Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M • Hacker News Board

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#81

Post by davidbild » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 8:47 PM UTC

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #74

KA9Q wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know about Hurricane Electric's free IPv6 tunnel broker? www.tunnelbroker.com. I have used it for a very long time, and it has been very stable and reliable. The only technical requirement is that you have control of a globally routable IPv4 address where you can set up a tunnel endpoint. I.e., "carrier grade NAT" (a contradiction in terms) won't suffice. I still use HE's tunnel even though Spectrum Cable has…

> Do you know about Hurricane Electric's free IPv6 tunnel broker? I was aware of it, but I could swear that I heard news a couple of years ago that they shut it down due to decreased demand, but thank you for letting me know it's still running. I'll see if I can use it!

Unfortunately, streaming sites like Netflix block access from HE tunnels, because they could be used to skirt around region controls (like VPNs).

My ISP (RCN in Chicago) doesn't support IPv6 either. I tried HE, but ran into the above issue. Now I'm seriously considering getting an IPv6 block directly from ARIN (and paying the few hundred a year fees) to use with HE tunnels, to work around the Netflix block.

Would love to find a cheaper solution though.

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#82

Post by zajio1am » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 8:51 PM UTC

mprovost wrote: post #72

Animats wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not. Google says their traffic is now at 30% IPv6, and climbing at 5%/year.[1] Worldwide, Google is undercounting, because they are blocked in China. Google claims that China is 0.27% IPv6, but actually China is around 55%, according to APNIC. Policy goal in China is all IPv6 by 2025. [1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

So it's taken 25 years to get to ~30% adoption. And a few years ago APNIC reported [0] that the rate was going down - I haven't found an updated report. In 2005 the US government mandated that all their computers be v6 connected by 2008. [1] This year they updated the mandate to 80% by 2025. [2] I learned networking in college in 1996 and I remember v6 coming up but so far I've never had to use it and chances are tha…

Considering that World IPv6 Launch was 2012-06-06 and nothing really happened before, it makes more sense to say that it has taken 8 years to get to ~30% adoption.

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#83

Post by politelemon » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

yftsui wrote: post #76

jonnydubowsky wrote: post #40

What will Amazon do with the AMPRNet addresses?

It’s already being used by ec2 in the us-east-1 and us-west-2 regions. https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json

> us-east-1

Everything's in US East 1. I sometimes wonder if it's a disproportionately larger estate that has even has its own gravity, compared to all of the others.

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#84

Post by sedachv » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

KA9Q wrote: post #70

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv6's has a fixed subnet size of 64-bits[1]. A router needs its own subnet, ergo everyone gets their own 64-bit address range. ISPs cannot give each customer a single IPv6 address because that would require each customer to have a single device connected directly to their router with no router in the CPE - basically like how dial-up used to work. There's no demand for a service like that. [1] See https://www.ripe.ne…

It is not true that an ISP cannot give each customer just a single IPv6 address. The Linux box I use as a router gets a single (i.e., /128) address from Spectrum Cable on its upstream interface, and it has to explicitly ask for a separate /64 prefix to advertise on the local interface (this is called prefix delegation, PD). So it's certainly possible for an ISP to give a customer just one IPv6 address. I'm not sure,…

> The Linux box I use as a router gets a single (i.e., /128) address from Spectrum Cable on its upstream interface, and it has to explicitly ask for a separate /64 prefix to advertise on the local interface

Ask for a /56! Spectrum in Los Angeles hands out /56s, and I understand many other residential IPv6 ISPs do as well. You get your own 8 bits worth of subnets on top of /64 for easy SLAAC address assignment. This works "for free" not only because the IPv6 address space is large enough to do this, but more importantly because IPv6 does NOT have any fixed subnet sizes - routing is hierarchical and subnet assignment is transparent. /64 is just the size used by SLAAC address auto-configuration, another bit of IPv6 magic.

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#85

Post by p1mrx » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #74

KA9Q wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know about Hurricane Electric's free IPv6 tunnel broker? www.tunnelbroker.com. I have used it for a very long time, and it has been very stable and reliable. The only technical requirement is that you have control of a globally routable IPv4 address where you can set up a tunnel endpoint. I.e., "carrier grade NAT" (a contradiction in terms) won't suffice. I still use HE's tunnel even though Spectrum Cable has…

> Do you know about Hurricane Electric's free IPv6 tunnel broker? I was aware of it, but I could swear that I heard news a couple of years ago that they shut it down due to decreased demand, but thank you for letting me know it's still running. I'll see if I can use it!

SixXS is the one that shut down: https://www.sixxs.net/main/

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#86

Post by Glanford » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

jcrawfordor wrote: post #32

Without going into too much depth, there was considerable controversy over this planned sale because of questions about ARDC's authority to make decisions involving this IP space (ownership of the IP block was never really assigned to ARDC per se but rather assumed due to lack of another clear owner), some historic bad blood between some amateur radio groups and ARDC (involving in part ARDC's administration of this I…

A considerable controversy exists over the fact that the IPs were allocated to the global amateur radio community to be self-administered, but due to the sale the 044/8 block is now administered by ARIN. The sale hugely benefits an American company, Amazon, with the profits going to ARDC who will likely be biased in benefiting or providing preferential treatment to the American amateur radio community by virtue of themselves being an American company, and despite claims that the sold IPs were unallocated and unused they were in fact partially allocated and used by Europeans.

There could have been a legitimate discussion on whether the amateur radio community really needed some 16M IP addresses and if a partial sale of the resource could have benefited the community more, but any such discussion was denied when the ARDC decided to do backroom deals with IPs they might not legally have had ownership over.

Still, $108 million is a lot more than the 'couple of million' to $50m rumours that were floating about at the time of sale, hopefully they can do some good with the money and buy back some goodwill. Let's just hope the wholesale of prices of IPv4 addresses doesn't rise too much leading to another /10 sale, or if it does that they sell off their own blocks instead of the blocks allocated to the rest of the world.

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#87

Post by mprovost » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 10:04 PM UTC

zajio1am wrote: post #82

mprovost wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's taken 25 years to get to ~30% adoption. And a few years ago APNIC reported [0] that the rate was going down - I haven't found an updated report. In 2005 the US government mandated that all their computers be v6 connected by 2008. [1] This year they updated the mandate to 80% by 2025. [2] I learned networking in college in 1996 and I remember v6 coming up but so far I've never had to use it and chances are tha…

Considering that World IPv6 Launch was 2012-06-06 and nothing really happened before, it makes more sense to say that it has taken 8 years to get to ~30% adoption.

I don't think you get to roll back the odometer and start counting again just because nobody adopted a technology from the start. That's not to say that adoption won't take off at some point - a lot of technologies experience exponential growth after a slow start. But the longer it takes to get started, the bigger the risk that something better will come along.

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#88

Post by criddell » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 10:10 PM UTC

md5person wrote: post #66

criddell wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want IPv6 so I can stop having to faff around with NAT. What makes you think your ISP will give you more than one IP even when they are no longer in short supply? If it's something that has value to you, it's something they will want to be paid for.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted, but I think it's yet another confirmation that this place has gone full Reddit.

wmf does have a point though. When it comes to ISPs and telecom companies, I'm pretty cynical. It's a well earned cynicism though.

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#89

Post by mindslight » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 10:19 PM UTC

rswail wrote: post #4

Is 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.

You've got the incentives backwards. An organizational push for IPv6 would allow a company to free up their IP addresses and sell (/lease) them, actually realizing that valuation.

Re: Sale of amateur radio AMPRnet TCP/IP addresses raised $108M

#90

Post by _16k4 » Mon, Oct 12, 2020, 10:20 PM UTC

schoen wrote: post #71

aidenn0 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are roughly 20 class 8s worth of special addresses, which reduces that by $10 billion or so.

I'm working on a project with John Gilmore to make those special addresses usable. https://github.com/schoen/unicast-extensions (note that most of the content in this repository was written by Dave Taht, who was running this project before; he got patches merged in the mainline Linux kernel that causes it to accept 0/8 and 240/4 as regular unicast addresses) If anyone would like to talk more about any aspect of this,…

Is the intent to get class E routed on the public internet, or just make it available in private networks?

I've seen docker configs squatting on chunks of class E space for the local bridge interface, presumably because Linux takes it, and it doesn't usually clash with the landmines in rfc 1918 space.

I know of at least one company using class E as the new 8/8 ;)