The collective Internet is reluctant to move on from the dying Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), according to Akamai's newest State of the Internet quarterly report. Every piece of hardware connected to the Internet—such as Web servers, PCs, cell phones, or printers—gets a unique number assigned by this protocol, which lets devices locate and contact each other.

For the past several years, we've been warned that IPv4 was running out of numbers. The protocol's successor, IPv6, provides an enormous pool of new numbers, but adoption has been very slow.

The official exhaustion of IPv4 came and went earlier this year, when every possible IPv4 number had been generated and allotted. Many unclaimed IPv4 addresses have clearly now been assigned; Akamai reports that there are 5.2 percent more unique IPv4 addresses in use than there were in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Internet-focused organizations strongly advised that providers stop handing out the unclaimed IPv4 addresses and make the inevitable switch to the roomier IPv6. The Internet Society even sponsored a worldwide test run for IPv6, which they hoped would encourage others to update their hardware and networks and make the switch.

But according to Akamai, which routes between 15 and 30 percent of the world's Internet traffic, only about 0.25 percent of the top one million websites (as rated by Web analysis company Alexa) can be reached through the IPv6 versions of their sites. And the Internet security firm Arbor Networks says that IPv6 traffic volumes only account for between 0.1 and 0.2 percent of all Internet traffic.

This isn't all that unexpected. Adoption of IPv6 can be tedious and expensive. And although IPv6 addresses will eventually cheaper than IPv4, they aren't yet. Google and Facebook can roll out their IPv6 websites, but users might not be able to access them if their Internet service providers don't widely support IPv6 connectivity.

Consumer-side hardware is also a problem since many older modems don't have IPv6 support. "For the most part, customers buy off-the-shelf home routers and modems and use them until they break," says Leo Vegoda, Number Resource Manager at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). "Providing IPv6 to most customers is going to mean replacing a lot of networking equipment that was never designed with IPv6 in mind and will never be upgraded to support it."

Fruit flies have long been a favorite research subject for biologists, but now they're unlocking secrets for computer scientists as well. Specifically, researchers used insights into how a fruit fly's nervous system develops to design a new algorithm that could prove useful for wireless networking, routing, and other network protocols.

When a wireless network gets deployed, it has to be organized to get information to every node in the network efficiently. One way to do this is to assign certain nodes to be leaders responsible for their own smaller areas of the network (called the "maximal independent set"). But assigning these leaders quickly and efficiently, with a minimum of back and forth communication, has been an open problem in distributed computing for a long time.

According to a paper published in Science, current algorithms are designed to know things about how a network is set up—such as how many neighbors each node is connected to. This doesn't jibe well the flexibility that wireless networks offer.

In the fruit fly, the researchers saw the flexibility and efficiency they wanted for wireless networks expressed in nature. While the fly's nervous system is developing in the larval and pupal stages, it selects "sensory organ precursors" that play a similar role to the leader nodes in a wireless network. The fly's nervous system does this, however, without having any information about how cells are connected—or, to follow the analogy, about how the network is built.

The researchers studied this process and came up with an algorithm for distributed computing based on it. They say it runs slightly slower than current solutions, but can be applied more broadly because it can work in more difficult conditions.

A screenshot shows a Diaspora user's homepage. Credit: Diaspora

A privacy-focused rival to Facebook, called Diaspora, released its project code last week, providing a glimpse of how it will look and function. The site closely resembles Facebook, but there's a key difference: users store and control all their own data.

Diaspora operates as a decentralized network. This means that users' data--photos, friend lists, statuses, etc.--are hosted on their own computers, or on servers they have access to, which are called "seeds". Diaspora lets users connect directly to other "seeds," and choose what data they want to share, and with whom, to build their social network. Data transferred over Diaspora will be encrypted (except for photos, for now).

The project was launched in April by four NYU students who obtained around $200,000 in funding in June via the fundraising program Kickstarter.

Diaspora may just be a welcome alternative to Facebook for many people. This year Facebook made a succession of a backlash from users.

But first Diaspora will need to address some of the security flaws hackers have found in the system. The alpha release is slated for October, and is expected to include Facebook integration, allowing unhappy users to easily jump ship.