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from the if-only-I-could-do-it-over dept.
Vint Cerf is considered a father of the internet, but that doesn't mean there aren't things he would do differently if given a fresh chance to create it all over again.
"If I could have justified it, putting in a 128-bit address space would have been nice so we wouldn't have to go through this painful, 20-year process of going from IPv4 to IPv6," Cerf told an audience of journalists Thursday during a press conference at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany.
IPv4, the first publicly used version of the Internet Protocol, included an addressing system that used 32-bit numerical identifiers. It soon became apparent that it would lead to an exhaustion of addresses, however, spurring the creation of IPv6 as a replacement. Roughly a year ago, North America officially ran out of new addresses based on IPv4.
For security, public key cryptography is another thing Cerf would like to have added, had it been feasible.
Trouble is, neither idea is likely to have made it into the final result at the time. "I doubt I could have gotten away with either one," said Cerf, who won a Turing Award in 2004 and is now vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. "So today we have to retrofit."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Snotnose on Sunday September 25 2016, @01:15AM
I should add I was writing ethernet drivers back then. 32 bit registers were high end, 64 bit just wasn't done. So I get why 32 bit IP addresses were chosen (especially when they were chosen in the 60s), I just don't get why whomever decided 128 bit addresses were better than 64 bit addresses.
I want no part of IPv6, each addy gives too much information about itself.
Being the dumbest idiot in the land and president of the US should be 2 different people.