We have these old glass grids in the sidewalks along College Ave up here in Fort Collins as well. Some are even still in use by restaurants to load inventory from the Cysco / Shamrock trucks.
I used to work for HP and someone explained to me a select few companies got /8's when the internet was still young. HP got one, Compaq had one which HP now also owns. I was basically told if you had a /8 you didn't give it up because of how valuable and rare they now are (this was around 2010, too). GE, Kodak, Apple, and Microsoft were a few other names that came up in that discussion as well.
GE actually sold their entire 3.0.0.0/8 block off to AWS a few years ago.
It's a little awkward since a lot of internal software is still configured to whitelist all access from that space since it was a constant for so long.
We called this threxit internally. (Get it? Three dot exit? ;))
And as far as I know we haven’t stopped threxiting — at least they hadn’t when I left. It turns out unwinding IT systems that have had stable IP addresses for 30+ years in a year or two is tricky business.
Funny enough the highest price point for IP ranges is somewhere between /16 and /24, IIRC.
You can count how many companies need and will be willing to pay 8-9 figures for a /8 without getting to your toes. And subnetting it and selling it to maximize returns is hard work.
But if you’re sitting on a /21? That’ll move before you can count how many IPs are in the block ;)
Because there are only four billion addresses all in all. Every device that wants to be reachable on the Internet needs one. These days, mobile devices don't get a public address anymore and there are all sorts of complications due to it.
We're slowly transitioning to a new scheme with ample address space. But to nobody's surprise it's taking decades longer than envisioned.
Crazy how wasteful it is. I wonder what genius thought to allocate /8 to every company/organization. You don't need to have PhD in statistics and math to know there's more than 250 companies.
I wonder who will think about the genius who disbanded the EPA, rolled back every environmental protection there is and withdrew from the Paris Agreement at the most critical time for our planet in 40 years.
Hindsight is 20/20 and the „Internet“ was a mainly US centered university research project that was thought of as a toy by the far majority.
Everybody thought they‘d have a replacement for the initial assignment once things got serious... for more fun, google ipv6 history ^^
Maybe take a dose of humility and realize that at one point the fastest processors and memory systems in the world weren't capable of holding more than a limited size routing table, while maintaining acceptable line speed?
And that in the interests of working within the physical hardware limitations of the day, very smart engineers made the best choices they could?
What this has to do with anything? I'm saying that giving whole /8 (or I should say class A) to a company is wasteful. And you can only do it no more than a bit over 200 times. You are on the other hand saying that the hardware at the time wouldn't be able to handle all the companies. Why not allocate C blocks, or at very least B blocks? Or are you saying that they doubted hardware of the future would be capable of handling it?
Because of such wasteful allocation we got this "wonderful" thing called NAT which basically killed most of innovation in area of networking and IPv6 which is taking over 20 years to adapt, because most ISPs hold to IPv4 as long as they can because making this switch requires some work.
Well, same thing for the geniuses that made IPs 32 bit when even MACs are 48 bit.
Or, if my networking trainer at a Cisco course is to be believed, the geniuses that made IPv6 subnets contains 65k hosts at a minimum, when due to ARP requests all traffic would be dead at that scale.
You can use anything from that block as well and there are situations where you might want a different loopback address or multiple loopback addresses. /8 of the public address space is massively excessive though.
Just curious, why single out Paint.NET exclusively? These types of ads have a long history all over the Internet, even on more popular sites than this - isn't this more of a Google issue than an individual website operator?
Certain parts of the list of subnets avoided by Hajime strikes me as rather interesting...
Some countries:
- Ukraine; Region Vinnyts’ka Oblast’ /16
- Iran, Islamic Republic of; Region Tehran /16
- Germany Virtela Communications Inc Amsterdam, NL POP /16
- South Africa; Region Gauteng /16
Then:
- General Electric's /8
- both Hewlett-Packard's /8
- US Postal Service's /8
and finally all of the US Department of Defence (obviously)
I would have thought HP would be a goldmine seeing as they put anything and everything on public, proxied IP's. And why not avoid Xerox, Apple, and CIA subnets too while you're at it?
This was my impression as well, especially since the Speedtest.net screenshots show each test was done on WiFi. It seems to me the author has a very loose technical understanding of WiFi and networking in general. I'll usually be among the first to criticize Comcast, but this was just a waste of time.
I'm not sure I understand their use of "large edge providers" in this context - are they insinuating that backbone providers such as Level 3 are already collecting my web traffic when they peer with my ISP? Or is that just a odd reference to "the largest email, search, and social media companies" mentioned further on? The article goes on to talk about common carrier status, so it feels like they mean the former but that just doesn't make sense.
Either way, I think you hit the nail on the head with this statement: "there is greater potential for ISPs if left unchecked and harder for users to avoid."
The CTIA's logic here can be reduced to "they do it so we want to do it too", seemingly framed within their long-time disposition of not considering themselves the "dumb pipes" that they are. Giving residential ISP's access to use this information, combined with what they already have on file for accounting purposes, is a situation just ripe for abuse. The article then goes on to say "What's less clear is whether the FCC will have any authority over ISPs' privacy practices after the rules are eliminated" - so there there may very well be no recourse whatsoever through either the FCC or FTC if or when widespread abuse were to occur. And of course, that's not even to start the age-old discussion about how & where the data is stored (plaintext on an insecure FTP server), who has access to it (all employees & contractors), etc.
I am confident that this change from the FCC will only serve to screw over individual people at the gain of large corporations.
I think what it's trying to convey is that there's absolutely no legal recourse in any capacity for the CIA at this point to try and do any sort of damage control.
That's difficult when a large company like Google or Microsoft use the tools as part of their development process to make their software more secure. These are organizations with a very large megaphone if the CIA did that to their employees.
