How much can the Internet affect the real world?
Feel free to open a software with a relatively large number of users, such as Alipay, Are you hungry, Tencent Video, etc., and you will see a line that is both familiar and unfamiliar: " Support IPv6 network ". This line is very small. There will be no impression at all. This line of small prints hides a key to breaking the American monopoly.
The story also starts with Iran. In 2010, Iran’s nuclear facilities were attacked by a virus called Stuxnet, which directly caused Iran’s nuclear power plants to postpone power generation and 60,000 personal computers were infected with the virus.
The man behind all this is the United States. Not long ago, the United States was exposed, the FBI collected the vulnerabilities of the Windows operating system as a network weapon and network strategy resource! Why can the United States launch cyber attacks without fear?
This is because under the IPv4 root server management system, the United States holds most of the domain name control. There are 13 root servers in the world, one of which is the main root server in the United States, and the remaining 12 are auxiliary servers. Among the 12 auxiliary servers, 9 are in the United States, 2 are in Europe, and 1 is in Japan.
Yes, as the country that most wants the largest number of Internet users and Internet access, it doesn't even have a root server! This undoubtedly left hidden dangers to China's network security.
Speaking from IPv4
Most people are familiar with the term IP. As long as you want to go online, you must have an IP, just like who you want to send emails to, you must have your own mailbox. IPv4 is the fourth edition of the Internet Protocol version. Its address format is:
The maximum value is 255.255.255.255, is it familiar? Yes, most of the current IP addresses are IPv4. However, there is a serious problem that needs to be solved urgently when using IPv4 addresses, that is, the addresses are not enough.
How many IPv4 are there? The answer is 2 to the 32nd power, about 4.29 billion.
In the very early days, the Internet was only designed for use by the U.S. military. It was never expected that it would become a global network. 4.29 billion seems to be a lot, but according to the statistics of the Internet Data Research Institute, the number of Internet users in the world of 7.6 billion people has exceeded 4 billion (data as of January 2018).
Therefore, IPv4 was exhausted on November 26, 2019.
The address is exhausted, what should I do with the new computer? The answer is to enable version 6 of the Internet Protocol, which is IPv6.
The rise of IPv6
IPv6 is not a new thing. It was born in the 1960s and was not paid attention to at first. Because IPv4's address pool is exhausted and cannot meet the needs of Internet development, it has been put on the agenda again in recent years.
How many IPv6 address pools are there?
The answer is: 340282366920938463463374607431768211456.
That is 2 to the 128th power, this amount is claimed to be enough to assign an IP address to all the sand on the earth.
Many people will have a question, why the highest intelligence for IPv4 addresses is 255.255.255.255 instead of 999.999.999.999? This is because the IPv4 address is expressed in binary, 11111111.11111111.11111111.11111111, converted to decimal, it becomes 255.255.255.255, which is already the maximum value.
However, if IPv6 is expressed in binary, it will be a very long number with up to 128 bits. Why is it convenient to use it? It is usually expressed in hexadecimal and shortened to 32 bits.
2 people will be divided into 8 groups, 4 people in each group.
Therefore, the following is an example of a standard and legal IPv6 address:
2001: 0db8: 85a3: 08d3: 1319: 8a2e: 0370: 7344
Attention! IPv6 addresses can be abbreviated! The leading 0 of each number can be omitted.
For example, this address:
2001:0DB8:02de:0000:0000:0000:0000:0e13
The bold "0" can be omitted and becomes:
2001:DB8:2de:0:0:0:0:e13
Furthermore, if one group or several consecutive groups are all 0, it can be abbreviated as "::", which is:
2001: DB8: 2de :: e13
Change lanes
In 2017, the General Office of the State Council issued the Action Plan for Promoting Large-scale Deployment of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6).
Why should we accelerate the deployment of IPv6?
In addition to this is an inevitable trend of the evolution and upgrading of the Internet and a major opportunity for the innovation and development of the technology industry, it is more important to fundamentally guarantee national security.
China's "Snowman Project" has completed the deployment of 25 root servers globally, of which 4 have been deployed in China, including a main root server and 3 auxiliary servers. This move will completely break the US IPv4 root server management system.
IPv6 dilemma
Although IPv6 has many advantages, its popularity is far from reaching expectations. For ordinary people, it is not because of insufficient addresses to access the Internet. Because there are some technologies that can alleviate the problem of insufficient addresses, such as NAT.
Let us use the private network address instead of the public network address when we surf the Internet at home or in the company. Every small local area network uses a private network address of a network segment, and then becomes a public network address when connecting to the outside world. In this way, the problem of insufficient addresses is effectively alleviated.
However, these methods have many disadvantages, and many Internet services will be restricted.
In addition, IPv6 cannot be popularized and it is also related to benefits. Operators and ISPs can apply for IP addresses from Internet domain name and number allocation agencies, which can be sold to downstream users and earn a huge price difference.
If you go to an operator or ISP to buy bandwidth, or rent cloud services, those with public addresses must be much more expensive than those without public addresses.
Investment is also a big issue. For operators and ISPs, upgrading to support IPv6 requires a large investment. Operators and ISPs have no incentive to enable IPv6.
IPv6 still has a long way to go.