Google hired “Autocompleters” – These are the people that automatically complete your Google search request. Hard to believe, but some people fell for this and really thought people where on the other end trying to quickly guess what you were going to enter.

Branson Buys Pluto – Virgin.com claimed the Richard Branson had purchased Pluto, but they didn’t stop there. They went on to say that he had reinstated it as a planet.

The 3D Monocle – Toshiba announced a 3D monocle “one-eyed 3D so real, you’d think you were using both eyes!”

There are others, many others, and tomorrow there will be even more to add to the list. So, when you hear tomorrow that the UN is demanding a halt to all helium mining on order to prevent the earth from falling to its doom, you may want to remember what day it is.

When the feds took down the network, it left a big hole. The servers that redirected the computers were gone so the infected computer could not go anywhere. To help prevent this, they replaced these servers with their own. This allowed infected PCs to function properly. This was always intended as a temporary solution and March 8th is the target date for these replacement servers to be taken offline. Any computer that is still infected with DNSChanger will not be able to access the internet once these servers are offline.

So how much will this effect business on March 8th? Well, that all depends on how serious organizations work on ridding their environments of this malware. Earlier this year the security company, Internet Identity, reported nearly half of Fortune 500 and major government entries had at least one device on their network that was infected.

How could this happen? Why didn’t they design IPv4 to handle a larger number of devices? Well, IPv4 can support about 4 billion unique addresses. That sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? It sure sounded like a lot when IPv4 was first design. Actually, 4 billion is a lot until you think about how many IP enabled devices there are today. How many devices that you personally own require an IP address? Let’s start counting, your PC, DVR, game console, cell phone, printer, and the list goes on. Take my parents for example, they are on what I would call the low tech side of things, but they have at least five devices that require IP addresses. Take someone like myself and you are looking at least 20. You multiply that by the number of families in the world that have Internet access and all of the sudden 4 billion seems like a very small number.

So how do we know that in twenty years we won’t be right back here with IPv6? IPv6 can support over 340 undecillion unique numbers. How many is undecellion you ask? It a 1 followed by 36 zeros. It looks like: 1000000000000000000000000000000000000. It has been said that you could assign 100 IPv6 addresses to every atom on the surface of the earth and still have some left over. I haven’t done the math to prove this but if it’s true, we shouldn’t have to worry about running out of addresses.

So what does all of this mean to you? I guess that depends on who you are. If you are simply an average Internet user it will probably mean nothing. If you are someone that has to support a corporate network, it means that you will have eventually upgrade your systems to support IPv6 (if you haven’t already done so). In the end, things should continue to work for the end users just as they do today. That is, of course, if things go as planned. If they don’t go smoothly, you may wake up to no email one day…