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Not every U.S. telephone number beginning with 555 is fake

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Re: Not every U.S. telephone number beginning with 555 is fake

#21
post #14

Similar: not every 192.x.x.x IP address is in a private (RFC1918) network.

This is interesting. Do you know who controls these public addresses? I know in the past I've seen filtered connections to 192.x.x.x thinking that it would get only internal connections then. The owners of these public addresses could wreak havoc in some places.

RFC1918[1] defines 192.168.x.x as the private address space, so anything else in the 192.x.x.x range would not fall under that specification.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1918#page-4

Re: Not every U.S. telephone number beginning with 555 is fake

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that same line of thinking, who gets the email @test.com?

And the mail for 123 Fake Street?

Presumably whoever lives here http://www.trulia.com/property/3075968468-123-Fake-St-York-P...

Re: Not every U.S. telephone number beginning with 555 is fake

#24
post #2

What's next? EXAMPLE.COM becomes an actual site?

Have you looked at it recently?

I suppose a lot depends on your definition of the word 'actual', but there's definitely definitely something there replying on port 80, if nothing else.

Re: Not every U.S. telephone number beginning with 555 is fake

#25
post #14

Similar: not every 192.x.x.x IP address is in a private (RFC1918) network.

This is interesting. Do you know who controls these public addresses? I know in the past I've seen filtered connections to 192.x.x.x thinking that it would get only internal connections then. The owners of these public addresses could wreak havoc in some places.

There's a university with a 192.16x.x.x allocation who has written about the confusion it's caused.

Nothing that special about it from a CIDR point of view -- but is rather confusing to us humans when written as a dotted quad.

Github's GITHUB-NET4-1 is on 192.30.252.0/22, which is what reminded me of this.

Re: Not every U.S. telephone number beginning with 555 is fake

#26
post #14

Similar: not every 192.x.x.x IP address is in a private (RFC1918) network.

This is interesting. Do you know who controls these public addresses? I know in the past I've seen filtered connections to 192.x.x.x thinking that it would get only internal connections then. The owners of these public addresses could wreak havoc in some places.

I have a 192.40.x.x address assigned to a VPS I have from a small random hosting company in colorado.

Re: Not every U.S. telephone number beginning with 555 is fake

#27
post #14

Similar: not every 192.x.x.x IP address is in a private (RFC1918) network.

This is interesting. Do you know who controls these public addresses? I know in the past I've seen filtered connections to 192.x.x.x thinking that it would get only internal connections then. The owners of these public addresses could wreak havoc in some places.

I got 3 192.x.x.x addresses from Ramnode for one of my nodes. They can't be that rare.

Re: Not every U.S. telephone number beginning with 555 is fake

#28
Not only are they not fake, but you can have one today!

Callcentric is an "internet phone service", which has been around for at least 8+ years. They allow you to search for unused phone numbers [1] in various area codes [2]. I searched for unused 555 numbers in the following area codes (213, 310, 626, 818) all have some available! So, you could create an account, and for something like $3/month, forward this 555 number to your existing number [3].

[1] http://www.callcentric.com/did_lookup.php?type=check_by_us_n...

[2] http://www.bennetyee.org/ucsd-pages/area.html

[3] http://www.callcentric.com/dids/phone_number_sale

Re: Not every U.S. telephone number beginning with 555 is fake

#29
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting. Do you know who controls these public addresses? I know in the past I've seen filtered connections to 192.x.x.x thinking that it would get only internal connections then. The owners of these public addresses could wreak havoc in some places.

There's a university with a 192.16x.x.x allocation who has written about the confusion it's caused. Nothing that special about it from a CIDR point of view -- but is rather confusing to us humans when written as a dotted quad. Github's GITHUB-NET4-1 is on 192.30.252.0/22, which is what reminded me of this.

Heck, the University of Waterloo has 129.97.0.0/16, and I see people get confused all the time between 192.168. (private) and 129. (publicly routed).

Re: Not every U.S. telephone number beginning with 555 is fake

#30
I have the phone number 5555 5555 in a capital city - it's unlisted, never advertised, and still gets about 10 calls a day, mostly from babies and drunks. If you do get a number like this, and want to use it, I would suggest putting it behind an IVR and asking callers to press * to continue. We dump all the non compliant users to a voicemail, which is entertaining to listen to once in a while.

When we got the number first, it was not possible to call it from the major mobile networks as they had blacklisted it as a test number!

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