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I don't have high hopes for his business prospects if this is how he handles one of the richest companies in the world clearly having a high need for something
by dharmon 7y ago
I don't have high hopes for his business prospects if this is how he handles one of the richest companies in the world clearly having a high need for something his company offers.
Maybe spend less time on Twitter and more on your business model?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- httpz 7y agoThey're basically bragging they have something Apple really wants. Now they have a bunch of people at least interested in what they got. I'll say that's not a bad PR.
- joatmon-snoo 7y agoAlso a great way to throw out massive red flags to any enterprise user that cares about privacy and non-disclosure. IP address data is pretty sensitive information, and throwing it out there like this, even in aggregate, is not OK because of what it shows. No matter how much PR this gets, this goes both ways.
- capkutay 7y agobig companies are also notorious for reaping whatever they can take from smaller companies...and when its time for the smaller company to monetize..."whoops we don't have budget for that."
- mariomariomario 7y agoThis isn't sensitive information. Anyone with a BGP session can have this information. [1] [1] = https://bgp.he.net/AS714#_prefixes https://bgp.he.net/AS714#_prefixes
- vonseel 7y agoPretty amazing that a single company can own an entire block of IP space, if I understand this correctly. Approx how many addresses is this?
- minhazm 7y agoIt's a /8, which is 2^(32 - 8) = 16.7 million address.
- dogecoinbase 7y agoApple has a /8 of IPv4 space (plus a couple other small allocations: https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/APPLEC-1-Z/nets https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/APPLEC-1-Z/nets ), which contains 16777216 addresses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...
- enjoy-your-stay 7y agoWell that should just be about enough for each customer on Apple iWeb Cloud Services to have their own ip address once it gets started.. :')
- jodrellblank 7y ago16.7 million or so. IPv4 is a 32 bit address space, so it tops out around 4.2 billion total. 17.0.0.0/8 is locking down the first 8 bits, giving 2^(32-8) variable bits, or there are only 256 possible first octets and this is one so it’s 1/256th of 4.2 billion addresses.
- koolba 7y agoIt’s even more when you factor in link local and private network ranges.
- manigandham 7y ago
- the8472 7y agoThey're not showing IP addresses, they're showing /8 CIDR blocks, that's very coarse granularity.
- lvh 7y agoThe real information is that Apple is downloading them. Why would they care about granularity?
- semicolon_storm 7y agoIf Apple didn't want that information to be public, they probably shouldn't have downloaded 45TB of data a day from a service they have no paid agreement with.
- lvh 7y agoI don’t disagree, but that’s not responsive to my (or GPs) point. GP implied the aggregate is what made it OK: if anything that made it more sensitive (not everyone would bother to aggregate and look up who owns the IPs).
- dogecoinbase 7y ago> Also a great way to throw out massive red flags to any enterprise user that cares about privacy and non-disclosure. If you want to have a business relationship with someone, pay them.
- manigandham 7y agoThere is no expectation of anything without a paid contract. This isn't a major issue though, no enterprise is going to care about their team freely downloading generic public ML data from the internet. If they did care, they would already have other arrangements.
- arthurfm 7y agoApple publishes that IP range (CIDR address block) in several KB articles on its own website for system administrators to configure firewalls/web filters. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210060 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210060 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT203609 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT203609
- bloudermilk 7y agoThat's rather beside the point. Just because I advertise my IP doesn't mean I want my service providers to disclose my activity publicly.
- black_puppydog 7y agoMaybe I'm misunderstanding something here, but does apple pay them for this?
- lolc 7y agoThe point of this thread is that maybe Apple would pay if they were asked.
- Aissen 7y agoAnd how would you be contacting Apple, from your little 3-person startup in Paris ? You assume they have the means or contacts to do that; and IMHO the tweet is not that aggressive. It's been done before, (e.g Intel has been called out for consuming kernel.org bandwidth and git CPU power) and is the simplest way to have people from inside BigCorp get a message.
- lolc 7y agoNo need to argue with me. I'm only explaining the original point, not making it myself :-) But reviewing the thread I see you your question was in response to someone calling them "service providers" to Apple. So your question was entirely justified and it was me who'd lost context.
- jldugger 7y ago> IP address data is pretty sensitive information, and throwing it out there like this, even in aggregate, is not OK because of what it shows. Apple's ownership of 17.x is so well known it is described in an xkcd: https://xkcd.com/195/ https://xkcd.com/195/.
- Yizahi 7y agoOh, so now IP addresses is PII? When it is inconvenient for FAAGM monster corporations? I seem to remember a few hundred thousands corporate statements that tracking individual IPs is totally ok and not surveillance.
- donkeyd 7y agoIn the Netherlands an IP address is legally PII. I'm not sure this is true for publicly available IP ranges, especially if they're owned by companies though (not like a person would own a range), but probably not.
- distant_hat 7y agoIP addresses are definitely PII under GDPR.
- paranoidrobot 7y agoDo you have a source for that? My understanding is that it is only PII if it's in conjunction with other data in particular ways. When the GDPR came along and IP Addresses were being mentioned as PII, my employer required us to sign a document stating (in part) that we wouldn't access, download or communicate PII data except when specifically authorised to do so. When I refused to sign that and ran it up the flagpole with questions about how I'd do my job which occasionally included things like blocking IPs and dealing with network captures, it (apparently) went to lawyers who came back with a revised document to clarify that IPs wern't PII unless used in specific ways. My point being - that specifically showing the 17/8 range as an aggregate shouldn't violate the GDPR any more than mentioning that it's Apple being the source of traffic.
- Fradow 7y agoNot hard to find: https://eugdprcompliant.com/personal-data/ https://eugdprcompliant.com/personal-data/ state "The conclusion is, all IP addresses should be treated as personal data, in order to be GDPR compliant." Obviously different jurisdiction have a different notion of PII. We agree on the conclusion though: a public range for a company probably doesn't count as PII.
- dageshi 7y agoIf an enterprise user cares about privacy and non-disclosure they'd have a contract with the guy providing the service surely? If they don't... then they really don't care about privacy and non-disclosure that much. Apple obviously didn't.
- viraptor 7y agoYou don't know that this was the only action he took. This was not a great criticism considering how limited our information is right now.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoYou're joking right? Lots of people use twitter. It's not just for tweens anymore. This is as good a way as any to get Apple to take notice and maybe send some bucks their way. It's a half joke/half serious attempt
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tln 7y agoThat tweet will get attention! Finding the right person is everything...
- bredren 7y agoFor better or worse, positioning yourself in a David / Goliath with Apple is almost always newsworthy. Interviews with the Apple underdog makes easy content.
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- bryanrasmussen 7y agoif one of the richest companies in the world is hammering your server without paying for it I would hope they don't get their feelings hurt when the server blocks them until they pay for it. I mean I've worked at some of the riches companies in the world and I think the conversation would have gone like this Me: hey project manager our access to server X where we get the really needed X1 resource has been blocked. Probably cause we are hammering their server (which we probably talked about some months ago) Project manager: hmm a paid account will need to go through approval. Can you tell them we are trying to get a paid account, see if you can get them to give us temporary access, and maybe we can cache the result so we don't hit their server that often. Me: ok I'll do that. In fact I mean if I was on a small company providing a service that a really big company was abusing in such a way that I think they might like to pay for it - I think the smart thing would be to force them to contact me somehow because how do I even call the part of the big company I need to talk to.
- goatinaboat 7y agoCan you tell them we are trying to get a paid account, see if you can get them to give us temporary access, and maybe we can cache the result so we don't hit their server that often. Me: ok I'll do that I’m not sure I would feel comfortable doing that - stringing along a fellow engineer for the benefit of a freeloading PM.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoin the scenario I was envisioning, the big rich company wants to get a paid account now that they need it but to do so they will have to go through a process to get it approved which could take a while.