Ten most expensive domain names

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Our Digital Legacy

Jack Dikian

July 2011

I was an early user of the Internet – only back in the dusty computer and physics labs of Sydney University the term Internet wasn’t yet invented. It was all about having UUCP access so that we can jump on the Usenet and look at newsgroups.

Newsgroups contained a great deal of content, albeit mostly of a technical nature and mostly text. Even from back then it occurred to me that much of what we were posting would have a presence, linger on servers distributed all over the world.

We are, after all, the first people in the history of the world to create vast online records of our lives. I say our lives because since the rise of the Internet (some 25 years) and more recent advent of social media (7 years) the internet has become seamlessly integrated with all our experiences, and more and more of our everyday life is being documented online.

For example, a quick look at Facebook’s stats tells us there are more than 750 million active users, 50% of them log on to Facebook in any given day and have 130 friends on average. Our lives, relationships, thoughts and opinions will surely fascinate future historians, sociologists, archaeologists and anthropologists studying the dawn of the digital age. The individual worth or contribution might be relatively small, but collectively, as a result of years of Internet activity, this becomes a significant.

At the same time people are beginning to think about their digital legacy. Those digital or virtual assets in the form of photographs, music, blogs, information, and other data that may be typically overlooked in terms of financial or monetary worth. Digital Legacy has been described as ‘the birth of a new industry' as new companies are being created to hold secure encrypted access to digital assets, to be released upon the proof of a users death.

In contrast to the legal, finical and officious aspects of digital legacy I’ve been wondering about what will happen to our Internet presence once we are gone. This is particularly true when we consider the rise of the phenomenon of social networking especially amongst the over 50’s is creating millions of personal archives.

So should someone notify our friends and followers on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other services after our death. Would we want somebody to remove our material from those services, or to leave it there as a memorial? More than a quarter of a million Facebook users will die this year alone.

Importantly, how long will our blogs, tweets and other material remain on the net if nobody removes them? History shows that even the most prominent technology companies can be rapidly overtaken by competitors or deserted by customers. It’s possible that some of our material might disappear along with the demise of our favorite platform. I grew up believing IBM would permeate our personal and professional lives for example.

Twitter

Whislt Twitter’s search only goes back a few days, every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions. So there is a very good chance our tweets will be archived for many many years.

Is This IPOCALYPSE?

Jack Dikian

January 2011

It seems that the world will soon run out of a man-made resource called an “IP Address” the unique stuff that makes the Internet work. No doubt the press will declare the end of the Internet, and that all communications will soon cease – a true IPOCALYPSE.

Every device on the Internet has a unique identifying number, called an IP Address. A typical IP address looks like this looks something like this: 216.27.61.137

And the same in binary (machine representation) is: 11011000 00011011 00111101 10001001

As we can see there are thirty two (32) zeros and ones that make up the IP address, a 32-bit number, a standard called IPv4 – and that’s the rub. The total possible address combinations this system provides is 4,294,967,296 unique values – or almost 4.3 Billion addresses, a number, back in 1977 when the Internet “experiment” was conceived was regarded to be adequate.

The problem

Because each computer or device on earth needs an IP address to help it connect to the internet and the existing standard (IPv4), only allows for about 4.3 billion unique addresses – there isn’t enough to give one to each person alive on earth today. Strictly speaking, this isn’t quiet true as ISPs can also deploy Network Address Translation, or NAT allowing them to share IP addresses, avoiding providing a new address to each customer – although this has its own limitations and disadvantages.

Dr Vint Cerf, considered one of the "fathers" of the Internet, told a Linux conference in Brisbane this week he was embarrassed about the situation. "I was the guy who decided 32 bits was enough for the Internet experiment," he said.

"My only defence is that choice was made in 1977. I thought it was an experiment. The problem is the experiment didn't end, and so here we are."

The solution

Dr Cerf says the Internet industry must start working hard to get IPv6 up and running. "The time for just talking about it is over, we just have to get busy and implement it and demonstrate it," he said.

A new numbering model, IPv6, has existed since the mid-1990s, but not all ISPs have begun experimenting with the hardware and software needed to use it. The new schema will be capable of providing approximately four billion times more addresses than the entire IPv4 Internet – however for this to work, communication devices will need to be upgraded.

As an aside, the Federal Government rolls out the NBN, one of the necessary side-effects of that is that the new hardware (routers) will already be compatible with IPv6 standard.

So, onwards and upwards towards a new world...