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Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#131

Post by withinboredom »

MereInterest wrote: post #123
dunmalg wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work in intelligence. "Secrecy creep" has long been a serious problem inside DoD. How information get classified has largely been left up to low level federal bureaucrats, people my father used to angrily refer to as "big haired women from Mississippi". Basically, they are low level federal office drones, with minimal knowledge about the actual content of classified programs, who re left to determine how th…

Don't answer this if it isn't legal to answer, but do you have any examples you can share? I can entirely picture the process, and completely believe that it happens, but I don't have a mental image of what the end result looks like.

From my personal experience: a cat died. A very non-important cat. It was the only thing of note in my report.

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#132

Post by GekkePrutser »

bagacrap wrote: post #106
_abox wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome also really works well on the desktop. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to get it working on Firefox on mobile (the chrome repo also contains the FF one now ;) ). Thanks for the archive link. PS I understand that websites need to monetise.. But getting a subscription to read one linked article per month or so is just not going to happen. The sites I use a lot I…

perhaps you should consider getting a subscription one month per year and using the extension the other 11 if you think that's a more fair price to pay

Good point. But I'm not sure if I'd do this with the Washington post. I wouldn't normally read this unless it's linked from somewhere else (I live in Europe).

I actually had an online subscription to the Guardian for a while because they were really good on the privacy advocacy news. I wanted to support a paper with deep dives into privacy issues. However the last couple of years I got annoyed with too much Brexit stuff (not surprising for a UK based paper obviously but as I don't live in the UK I don't want to read about it every day). So I let it lapse.

But there's another thing holding me back. If I subscribe I have to give all my personal details. I don't want to have too many sites where I have that around, data leaks are now happening too often. Even a couple days ago I got yet another notification from haveibeenpwned (this time it was the Spanish company phonehouse.es that was hit).

Anyway, I just wanted to say that while I use paywall avoiding tools I'm not blind to the problem of monetisation and the cost of real journalism :)

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#133

Post by GekkePrutser »

fwn wrote: post #116
_abox wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome also really works well on the desktop. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to get it working on Firefox on mobile (the chrome repo also contains the FF one now ;) ). Thanks for the archive link. PS I understand that websites need to monetise.. But getting a subscription to read one linked article per month or so is just not going to happen. The sites I use a lot I…

You need Firefox 68 ( fennec 68.11.0 ) to use extensions from the open internet. Mozilla axed general extension support in later versions of their android browser. I just keep it around next to my regular browser for the occasional paywall.

Thanks, I'm not sure if I want to run a browser that old though... Security-wise. Even if it's probably ok now, it's never going to get updated.

I wish they just supported sideloading of extensions. I wonder how developers are supposed to test their stuff on mobile.

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#134

Post by dwarfsandstuff »

withinboredom wrote: post #131
MereInterest wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't answer this if it isn't legal to answer, but do you have any examples you can share? I can entirely picture the process, and completely believe that it happens, but I don't have a mental image of what the end result looks like.

From my personal experience: a cat died. A very non-important cat. It was the only thing of note in my report.

A random cat's death got to be top secret? Oh gawd...

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#135

Post by jasonhansel »

dannyw wrote: post #43
jasonhansel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe DoD is trying to catch security flaws caused by traffic intended for their own internal networks accidentally reaching the public internet? Advertising those IPs publicly and logging all traffic could be a good way of detecting such bugs in DoD systems.

It also explains the lack of public commentary.

Indeed. Publicly commenting on it would expose the potential vulnerability (i.e. the accidental leakage of traffic onto the public internet).

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#136

Post by GekkePrutser »

gitowiec wrote: post #107
pelagic_sky wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Had to use Safari on mobile as the captcha did not play well with Firefox.

Google recaptcha? I get the same problem continuously on FX desktop and Android :(

Really? I use Firefox literally all the time (with the minor exception of some internal work sites where they require Edge) and while all captchas annoy me to no end, recaptcha does work perfectly fine on Firefox even with uBlock origin and pihole running. Both on Desktop (I use FF on Windows, Mac, Linux and FreeBSD :) ) and on Android.

What is the problem you're seeing?

In fact I really rarely have any issues with FF whatsoever, and if I do it is always either uBlock Origin blocking a little bit too much, or a site that specifically rules out Firefox (like https://business.apple.com ), probably for no real reason other than not bothering to test their site with it.

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#137

Post by kdmdmdmmdmd »

mattkrause wrote: post #63
cronix wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were to guess, because private companies aren't subject to FOIA requests. It's a little trick the gov't has been doing for some time now to avoid legitimate, legal scrutiny by the public.

Outsourcing to private companies also (somehow) appeases the "small government" folks, even when it costs more/works worse.

Somehow? Money the spent is money in the economy, not in the government. It’s pretty easy to understand, I think.

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#138

Post by dwarfsandstuff »

leesalminen wrote: post #122
imwillofficial wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always hated seeing “FBI Surveillance Van” Made me wanna climb out of my FBI Surveillance Van and have a word with them.

Ha! “Unmarked white van” is the WiFi name at my local dog daycare. I got a good laugh.

My wifi is called nsa_net

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#139

Post by [deleted] »

echelon wrote: post #6

I want to reply to the following dead comment [1] > Aah, the wapo, that's Bezos, isn't it? It actually doesn't seem that unreasonable to me that a company as large as Amazon sees vast, unused resources held by the government. They publish an article as a sort of "wink wink, nudge nudge" to see if they can get it put up for auction. In fact, I'd be shocked if someone at Amazon or another company hasn't tried to ask th…

[deleted]

Re: Millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20

#140

Post by icedchai »

tiernano wrote: post #110

when digging though some of the IPs, i came across 22.0.0.0/8, which if you look at the DNS tab of bgp.he.net ( https://bgp.he.net/net/22.0.0.0/8#_dns ) shows a LOT of people are "using" those IPs... which means a LOT of people wont be happy that their sites, email, dns, etc, are now essentially being blackholed... for me (I run AS204994), the traffic hits Frankfurt (i peer with HE there) goes over their network thou…

If they're using them for internal networks, they'll (probably) work just like they did before. It's likely many folks are using these as like private RFC-1918 addresses.
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