The Internet

The internet, like the chip, is also not yet ready for Mark of the Beast.  First a little
background.  This wonderful piece of modern technology was initially developed by the US Military in order to launch our ICBMs.  IT was designed in a web patterns so that no single point of failure cause the whole network to cease.  It is this weblike nature of the internet that we get its other name - The World Wide Web. And NO!! Al Gore did not invent the Internet.  He just sponsored a bill that opened it up for public use.  It was mostly used by the Government, Universities, and Large Corporations before that "Information Superhighway" bill.   As you can see, the Internet wasn't developed to be used on a global scale.  Every "node" must have what is called an IP Address.  This IP Address acts like a phone number so that routers on the internet know where to send data.  Well folks, We have run out of IP Addresses.  There have been a number of technological band-aids thrown on to stretch out the IP Addresses that we currently have to allow for an even greater capacity of.

There are only a few million IP Addresses in the current IP version 4 of the internet.  To help with the growing number of users, the decision makers implemented Subnetting and they assigned a couple of IP Address slices for private addressing.  Private addressing is the addressing that most Corporate networks and Home Networks use and these do not route over the internet.  So you need to do a translation between the private ip address and the internet ip addresses.  Which they implemented so that you can virutally use one Internet IP address for thousands of privately addressed computers.  This was great while they look for a new system to be used on a global scale.  However, with the growing number of permanently connected networks (via broadband) even this band-aid is of no help.  Here the unimplemented solution called IP version 6.  It dumps the current four octets of binary numbers and expands it to six fields of four hexadecimal numbers.  A hexadecimal number has a value of 0-15.  The numbers start at 0-9 are equal to the number they are.

A = 10, B = 11, C = 12, D = 13, E = 14, and F = 15.  This IP addressing version is unimplemented, but the infrastructure is currently being put into place.  Every Windows XP (and newer) computer has the capablilities to implement IP v6 as well as all routers since 2002. It hasn't been implemented because no one entity is in charge of the internet and the task of converting just the internet backbone is monumental.  It takes a high degree of skill to design even a small routed network working the way it should be working, the Internet is easily a thousand times more complex and we cannot have any downtime to implement it.