WARNING: Long Post, almost entirely hypothetical.
Somebody is reading these things. I was beginning to think I was talking to myself, but no; these messages are being received by person or persons unknown. I've been getting a number of hits on those orders I uploaded on the 15th, and the traceback shows that the origin is outside the GTI network.
Problem is, that's as far as I can get. Just when it looks like I can identify the access point, I hit a dead end. It doesn't make sense. On the one hand, the access trace shows no encryption whatsoever, not even basic packet encoding. On the other hand, all the traces I run are only supplying the least significant four bytes of the node addresses. No matter what I do, I can't find the rest.
He's totally talking about us. IPv4 addresses are 4 bytes (for example, 74.125.19.147 is 0x4A.0x7D.0x13.0x93, and two hex digits represent one byte). The reason he can't find any more is because no more exists.
This means that whatever protocol the Holonet uses, its addresses are at the very least 29 bits (12 + 4 + 13), and if all of the address parts have integer multiple sizes in bytes, this jumps to 40 bits (5 bytes, 2+1+2). Furthermore, if all the address parts are of equal size (a reasonable assumption), this jumps to 48 bits (6 bytes, 2+2+2).
No wonder he thinks we're expert hackers. If you only have the last 4 bytes of 6 for an address, the number of possible origins for that partial address comes to 65536. There's almost no way to pick out a single hacker among 65 thousand people.
--HYPOTHETICAL STUFF BEGINS HERE--
This also reveals a bit more about the Holonet itself. Assuming that Node Addresses on the Holonet are 6 bytes in size, the maximum number of computers connected to the Holonet at any one time (ignoring the possibility of NAT) is 2^48, or 281,474,976,710,656. This places it between IPv4 (4,294,967,296 (2^32)) and IPv6 (340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 (2^128)). Assuming that there is at least one computer per person, that all computers are connected to the Holonet, and that NAT is not being used, this puts the maximum number of people in the GTVA at 2^48 as well, roughly 281 trillion.
However, there's no way you'd wait until you filled the address space before making a switch. As of Oct 2008, IANA holds roughly 39 unallocated address blocks (each address block holds 16,777,216 addresses.) This means roughly 15% of the IPv4 address space is being held in reserve. Assuming that 15% is the cut-off before you start switching to another addressing method (such as IPv6), this means that the organization that controls the Holonet Address space should have at least 15% of the address space in reserve, or roughly 42,221,246,506,598 addresses. Assuming a similar percentage of reserved addresses, this means that there are at most 200,025,354,348,265 addresses allocated by the Holonet Address Space Governing Body.
The current population of Earth is roughly 6.7 billion, which means that our population to allocated address space ratio is roughly 2.195177713. This means that for every two people on Earth, there is roughly one address allocated for them. In a more technologically advanced society, this number goes down. If we assume that the GTVA ratio is 1 allocated address per person, this puts the theoretical upper limit of the GTVA population at the time of ST:R somewhere around 200 trillion people.
Of course, this number is nowhere near the actual GTVA population. We know that the Lucifer's bombing of Vasuda Prime killed 4 billion Vasudans. Even assuming that it only killed half of those who lived on Vasuda when the Great War started, that puts the total population of Vasuda Prime during its peak at 8 billion. Assuming this was average for a planet (not the best assumption), The GTVA would still need over twenty five thousand inhabited planets to reach the 200 trillion mark.
In short, this was a fun post to write, but it's not very useful.
