171–180 of 208 posts
I know a naughty person who decades ago hijacked a /8 IPV4 network block when the company that owned it went out of business, by registering their expired domain name and sending in an email from that domain, transferring ownership of the block to himself. It was "hot" so he couldn't just squat on it or sell it in the open, but he laundered it by trading it to some shady company in exchange for free network services…
Interesting work, but IMHO anything that extends the life of IPv4 does active harm. I'd prefer if these addresses stay out of the pool so scarcity increases and forces people to upgrade. IPv4 is fundamentally too small, period. There are already more people and computers on Earth than possible IPv4 addresses even if it were perfectly optimally used. It leads us further down a path in which everything is behind increa…
Turn IPv4 off for one minute a day.
Next month, increase it to two minutes, and so on.
IPv6 adoption will _soar_.
Interesting work, but IMHO anything that extends the life of IPv4 does active harm. I'd prefer if these addresses stay out of the pool so scarcity increases and forces people to upgrade. IPv4 is fundamentally too small, period. There are already more people and computers on Earth than possible IPv4 addresses even if it were perfectly optimally used. It leads us further down a path in which everything is behind increa…
Let's say we claw back /8 networks somehow and let's say we can free up one of those /8 networks per year. Pretty optimistic.
The allocation rate for /8 networks from IANA after conservation measures were put in place was still 5 /8 networks per year. Even if we conserved IP addresses five times better than that, this would still merely freeze the current situation for a few until we run out once again.
There is just no amount of crumb picking that can fix the fact that 32 bits are woefully inadequate.
I know a naughty person who decades ago hijacked a /8 IPV4 network block when the company that owned it went out of business, by registering their expired domain name and sending in an email from that domain, transferring ownership of the block to himself. It was "hot" so he couldn't just squat on it or sell it in the open, but he laundered it by trading it to some shady company in exchange for free network services…
Was it really an /8? I could believe a smaller block...
I have another naughty friend (not the same person) who worked at SRI-NIC implementing and maintaining the ARPANET TACACS database, and as a personal favor, he created our mutual friend Devon his own ARPANET TAC card.
So Devon's free vanity TACACS account was named "DEVON", while most other accounts like mine were something ugly like "DH32", using initials and numbers. One day his boss summoned him to his office and showed him a print-out of the TACACS accounts, with "DEVON" right at the top, and asked him who the hell that was. He sheepishly prevaricated that "DEVON" was actually a control code to turn the printer DEVice ON, which accidentally got printed at the beginning of the list because of a bug in his program missing an escape code, and he would fix it right away. And that's how Devon lost his TAC card. We still tease him about his name as a printer control code, and call him "DEVOFF" when he talks too much. I'm pretty sure his boss knew what was up, but just let it slide.
Network security was a lot different in those days. TAC cards only happened later when they finally put passwords on the dialup TACs/TIPs -- you originally could dial up and connect to any host on the ARPANET without a password, then you could ask nicely for a free tourist account at places like the MIT-AI Lab. It didn't even require any social engineering, just being polite and curious, reading documentation, and following instructions.
I asked BBN nicely about the TIP manual, and they helpfully mailed me a free hardcopy of the "Users Guide for the Terminal IMP", which documented how to take control of other people's sessions and even divert their output by prefixing @ commands by their terminal number! See "Section 5: Unusual uses of the TIP" page 5-7, "Setting Another Terminal's Parameters" and "The DIVERT OUTPUT Command":
https://usermanual.wiki/Document/ADA014398UsersGuidetotheTer...
The guy who originally wrote that TIP manual in 1971 was none other than Will Crowther, who also developed Colossal Cave Adventure with Don Woods! You're in a twisty little maze of IMPs, all different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Crowther_(programmer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
ARPANET Psiber SPACE (circa 1986): This is the network of IMPs (Interface Message Processors) that comprised the ARPANET in 1986. The ARPANET is history now, but thanks to the magic of Pseudo-Scientific Visualization and the ScriptX language and class library from Kaleida Labs, you can now experience what it was like to be free ranging packet hopping around the ARPANET in 1986!
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/arpanet/index-large....
MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73...
“The MIT machines were a nerd magnet for kids who had access to the ARPANET,”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15080221
Keith F. Lynch wrote up a fascinatingly detailed and accurate history of the ARPANET from his perspective:
http://keithlynch.net/history.net.html
Keith mentions that ARPANET TACACS passwords were installed in 1986, and even mentions how Jerry Pournelle got himself kicked off the ARPANET for being obnoxious in 1985, which I can conform with the email messages he mentioned. The first message is about TACACS, and explains how MILNET TACACS was implemented in 1984, before ARPANET TACACS (in 1986). It was addressed to the same DEVON, and HN's own GUMBY chimed in with some salty remarks:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/pourne-smut.htm...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it really an /8? I could believe a smaller block...
Yep, it was a long time ago, and he was one of those "old net boys" who worked on the early ARPANET, but I won't say anything else that might identify him. I have another naughty friend (not the same person) who worked at SRI-NIC implementing and maintaining the ARPANET TACACS database, and as a personal favor, he created our mutual friend Devon his own ARPANET TAC card. So Devon's free vanity TACACS account was name…
"then you could even anity TACACS account "
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My point is that if every company uses real IPs then you can merge networks with no conflicts. 10/8 is fine for home use but not for enterprise networks.
In a word where any medium sized company could just get a /20 network and any enterprise could get a /8 I would agree, but with IPv4 we live in a world where the vast majority of companies don't have anything but 10/8 (and a couple of IPs for public facing stuff). The only real options besides 10/8 are to have been big at the advent of the internet (like IBM or Apple) or misappropriate one of those IP blocks in the h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, it was a long time ago, and he was one of those "old net boys" who worked on the early ARPANET, but I won't say anything else that might identify him. I have another naughty friend (not the same person) who worked at SRI-NIC implementing and maintaining the ARPANET TACACS database, and as a personal favor, he created our mutual friend Devon his own ARPANET TAC card. So Devon's free vanity TACACS account was name…
Your text is garbled: "then you could even anity TACACS account "
The "Arpanet" episode of The Americans featured a classic scene with an academic computer science professor dude bullshitting about the ARPANET -- I'm sure we both know somebody exactly like that from that period, who made eloquent hand-waving metaphors about Virtual Spaces and Post Offices and God and Disembodied Brains, trying to explain to skeptical people how vast and important the ARPANET was (with its 8 enormous bits of address space). But he kinda had a point, calling the PDP-10 "The Beast".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVth6T3gMa0
But the thing The Americans "Arpanet" episode got wrong is that you didn't actually have to slap on a Frank Zappa Soul Patch and a Beatnik Wig, dress up like a janitor, and brutally murder an unlucky grad student to get on the ARPANET, you just had to ask the right people nicely! (But it's still one of the best episodes, with the scene about passing a lie detector test by clenching your anus.)
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Why would that be relevant here (or sibling comment about Apple)? Last I checked except for 9.9.9.0/24 (to quad9) IBM is indeed the assignee for 9.0.0.0/8 from back in 1992. Apple got 17.0.0.0/8 back in 1990. Back in the day a lot of big entities got whole /8 blocks (including of course a lot of the USG but private corps as well). Many of them are still around and fully active, while others are defunct (Halliburton h…
We have run out of freely allocatable IPv4 and equipment isn't catching up to IPv6 - it's very relevant here. Neither Apple, not IBM, actually need that many publicly useful set of IPs. IBM would be smart to sell them off. Apple is probably going to sit on them. (I used to work at IBM and that 9 block was very confusing to me, considering that IBM isn't even that big of a DC operator these days)
It's not equipment...it's purely a financial business decision that this hasn't happened yet.
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Why would that be relevant here (or sibling comment about Apple)? Last I checked except for 9.9.9.0/24 (to quad9) IBM is indeed the assignee for 9.0.0.0/8 from back in 1992. Apple got 17.0.0.0/8 back in 1990. Back in the day a lot of big entities got whole /8 blocks (including of course a lot of the USG but private corps as well). Many of them are still around and fully active, while others are defunct (Halliburton h…
> Why would that be relevant here Because it shows how wasteful these companies operate with resources others are in need of.
It reminds me of the nouveau urbanists that move into places like SF in droves then instantly start complaining that the little old lady down the street, who has lived in the same house for 50 years, is being greedy and wasteful because she doesn't sell her family home to developers who will build 50 shoebox condos in its place.
I suspect most of the "10/8 ought to be enough for anyone" crowd has never worked on a complex enterprise network. Just because a netblock is in use doesn't mean it has to be routable to the Internet.
The problem isn't with IBM. The problem is all the cloud BS -- the 18,000th food delivery app that no one asked for -- isn't using IPv6. And that's just pure laziness on the developers' part.