Waiting for the internet meltdown

The world is heading for a digital doomsday as the net fast runs out of numerical addresses The end of the internet is nigh - and in less than three years, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Can it be true? The problem is that the world is running out of internet addresses. More than 85% of the available addresses have already been allocated and the OECD predicts we will have run out completely by early 2011. These aren’t the normal web addresses you type into your browser’s window, and which were recently freed up by Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the body responsible for allocating domain names, to allow thousands of new internet domains ending in, for instance, .london or .xxx. Beneath these commonsense names lie numerical internet protocol (IP)... [read full story]