Diff of IPv4 at 9d402df

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+IPv4 is the fourth Internet Protocol, succeeding early experimental Internet Protocols (some of which also integrated [[TCP]] functionality). IPv4 is a [[packet-switched]] communications protocol: data is divided into fixed-length (~1500-byte) packets which can be sent individually along a variety of communications media, shepherded by "dumb" [[routers]] which only need to know how to forward each packet to its next hop. Endpoints are identified by their [[IP address]], which each router reads to determine the appropriate next hop. Unfortunately for the world, it was designed by academics as a still-fairly-experimental successor to the earlier experimental protocols, but became much more popular than anticipated and ran out of their control despite major limitations, most notably the 32-bit address space. There are only about 4 [[billion]] IP addresses, and now many more than 4 billion computers. [[IPv6]] was designed to fix this and [[https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810|other things]], but was standardized 15 years afterward, by which time it was already far too late. [[IPv5]] is [[forbidden knowledge]] and must not be spoken of.
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