Interesting historical note: AMPRNet was one of the first times that the Internet's NIC had to decide if an ambiguously categorized entity belonged in .org, .net, or would have its own top-level domain (in this case .ampr)
Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M
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Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M
#12So we've now had several interesting cases of how breaking changes to something popular (even foundational) are made and how that works out:
- Perl 5 to Perl 6. I think this was an unmitigated disaster. 20 years ago Perl 5 had a lot of users. I'm pretty sure it's completely irrelevant now;
- Python 2 to Python 3. It's been almost 12 years and we still have Python 2. Personally I think a lot of bad decisions were made here, like getting rid of s' and u' string prefixes (before adding it back in Python 3.3). Unfortunately I think Python 3 is now in a state where each minor release makes language changes.
Which brings us to IPv6. It's been 25 years and we're still asking "are we there yet?" The biggest lesson for me is that IPv6 is a classic example of the Second System Syndrome.
Faced with the limited prospect of making future breaking changes, everything got thrown into IPv6 without solving the two problems that actually matters (ie roaming, reliable UDP). The only real problem with IPv4 is address space exhaustion. And we've had decades of NAT to kick that can down the street with probably decades to come.
I honestly don't know how this will ever happen.
Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M
#13The precise numbers are 4,194,304 * $26.13 = $109,597,164 - broker fee of $545,260 = $109,051,904 net.
broker fee of $545,260
boy am I in the wrong business... I'm imagining something like: "Hey you want to buy?" ... "Yes!"... cha ching!
Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M
#14> The bottom line is that the sale netted us about US $108M, and we expect to grant at least US $5 million per year on an ongoing basis, depending on how our investments perform, to a wide variety of Internet and amateur radio digital communication projects. To date we have made about $2.5 million in grants, so we're only getting started."
Provided they stay true to the goal, and don’t capture the money for themselves via “administration costs”, this this is probably a good thing for amateur radio in the long term.
Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M
#15Is there any wonder that moving to IPv6 is delayed? Assuming an average $25/address, that's $400m/class A. Some of the organizations that own a class A: Apple, Ford, Softbank, Daimler, Prudential, Comcast. Softbank needs the money and the others wouldn't sniff at $300m+. Not sure how long the 100m odd addresses would last though.
Comcast started rolling out IPv6 across their network a long time ago. They hit 100% support on their broadband network in 2014. They run a lot of the own stuff on IPv6, such as on-demand video on their set-top boxes. I think any home modem/router that they support that did not support IPv6 hit EOL long ago and was replaced.
There may be some class A owners who are trying to hold back IPv6 so they can make money off their class A, but Comcast isn't one of them.
Apple has long had IPv6 support in their operating systems, so I don't think they have been trying to hold it back either.
Ford, Softbank, Daimler, and Prudential? It is not immediately obvious to me if they could do anything to hold it back even if they wanted to.
Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M
#16Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M
#17This seems like a prudent decision on the part of the ARDC, and potentially a good boost to lots of interesting radio-adjacent projects.
Hopefully they can maintain their organisational culture. Large amounts of money can be very damaging to organisations which aren't set up to handle it.
Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not over licensed RF links in most countries, unless you publish the private key.
Publishing the private key only allows for spoofing, not decrypting, unless you fail to use ephemeral Diffie-Hellman, which seems to be the default for most clients nowadays.
Yep, TLS with forward secrecy is not legal to use on ham RF links. Same with SSH.
Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M
#19Anyone have pointers to the history of IP addresses becoming tradeable, as opposed to just being allocations and up to registrar to reallocate?
It appears to have started in 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing
Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M
#20So we've now had several interesting cases of how breaking changes to something popular (even foundational) are made and how that works out: - Perl 5 to Perl 6. I think this was an unmitigated disaster. 20 years ago Perl 5 had a lot of users. I'm pretty sure it's completely irrelevant now; - Python 2 to Python 3. It's been almost 12 years and we still have Python 2. Personally I think a lot of bad decisions were made…
>everything got thrown into IPv6 without solving the two problems that actually matters
That would arguably be much better suited to a layer 4 solution. SCTP has solved both of those problems and is now 2 decades old. I have in the past harped on what a shame it is that QUIC was built, basically reinventing features of SCTP poorly. SCTP could still be viable over the open internet on IPv6 if it's done before the inevitable protocol ossification happens on IPv6 just like IPv4 when middlebox vendors can't be bothered to support passing traffic other than TCP, UDP, and ICMP.