Why are home networks prefixed with 192.168?

The short answer An Internet spec called RFC 1918 reserved a few blocks of addresses for "private" networks, which is what you should use when you don't have enough public, routable IP addresses to go around. 192.168/16 was one of those blocks. The long answer (and then some) Back in the good old days, everything on the Internet got its own public, routable, "real" IP address that almost never needed to change. It was awesome because anytime you wanted to run some cool new app that implemented …