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Shell companies that hoard and sell IPv4 addresses
- hansjorg 10y agoCan't argue that it's fraudulent, but if those addresses truly are "dark" and it's not possible to contact the owners, maybe it's not so bad that they're doing this?
- extremescholar 10y agoThe article calls them criminals, but they seem to be providing a valuable service...
- c3534l 10y agoThe same can be said of drug dealers.
- chris_va 10y agoFirst ping is always free.
- hueving 10y agoA better comparison would be someone who steals unused houses and sells them to people.
- hga 10y agoThere's a legal real estate doctine for this, based on the idea that it indeed can be a good thing to bring unused property back into use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession
- hartpuff 10y agoSo "crims" (if they're criminals why isn't it a simple case of prosecuting them and confiscating their ill-gotten gains?) are making otherwise unusable IPv4s usable? That seems to be the bottom line to this story.
- scurvy 10y agoFWIW anyone can get a /22 from RIPE right now. Just need to pay that 1500 euro membership. Not that a /22 is huge but it beats dealing with sketchy people.
- ryanlm 10y agoHow exactly does one buy IP addresses? Do you have to run your own BGP instance and peer with others? Could I, for personal use by a /22 and control my own network? How much does that cost to do?
- scurvy 10y agoFirst you need to get a ASN. Not hard these days with 4 byte AS support. NRC and yearly fees for this. Next you need to either get a direct allocation from a RIR (RIPE, ARIN, APNIC, etc) or buy/transfer IP's from another party. Depending on the IP's history, it may or may not be subject to transfer regulations (showing a need for it). Once you've got an AS and IP's, you can advertise them out multiple ISP's with BGP. If you've only got a single provider, you can have them announce it for you and statically route it to your side of the interface.
- rhizome 10y agoNot exactly "anyone," you have to demonstrate a need for a /22 without lying.
- scurvy 10y agoNo. Not true. All RIPE participants can get another /22 right now. [0] "We are now allocating from our last /8 block of IPv4 address space. This means that LIRs can request one final /22 IPv4 allocation (1,024 addresses) from the RIPE NCC." It's part of RIPE's IPv4 depletion playbook. They're in the 'you can't get anything larger than a /22, but everyone gets one last /22' phase. [0] https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/ipv4/request-an-ipv4-22-from-the-last-8 https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/ipv4/request-an-ipv...
- 10y ago
- Cuuugi 10y agoHow does this differ from Ticket Scalpers? (that noone seems to care about legislating against) Edit: I am an idiot
- jdalgetty 10y agoSeems strange to call them criminals.
- cdelsolar 10y agoWhy does it keep saying criminals?
- Figs 10y agoBecause they're falsely claiming to be the original registrant where invalid contact details exist in order to take over control of address blocks so they can re-sell them. (At least that's my interpretation of what appears to be going on based on text later in the article.)
- djschnei 10y agoSeems like a market economy is forming for a finite resource... unprecedented... how could we have predicted this?! lol @ "criminals"
- dang 10y agoSince everyone is objecting to the word "criminals" (and indeed the article is strangely all "criminals criminals criminals") we've taken that out of the title above.
- Figs 10y agoMaybe it's finally time for people to get serious about IPv6?