what if your IP was portable?

Thinking about the internet and its makeup. Today, when you connect to the internet, whether it is from your phone or from your computer, it is given an IP address from whatever ISP you are connected to. If you travel somewhere and connect to the internet somewhere else using the exact same device it is given an entirely different IP address.

But what if it wasn’t? What if it was your own permanent address? Just like the address you live at, or your phone number. Suddenly whereever you are you could be reached over the global Internet.

I want to give this some more thought, but I started down this path due to the impending popularisation of IPv6 which will allow for further IP addresses (given to unique devices that connect to the Internet) to become available (compared to IPv4 which we use today).

Of course the Internet is not built this way - you can’t take IP addresses with you wherever you go - so the structure of the entire Internet would probably need to be altered to achieve this; I guess this makes it completely non feasible. But there is another way to get this same functionality without a fundamental change to the internet. Dynamic DNS - it has been around for ages, and used by geeks worldwide to alow their home Internet connections to act as Internet servers. The basic principle is that when a device connects to the internet, it connects to a known location online and identifies itself, effectively acting as a phone book. Using this system you, in effect, have a portable Internet connected identity similar to a portable IP address.

Why is this useful? Do we need every device to act as a server or be reachable? One possibility is that it could work as a form of authorisation or authentication tool - identifying centrally what 3rd party systems are allowed to know about an individual. Another obvious one is as a form of standardised Internet enabled communication device.

There must be more..

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those who know me accept that I am OLED’s biggest fan. As you can see on my wish list, an OLED TV is on my list of must haves. The reasons are obvious - none of the perforance issues of plasma and LCD, viewing angles that compete with CRTs, manufacturing is supposed to be much easier than LCD or plasma with failure rates being significantly reduced. Now all that needs to happen is for the damn things to be produced in enough quantity for me to be able to buy one and hopefuly at some point afford one :)  Anyhow, the reason for this entry - MPIO have released a new MP3 player which sports an OLED screen - now the screen is 1inch in size and in 65K colour - not exactly the sort of screen to view photos and video on so a standard colour screen would probably have sufficed - except maybe this means OLED screens are cost effective enough now to replace the current batch of screens out there. Fingers crossed this can be extended to TVs soon!

there is one word which sums this entry up.. FINALLY!  I have to say a little more.. it actually looks cool - unsurprisingly from Apple - it would be interesting to get hold of one and actually try it out. I have a feeling it will take a little getting used to. The big downer though is its going to cost around £35!! looks like its one for macophiles only..

Virtual Earth just launched - I had been looking forward to seeing how Microsoft’s implementation would compete agains Google’s Mapping tools and when it loaded up, it looked good. It centred on the States, but then Google Maps did that to start with, so I figured they would solve this over time. Even better, when you scrolled across you could see the world - not just the UK sitting all on its own off the east coast of America as with Google. So onto the searching - I started with something easy - Oxford Street - and shock horror "No results were found in the current view. Try zooming out". Searches for other content brought back US addresses.. Yes, as always seems to be the case with Microsoft’s MSN group, content is minimal outside the US - non existant when it comes to Virtual Earth. It is shocking to me that a company the size of Microsoft cannot get localised content sorted out. It took them years to bring out hotmail.co.uk, MSN UK is still a huge disappointment when compared to MSN US, MY MSN - even though I am using the URL http://uk.my.msn.com/ (note the UK), it insists on providing me US sports and news from Fox and MSNBC. So guess which services I am using? Here’s hoping that they update Virtual Earth quicker than they sort out My MSN.. Minor Update: If you scroll around, the map never seems to completely download - there seems to always be one or 2 squares that does not show. Anyone else seeing this?