get a good laugh every once in a while. There are countless examples where an IP address is "traced" (there are sooooo many issues with this clip from CSI but I digress), and they show some IP address that's clearly outside the bounds of an IPv4 address.
In an effort to not accidentally give an IP address of someone's actual server in the real world, they give a fake, non-valid, address. I can understand the logic behind that. What I can't understand is why they can't just show an address of the network, or the production companies. That should give enough addresses so that no one gets damaged and everyone's happy.
Anyway, back to the main point: we're running out of IP addresses. As smartphones become more and more common in the third world, we're coming dangerously close to the 4ish billion IP addresses that can be allocated at a time. Not to worry too much, though, because IPv6 is on the way! This will assign some insanely long address to everyone, way more than we'll ever have in this universe.
What I propose is simple: we set aside some of this newfound space as specifically for the media. So, in the odd situation that some viewer wants to put this crazy long string into their URL bar, it'll just redirect to nothing. Problem solved. With IPv4, this wasn't an option because we don't have enough to spare so we can't afford it. With IPv6, we can do this a million times over and we'll be fine. Everyone wins.
Seriously though, some of the stuff on that subreddit is golden for tech geeks and programmers like me.
For those who don't know, IPv4 is a protocol to assign a unique address to every computer connected to the Internet. There's a lot more detail that can be given here, but that's not important. What one needs to know is that the addresses can range from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255, with some of them not allowed. This gives us just about 4 billion address to work with.
I have my issues with the way technology is portrayed in TV and movies. They are disgustingly inaccurate. You don't have to hire a consultant to get it right. At this point, you just have to throw all common sense out the door and portray it inaccurately practically on purpose.
I cringe every time I watch TV (I do watch a lot of TV though...) and something with tech comes up, because I just know it's going to be all wrong. One of my favorite shows, Person of Interest, doesn't do as good of a job as I hoped (but it's still a really good show from just about every other aspect).
On a side note, I seriously want to create a movie or TV show and go through painstaking effort to make it technologically accurate. But that's for another time.
If and when I create a Reddit account, one of the first subreddits I'm subscribing to is "/r/itsaunixsystem" so I can get a good laugh every once in a while. There are countless examples where an IP address is "traced" (there are sooooo many issues with this clip from CSI but I digress), and they show some IP address that's clearly outside the bounds of an IPv4 address.
In an effort to not accidentally give an IP address of someone's actual server in the real world, they give a fake, non-valid, address. I can understand the logic behind that. What I can't understand is why they can't just show an address of the network, or the production companies. That should give enough addresses so that no one gets damaged and everyone's happy.
Anyway, back to the main point: we're running out of IP addresses. As smartphones become more and more common in the third world, we're coming dangerously close to the 4ish billion IP addresses that can be allocated at a time. Not to worry too much, though, because IPv6 is on the way! This will assign some insanely long address to everyone, way more than we'll ever have in this universe.
What I propose is simple: we set aside some of this newfound space as specifically for the media. So, in the odd situation that some viewer wants to put this crazy long string into their URL bar, it'll just redirect to nothing. Problem solved. With IPv4, this wasn't an option because we don't have enough to spare so we can't afford it. With IPv6, we can do this a million times over and we'll be fine. Everyone wins.
Seriously though, some of the stuff on that subreddit is golden for tech geeks and programmers like me.
2001:db8::/32 and 192.0.2.0/24 are reserved for documentation purposes. Those would probably be appropriate to use on TV.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing that, I wasn't aware of it.
ReplyDeleteI feel that for IPv6, it won't even matter because the length is so long. Personally, I wish that there was part of IPv4 class B set aside for this.
Just curious, how did you find this blog post?
>2014
ReplyDelete>still not having a reddit account
What are you doing with your life?