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Tech CEO pleads to wire fraud in IP address scheme
- karmanyaahm 5y agoimho ARIN should let these shady companies own IPv4. Only driving up prices of v4 will promote v6 adoption.
- Scoundreller 5y agoIf a government was smart, it would create an IPv4 tax and capture that value for itself. Tax the inelastic and all.
- nlitened 5y agoWhich country’s government and why?
- onphonenow 5y agoFor sure. This has the secondary benefit of freeing up unused space.
- Symbiote 5y agoFreeing up unused IPv4 space has the opposite effect, it delays adoption of IPv6 since it increases supply, thus lowering the price.
- onphonenow 5y agoWhich is fine. IPv6 is a pain in the neck to deal with. There is a fair bit of unused IPv4 space. Put a $5/year tax on IPv4 and a ton would free up.
- b112 5y agoThis is unfair, for those waiting for ipv8.
- f0xtrot 5y agoWoh there, I hear that causes rabies in cancer cells.
- da_chicken 5y agoPrecog DNS is the future of subzero latency.
- greyface- 5y agoThe US DoD owns 14 /8s and appears to be preparing to sell some of that space. Value captured.
- iqanq 5y agoCGNAT exists (and it works well).
- yholio 5y agoCancer exists too, and it's effective at what it does.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoCGNAT provides positive value to humans. Do you have a point to make?
- karmanyaahm 5y agoCGNAT does provide value in our current v4 situation, but it's far from ideal. Not having NATs allows for more decentralization (p2p connections, self-hosting), and saves the resources - unnecessary energy and compute - that NAT consumes
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throaway46546 5y agoDumpster fires exist (and are a valuable source of heating).
- MertsA 5y ago>CGNAT exists (and well... it "works"). FTFY. CGNAT means consumers get to be behind a double NAT, no port forwarding, poor P2P support, etc. CGNAT is the IPv4 solution of last resort.
- imdsm 5y agoIPv6 was poorly designed, and will never be fully adopted because of this. Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck between IPv4 and IPv6 when really, what we need is a new solution, something better designed and easier to adopt.
- camkego 5y agoThat's a strong statement about IPv6, is there an article or paper you are referring to?
- imdsm 5y agoNot really. Just personal experience. And I think that's the key point here - coming up with a design that is fit for the world (wide web), and not just academically viable. I suppose the evidence I would give to back up my statement is that if it was well designed, it would have been adopted. As it stands, I only find it is supported among the more distinguished services that I use.
- vore 5y agoThere's a difference between "poor design" and "difficult to adopt", and I think confounding the two doesn't make sense. For another example, Python 3 has much better design than Python 2, and the difficult adoption a result of having people fix what they had written using the poor Python 2 design, and making it easier to adopt would have meant preserving the poor choices. I don't know enough about IPv4 vs IPv6 to make a judgment in this particular case, but I don't think your argument broadly in itself here follows.
- Plasmoid 5y agoI've heard people complaining how hard IPv6 but I've never see a plan that is actually easier than migrating to IPv6. It's always massive CGNAT investment or making non-backwards compatible changes to IPv4 that is somehow "easier" to work with.
- kmonsen 5y ago
- sebmellen 5y agoThe VPN connection here intrigues me. Do these VPN companies know how their IPs are being procured/by whom? > In a 2020 interview, Golestan told KrebsOnSecurity that Micfo was at one point responsible for brokering roughly 40 percent of the IP addresses used by the world’s largest VPN providers This would be an interesting deep dive for a tech-focused investigative journalist.
- walrus01 5y agoin my opinion almost all VPN companies are shady/gray-market entities, so yes, they absolutely know. the colocation hosts and regional ISPs that will accept VPN operators as dedicated server and 1U server colocation customers are towards the more suspicious end of the hosting segment market spectrum, in my experience. dig hard enough on a modern vpn hosting company with a slick marketing presence and you'll find like, a cypriot corporation with a cyprus bank account run by a guy who 15 years ago was in the adult website hosting business, who currently lives and works remotely from cambodia. Or similar.
- AnthonyMouse 5y agoThis is kind of the nature of the market. On the one hand, it's effectively a commodity, so there is a lot of competition. On the other hand, the entire point is to protect the privacy of the customer. So if you're doing it right and any of your customers are actually in need of that privacy protection, you're going to be taking flack from angry jerks who don't like that you're providing it. The same thing happens to people hosting adult websites, so it's the same kind of people who are willing to put up with that in exchange for money.
- duskwuff 5y ago> On the other hand, the entire point is to protect the privacy of the customer. I'm not so sure. As far as most of these companies are concerned, "the entire point" is to collect customers' money. The quality of the service they're providing is secondary, beyond that it has to be good enough that customers won't leave -- and the privacy properties of that service are even less important, since most customers aren't equipped to evaluate that.
- broknbottle 5y agoI dealt with this guy at a previous role. There was always something off with the LOAs they provided. They came off as somebody that would just badger until they found somebody who’d do something to get them to go away.
- loeg 5y agoWhat does LOA stand for in this context?
- RKearney 5y agoLetter of Authorization
- opportune 5y agoNot excusing his lying or fraud but this is an excellent way to get things done even in ethical contexts.
- frupert52 5y agoIt’s a short sighted and poor long term strategy. Eventually no one wants to work with you regardless of whether you can get things done. Much better to build relationships which enable you to get things done by virtue of others wanting to look after you.
- lovemenot 5y agoEven further, it can be reasonably argued that there is no ethical context for such behaviour. For those on the demanding side, it can be a badge of honour not to take "no" for an answer. While those on the other side, are being deliberately placed between a rock and a hard place. Just for another's benefit. If not unethical, it is at least dishonourable.
- lkrubner 5y agoAs the years go by, I have found that some of people who gave me a bad feeling later turn out to be even worse than I first suspected. In my book "How To Destroy A Tech Startup" I describe this guy Milton, who is the villain of the story. He did many things that seemed vaguely creepy, most of which I didn't put in the book because it didn't seem relevant. But I just recently learned he was in prison on charges of child pornography. So, yes, wow, my instincts were right. There was something creepy about him and eventually his creepiness turned out be far worse than I first guessed. The story of Milton is the most extreme example I can give, but I've worked with others who I could tell milder stories about. I had a bad feeling about them, and 10 years later, when I learn even more, the facts justify the bad feeling I had about them.
- WalterGR 5y agovs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29844651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29844651 - “How to acquire 1,024 public IPv4 addresses which are worth $60K for $500”. Interesting.
- tyingq 5y agoIt is shady, but it's interesting that it's "wire fraud" to me. The laws allow for shell companies, and I assume he was paying. And the thing he was skirting feels more like a TOS, contract rule, etc. It doesn't seem much different from things large companies do for tax purposes, etc. They can sentence up to 20 years per count for wire fraud.
- ChrisLomont 5y agoIf he's fraudulently making up people to fake ownership then it's not what companies do legally. It's fraud.
- techsupporter 5y agoYou can set up all of the shell companies you want, but what you can't do is fake notarized statements and induce others to take actions based on them by transmitting them "over the wires." That's what he is being charged with here, because otherwise ARIN would have said "all of these companies are owned by the same person and our rules don't permit address allocations in this manner."
- jrochkind1 5y ago> Each of those shell companies involved the production of notarized affidavits in the names of people who didn’t exist. As a result, Lydon was able to charge Golestan with 20 counts of wire fraud — one for each payment made by the phony companies that bought the IP addresses from ARIN. That's the part that becomes wire fraud, says the OP. Faked notarizations of people who don't exist.
- cm2187 5y agoThere is hardly anything that doesn't evolve the internet one way or another. Haven't all the frauds become wire fraud now? Does this legislation still make any sense?
- andreareina 5y agoI'm not bothered. It's still fraud, and sometimes it's the only thing that sticks (c.f. the Holmes trial).
- starwind 5y agoLOL that picture of him is awful. The longer I look the worse it gets
- shard 5y agoAt first I thought it was a weirdly inept clothing ad, until I realized it was actually the person being discussed in the article. Looking at that picture, I have to actively tell myself to not judge someone by just one photo.
- rambambram 5y agoHaha same reaction here, it's awful. When you search for another pic it gets better.
- mavelikara 5y agoFrom 2020 ("That time I was employed by a criminal organization"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22360642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22360642
- nativeit 5y agoThe email group thread where Ron Guilmette (security researcher cited at the end of the article) is confronting an Israeli businessman about the alleged theft of the AFRINIC IP blocks is/was available. I ran across it while looking for information related to an aggressive bot scanning ports on my Linodes that happened to be using a /20 involved with the theft. It's a riveting thread for anyone interested in that kind of thing, I'll post back if I can find it again.
- nativeit 5y agohttps://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-September/102971.html https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-September/102... That might drop you right into the middle of it, but that's the thread in question.
- jlgaddis 5y agoHere's the first message (of tha particular thread) from Ron, with all of the background info: https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-September/102944.html https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-September/102...
- joering2 5y ago..and then there is a background on Ron... https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/anti-abuse-wg/2020-April/005662.html https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/anti-abuse-wg/2020-A...
- jhugo 5y agoNot sure I would call that "background" so much as "barely coherent rant with no evidence for its many wild accusations". Fun read though.
- wolverine876 5y agoI never thought about it this way before: Are we in a dirty industry? Perhaps we should be cleaning up the place, as a responsibility and as enlightened self-interest.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y agoIt's far too big of an industry to call it dirty or clean. This guy was doing dirt, which didn't work out too well for him. And cleaning this type of fraud up is definitely squarely the responsibility of law enforcement, not random industry participants. Most industry participants are just building things that there is market demand for. That is not necessarily enlightened, but it's also no worse than anything anyone in any other industry does.
- wolverine876 5y ago> cleaning this type of fraud up is definitely squarely the responsibility of law enforcement, not random industry participants According to who? Law enforcement is a last resort, and it reports to the people. People are responsible for their own communities. We live here, we benefit from it.
- hericium 5y agoI wonder how large is IPv4 allocation business' impact on the stallment of IPv6 adoption.