Moving to IPv6 to Avert Internet Crisis

The pool of available IPv4 Internet Addresses will soon run out. This event is being likened to the problem of Y2K, however the problems that can emerge may be quite notable if appropriate action did not or does not take place. IPv4 designed in 1977 has a limit of approximately 4.3 billion addresses. Thankfully IPv6 has been steadily being introduced over the past few years to replace IPv4. With IPv6, the new limit will now be 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses.

The following article provides further details on this important issue:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20029721-264.html?tag=TOCmoreStories.0

Here are a few excerpts:

"Many expect some disruptions as the IPv6 shift takes place. Web sites could be slow or inaccessible, companies could have a harder time setting up new services, Internet service providers could have a hard time keeping up with subscriber growth, and security will have to adapt to the new technology.

The Net won't collapse, though."

"Perhaps the best news about the IPv6 transition is that, once it's mostly over, the Internet will be a qualitatively different place. With vast tracts of IP addresses available, individual ones can be assigned to phones, computers, cars, stereo components, living-room thermostats, heads-up display glasses, wristwatches, home solar panels--you name it. Where a case can be made for networking, these devices will be able to communicate directly without the network topology shenanigans such as network address translation necessary today."

Google Supporting WebM for HTML5's Tag

Google recently announced that they will be dropping support for the H.264 codec in Chrome. Videos encoded in this format will still be playable via Flash and Silverlight plugins. For Google's explanation for this move - visit The Chromium Blog:

http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html

Here are a few excerpts:

"As it stands, the organizations involved in defining the HTML video standard are at an impasse. There is no agreement on which video codec should be the baseline standard. Firefox and Opera support the open WebM and Ogg Theora codecs and will not support H.264 due to its licensing requirements; Safari and IE9 support H.264. With this status quo, all publishers and developers using the tag will be forced to support multiple formats."

"We acknowledge that H.264 has broader support in the publisher, developer, and hardware community today (though support across the ecosystem for WebM is growing rapidly). However, as stated above, there will not be agreement to make it the baseline in the HTML video standard due to its licensing requirements. To use and distribute H.264, browser and OS vendors, hardware manufacturers, and publishers who charge for content must pay significant royalties—with no guarantee the fees won’t increase in the future. To companies like Google, the license fees may not be material, but to the next great video startup and those in emerging markets these fees stifle innovation."