Founding father of the web says we're about to run out of IP addresses

The world is about to run out of Internet Protocol addresses.

So goes the doom and gloom of a report issued today. In an interview with the Sydney Herald, founding father of the web Vint Cerf is quoted as saying, "I thought it was an experiment and I thought that 4.3 billion [IP addresses] would be enough to do an experiment. Who the hell knew how much address space we needed?"

How soon may we run out? "Within weeks," Vint said. IP addresses are unique numbers assigned to every computer, website, or any internet-connected device—not to be confused with domain names.

Fortunately, the internet as we know it isn't going to explode: an updated protocol for the Internet, IPv6, is already being planned and will create trillions of addresses.

Some experiment the internet turned out to be.