After a bunch of political blog posts, I’m on a roll of technology blog posts. Perhaps it is just part of my way of decompressing. Anyway, today I am writing about IPv6. IPv6 is Version 6 of the Internet Protocol. Currently, most people use Version 4 of the Internet Protocol.

The way this works is each device on the Internet is assigned a special number. Often these number are represented as four numbers between 0 and 255 and there are special rules about what numbers can be used which way. Essentially this limits the number of devices that can connect to the Internet to around four billion. While four billion might sound like a lot, keep in mind that every year more and more cellphones get connected to the Internet and in 2007 over a billion cellphones were sold. Unless something is done, we will soon run out of internet addresses.