Bloke accused of conning ARIN out of 750,000 IPv4 addresses worth $9m+ to peddle on black market

A fella who allegedly conned his way into pocketing 750,000 IPv4 addresses has not only lost them, but now faces a lengthy stretch behind bars in America, if convicted. Amir Golestan, 36, of Charleston, South Carolina, was charged [PDF] on Wednesday with 20 counts of wire fraud, each punishable by up to 20 years in jail: he is …

[Jellied Eel]

Ah, ARIN..

Golestan allegedly figured out how to game the system by setting up small companies with different directors and putting in repeat requests for as little as 8,000 addresses at a time.

Golestan probably isn't alone in doing this, especially after ARIN failed to act when speculators and secondary markets appeared. OK, so MS buying Nortel's 'asset' probably didn't help given MS can afford even more lawyers than ARIN. But ARIN's traditionally been generous with it's allocations, at least compared to the other RIRs, and I doubt they'd be too impressed with handing out multiple /19s on what I suspect were limited (or potentially familiar) looking justifications.

The good news I guess is if speculating becomes fraud, it may result in more v4 space becoming recoverable.

[david 12]

Does ARIN have more IP4 addresses available?

I keep on reading that "now we really have run out". And then reading the same thing again later.

[robidy]

Re: Does ARIN have more IP4 addresses available?

Not everyone sells the IP addresses on the black market...some hand them back.

[Lee D]

Re: Does ARIN have more IP4 addresses available?

Many major allocations are gone, now.

What you have is what there is, effectively, if you're a huge gatherer of IP addresses. There are few to be had, and they are expensive, and you can't just request more. There's the main block allocations (IANA), and then each regional numbering organisation (e.g. AfriNIC, ARIN, RIPE) etc. holds millions of addresses (as they should, they always had to hold a reserve to account for sudden demand), who then issues them to ISPs etc. in smaller groups, who then issue them to customers etc. in tiny groups of single allocations.

But, any sensible organisation in that chain is now reclaiming all the IPs that they can, because the top-levels (IANA) and some regional-levels (AfriNIC) aren't giving them out any more. They are hoarding what they already have. They may still issue to those below them, but on much stricter terms, and they have millions in reserve, but those reserves are no longer replenished. Once they go, there is no authority to go to who will give them more (hence the black-market trade in them).

It's like all the oil in the world has been extracted and there literally is no more left. It doesn't mean that the world collapses overnight. There are regional stocks and reserves, which are rationed and controlled and eeked out, and raise in value by doing so. But even some regions are now "oil-less" promoting a black market for the resource, and it's only a matter of time before the others follow suit as they have a limited resource and natural growth means they are still allocating them out on a daily basis.

ISPs are now using carrier-grade NAT, so all their customers only get an "private" address and not a world-accessible address. This buys time. Numbering authorities are stricter on allocation, this buys time. IP addresses are sold back and reused, this buys time. And then you have Apple, et al, sitting there with some stupendously large allocation that could breathe life back into the main registries for a few more years, but they're not giving it up and neither are they using it to any significant extent.

We're all living on borrowed time on IPv4. The source dried up, and we're Mad-Maxing over the scraps leftover until they run out too.

(And then you have The Reg, still publishing articles on IPv6 and STILL not actually even piloting it alongside their IPv4 site.)

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Does ARIN have more IP4 addresses available?

Many major allocations are gone, now.

What you have is what there is, effectively, if you're a huge gatherer of IP addresses. There are few to be had, and they are expensive, and you can't just request more.

Kind of.. Officially, IP addresses aren't expensive. It's scarcity and speculation that's allowed that to happen. But long gone are the days where you could get a /8 by convincing Jon Postel (RIP) that you'd use it wisely. Much like real estate, the early colonisers ended up with a lot of the prime real estate though. So businesses became 'class A' networks when they wouldn't be able to justify those allocations now. And generally refuse to hand back addresses once they've got them. DoD being a notable and neighborly exception.

Some of the bloat was technical, ie a 'need' for /24 or better if you wanted to multi-home to get a chance of getting through ISP's prefix filters. Or if you want to be a service provider and delegate your own addresses, which is probably how this lot got /19s. But the result has been manufactured scarcity and increased value, when contractually IPv4 addresses aren't owned by the entities they're delegated to.

Result's been huge growth in routing table sizes due to disaggregation, but luckily routers now have >256MB to hold routing tables & better processing to recompute when the Internet has a bad day. Plus the adoption of NAT and CGNAT has reduced the need for uniquely routable global address space.

IANA and the RIR's could perhaps do more to recover address space, but policy is that v4's sold out, so get moving on v6. So no real incentive for them to recover more, or release some of the unassigned address space IANA's sitting on. OK, that may break some internal stuff, but officially in a v4 world, that space shouldn't be used until it's assigned.

[AdrianMontagu]

Using IPv6

People would use IPv6 if it was simpler. Using hex is not as easy as binary. There are also various add ons. The golden rule is keep it simple.

[Baldrickk]

Re: Using IPv6

For the end user? who cares? Turn it on, and they just type in "facebook.com" and let the system do the heavy work.

Unless you're actually dealing with the addresses themselves, it has no real impact.

Binary/Hex is just a representation of the same data. One isn't easier than the other. Do you type your IPv4 addresses in binary?

"IPv6 day" was in 2011. Its about time we announced a switch date and just bit the bullet.

[Lee D]

Re: Using IPv6

Do you honestly think that even 1% of 1% of people even handle an IP address or know what it is?

Hex is simpler to check, to type, to copy, to handle than binary - nobody deals in binary for IPv4 anyway! I'm a mathematician and the times I actually need to subnet, I just use an online tool - even though I'm perfectly capable of masking the binary myself, nobody WANTS to use binary anyway.

IPv6 is there, it works, it's in every major OS, it's REQUIRED in DOCSIS (cable Internet, since 2006! 13 YEARS!) and 3G/4G services (even if it's not used, but your phone probably already uses it and you don't even know). There is no excuse, but certainly "hex vs binary" doesn't even come close to consideration.

Any IT guy managing any significant number of networks or computers barely touches a binary number in his life, and probably deploys entire networks with only two or three locations even containing or requiring an IP address (DHCP ranges, Gateway machine, DNS servers). I honestly don't know, care or need to know the IP of any of the hundreds of machines, dozens of servers (virtual or otherwise), VPNs, outside servers or anything else that I manage. I copy paste the output from my DNS server when I need to (e.g. I nslookup server.domain.com, copy the IP and paste that into the VPN or whatever - and that's assuming it's so dumb that it can't resolve that itself!)

And... internally... it doesn't matter WHAT I use. All I need is a gateway that does 4->6 translation, that's it. Done. Online, forever, via IPv6, who cares what my internal numbering is? One device, one IP address range, plugged in once, when I set up an Internet connection / router. Most people *never* have to do even that. They get a router in the post, plug it in, join the specified wifi, and they are up and running. There is literally no change required to that process to allow every home user to use IPv6... all that changes is the *external* address, you're all still using 192.168.x.x internally anyway!

The poor arguments trotted out against IPv6 are honestly pathetic. Turn it on. Add an AAAA record (if you can manage DNS, you can copy/paste an IPv6 address from the output of ip addr/ipconfig). Ensure the final connection upstream has an IPv6 address and appropriate network translation (which you're GUARANTEED doing anyway, because you'll be using the reserved ranges inside the network), done. And that's for the frontline, techy staff running huge businesses, offices, etc.

ISPs are the hindrance. They just don't want to turn it on. Datacentres have been onboard for years. Outside websites are a cinch (my own personal website is 6 already, as well as the time-server I provide, VPN I use, my dynamic DNS account, etc. etc. ) ISPs are the one category of business that needs to hire people who understand IP addresses (and "binary" as you put it). That's it. If your existing guys implementing your ISP on a national basis don't understand IPv6, just sack them now, immediately, totally, no-questions.

The reason is - it's a business expense to change it, and they won't do it while they're hoarding IPv4 addresses because... shock, horror... they could always make the whole thing work for everyone by deploying IPv6 at their boundary and carrier-grade NAT could do 4->6 as well.

Stop the pathetic excuses. Enable services. Turn the little switch on in Windows. Done. The only thing stopping people like me (who have IPv6-capable internal networks, IPv6-capable services all over the place, and barely a line anywhere that even mentions IPv6 except by default (e.g. Apache binds to all the local network addresses itself already anyway!)) is that my ISP do not provide me with an IPv6 address. They carry the packets, they do everything else. They just don't offer an IPv6 allocation.

But they're already doing it for every mobile phone carrier, their back-end networks for cable customers, even their VDSL networks, etc. They just won't run the IPv6 equivalent of a DHCP server for their customers. Hell, most of them run the 4->6 addresses!

It's been out for 20 years, working fine for over 10, been in every major OS in that time. That's more than enough time to "learn binary", especially given that you only need one guy per ISP who actually understand "binary" to start implementing it.

[Joe Montana]

Re: Using IPv6

It's not even because of business expense, its a chicken and egg problem...

IPv6 provides huge benefits, but only if everyone is using it... If not everyone is using it, then it only provides limited localised benefits for those who do, and there is very little pushing for it.

The regional registries should be doing more to require their members to implement dual stack, many people want to implement ipv6 but can't because isps are refusing to support it.

ISPs which do support ipv6 should use it as a marketing tool, call it "next generation internet" or something as it's technically true. Users don't even need to care what it is, just make them think "new, shiny".

Big sites like google should start promoting ipv6, displaying warnings when users connect from ipv4 addresses or offering new beta services on ipv6 only to start with. If users start demanding ipv6, and moving to providers which support it then isps will soon start rolling it out.

The US government required that all government websites, and that of all government suppliers use ivp6 - all us government websites are reachable over ipv6, yet i don't think any uk government sites are.

[shaunhw]

Re: Using IPv6

Why didn't they just add up to four bytes to the start of existing numbers, rather than the horribly complex hex based IPV6 ?

The routers could check for the old protocol and easily translate it to the new one by assuming the leading bytes were all 0,0,0,0 and the whole thing would have been compatible.

IPV5 suggestion:

0,0,0,0.x.x.x.x compatible

x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x new numbers starting at 1 (eg 0.0.0.1.x.x.x.x) when the system was ready and we finally ran out of old ones, with a strict rule that the upper 4 digits aren't incremented until absolutely necessary.

It would have all been working seamlessly by now and people would have at least found it MUCH easier to use and 64 bit numbers would have been enough for the long term.

We need some common sense.

[Lee D]

Re: Using IPv6

It wouldn't buy enough time.

Routers would NOT be simply adjustable to that format, they wouldn't have been designed with that amount of internal RAM and processing and all their processing speed would break down for even ordinary packets - they would have to be reprogrammed, packets sizes would increase, fragmentation problems and MTU problems would increase, old kit would never get upgraded, and most old kit *couldn't*... just a BGP routing table hits the RAM limits nowadays, suddenly increasing every IP and mask by doubling the size of it knocks it out of the park on anything but new hardware.

TL;DR: Old kit would break, slow down, or just never be able to accept the new addressing.

And in the meantime, you'd still end up in the same problem - in about 30 years we've exhausted IPv4, with exponential growth expected.

IPv6 was invented ~15 years ago, to solve the problem once and for all (because if you have to do all the above, you may as well do it once and properly so you don't have to do it again in another 15 years). So all equipment from ~10 years ago onwards was redesigned with IPv6 support. One redesign, decades upon decades of future-proofing, plenty of space for everything you ever need, change it once, spec the router/RAM/whatever accordingly and then you're covered. That happened in the WINDOWS XP/Vista ERA. Done. Gone. Happened. OS included.

And IPv6 already has shorthand... because even in hex, an IP is for example: 2001:0db8:0000:0042:0000:8a2e:0370:7334

In dotted decimal, that would be something the size of:

192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.192.168.001.001

(every two characters in hex is two dotted decimal numbers up to 255!). Easier to remember "ab" or "160.161"? You literally don't understand how big IPv6 is and the problem it was solving for all foreseeable future extensions.

And: 2001:0db8:0000:0042:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 That can be shrunk to: 2001:0db8::0042::8a2e:0370:7334.

Not that much longer / harder to say that your eight dotted decimals from 0 to 255 each. Imagine having to say "2 5 5 dot 2 5 5 dot 2 5 5 dot 2 5 5 dot 2 5 5 dot 2 5 5 dot 2 5 5 dot 2 5 5 dot" out loud to an amateur, with random numbers instead of nice repetitive ones.

Two thousand and one. "O" "D" "B" "eight": "double-O forty 42":skip it: "eight a two e", "O three seven O", "7 double-3 4". And I've chosen a very long, quite incompressible example (from a random website) that conveys an address from BILLIONS of your IPv5 networks, not just one. It really didn't take that much more, if anything.

And IPv6 also supports compression of the kind you mean (where any multiple 00 can be compressed out of the string by just removing ), the first 64 bits are allocated to you and won't change, and you do not need to worry about all the end digits - as the last 64-bits (8 bytes, or 8 hexadecimal characters, or 8 dotted decimals up to 255) are all yours to do with as you like.

So IANA gives a number using a bunch of the first bits to regions, ARIN etc. allocate numbers with their bunch of the second bits to ISPs, your ISP gives you numbers with all the above, and you get the last bunch of the bits to yourself to do what you like. The same way that MAC addresses work. The initial HEXADECIMAL! bytes are the manufacturer's allocation, the following ones are the individual devices. Note that a MAC address (12 hex digits) already conveys more information than an IPv4 address (4 hex digits), more than your IPv5 address (8 hex digits), and are bandied about, entered into device management portals, copy/pasted, read out over the phone, etc. already. And you don't want to confuse and IP with a MAC or even be close to doing so.

Hierarchical, ordered, future-proof (i.e. only 3% of the IPv6 addresses that exist in current plans will ever be used for the Internet itself, the rest reserved for other uses), and everyone along the chain gets SO MANY addresses that they can issue that any possible use they think of for billions upon billions of customers is covered into the future.

And yet your IP still just looks like:

FE80::0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329

where the last few blocks of letters for most everyone will be squished to zeros using :: and 1, 2, 3 etc. at the end.

For example, I have 65536 IP addresses at the moment on my network, i know precisely three of them (two DNS servers and a gateway). So, a user's IP under IPv6 might change to:

FE80:0202:B3FF:FE1E:0000:0001 or

FE80:0202:B3FF:FE1E:0000:0002 or

FE80:0202:B3FF:FE1E:0000:0003 or

FE80:0202:B3FF:FE1E:0000:0004...

But I still only need... the first three... which will assign names to the remaining billions as they are required. And the first bit never changes (copy/paste, computers are good at repetitive work) while giving positively BILLIONS of addresses / ranges to everyone along the way.

This is not a burden.

It's not difficult.

It's no more cryptic than IPv4.

And 99.99999% of people will never need see, touch, manipulate or remember that address at all (what is your external IP *NOW* as we speak? Do you know? How did you memorise your 192.168.0.x subnet when you saw it for the very first time and realised you needed it plugged into your network routing?) and the people that do need to? They'll copy/paste from their DHCP config, DNS record, an nslookup, their ISPs techy-only email, etc. etc.

It's ridiculous, in a world reliant upon billions of devices already, to expect a small increase to work for any significant length of time, to expect old hardware to just support that small increase as a matter of course (we're actually worrying about BGP routing tables of only 512k entries which nearly broke the Internet because old routers couldn't hold them!), to redesign ALL new hardware worldwide without future-proofing, or to hinder such efforts because of an address you have to copy/paste from an admin interface once in a blue moon only if you're an IT guy.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Using IPv6

It wouldn't buy enough time.

It would have, and was one of the proposals to extend/enhance v4 to deal with address space depletion.

Routers would NOT be simply adjustable to that format, they wouldn't have been designed with that amount of internal RAM and processing and all their processing speed would break down for even ordinary packets - they would have to be reprogrammed, packets sizes would increase, fragmentation problems and MTU problems would increase, old kit would never get upgraded, and most old kit *couldn't*... just a BGP routing table hits the RAM limits nowadays, suddenly increasing every IP and mask by doubling the size of it knocks it out of the park on anything but new hardware.

All of that is/was true for both v4 routing table bloat, and the introduction of v6. So back in the good'ol days, a Cisco 7206 made an adequate peering router, providing there were no hiccups. But like a lot of tin from that era, fixed memory and a limited PCI buss meant by the mid-90's, they were really only good for edge boxes.

But a 'carrier grade' core router now is a very different beast. No longer is the 'brain' a simple *nix board hanging off a 100Mbps ethernet connection (hello, Juniper!), but a million dollar beast that can support dual stacking, Nx100Gbps interfaces, and spin up many VRFs for supplying MPLS IPVPNs. And possibly claim some SDN features, or just try and manage policy routing* between VRFs without the silicon quietly puddling.

But ASICs, CPUs, backplane designs and cheap RD or fast VRAM's meant core routers can do all these things and more. And optimising performance has become even more of a black art.. v6 though came with all the problems you mention, ie redesigned routing/forwarding/buffering, inefficiency due to header bloat, risk of fragmentation and of course the need to route between v4 and v6.

Simply prepending some new octets would have achieved the same ends, if the requiremnt was purely to keep up with demand. But like much technology, ended up being designed by committee and semi-obsoleted by technology. There was also plenty of experience coping with this challenge, ie the telephony world kept expanding phone number length, or tweaking STDs.. And that method's meant there are more phone numbers for everyone in the world using fewer bits.

Biggest trick that I think was missed was not following the telephony model and simply making one of the new octets the ITU county code. So with one extra byte, the UK could have become 44.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxxx which would give each country at least an entire 'v4' space to allocate, or even more by prepending some extra octets.. And it would have had a huge advantage in making it simple to manage local vs international routing. Basically how the telephony world solved these challenges over a century ago.

*Modern routers are much like cloudy VM boxes. Spin up multiple VRFs, create policies so they can talk to each other, or just a default route to the VRF containing your Internetv4 or v6 instance.. But that can get complicated fast, hence why IP engineers with an instinct for self-preservation try to place some limits on what customers can do per-VRF, ie max prefixes, filters etc. Which sales then usually ignore, because sales likes to push the envelope!

[Nanashi]

Re: Using IPv6

The v6 header is actually much less bloated than the v4 header is. One third of the non-address bytes were removed, reducing the number of non-address fields from 11 to 6. One of the removed fields is the checksum, so v6 routers no longer have to recalculate a checksum on every packet. Routing v6 packets tends to be about 500us faster than routing v4 packets, probably at least partly as a result of all this.

As for addresses, you can't just "simply prepend some octets" to them. v4 is inherently fixed length, as are all of the protocols and software that use it. It's just not an option, unlike in the telephony space where phone numbers have been variable-width since the beginning.

If we wanted to use the telephony solution, we'd first need to deploy some alternate protocol that supports variable-width addresses. That would require doing everything we're already doing to deploy v6, so it would be no easier. In fact it would be harder, because a protocol with variable-length addresses would be significantly different to v4. v6 at least has the advantage that it uses the exact same addressing and routing model as v4 does.

[Roland6]

Re: Using IPv6

>IPv6 was invented ~15 years ago, to solve the problem once and for all

IPv6 was 'invented' back in the late 1980's ie. more like 30 years ago. If memory serves me correctly, the address length was set in the early 1990's. What took time was that the working group decided to try and do more (with revising IPv4) than just change the address length, which resulted in them missing the opportunity to get the new protocol out before the release of Win95...

It is interesting to note that it took until 1998 for IETF to adopt it as a draft standard and only in 2017 ratifying it as an actual Internet Standard. So we shouldn't be too hard on ISP's and others taking their time in deploying IPv6; although now it is a Standard...

[Yes Me]

Re: Using IPv6

Sorry, that proposal is the FAIL. It has always been true and will always be true that an IPv4-only node can only handle 32 bit addresses. If you extend the address by one bit, let alone 32 bits, no unmodified node will be able to use it. There are mathematically only two solutions: a dual stack node that can handle either address length, or a translator that can magically convert a 32 bit IPv4 address in to a (say) 33 bit New IP address. And guess what? Those are the two solutions that work for IPv6.

Otherwise, how could more than 25% of Google users be on IPv6 when El Reg is still stuck on IPv4?

[Joe Montana]

Re: Using IPv6

IPv6 is simpler if you've actually used it extensively.

Even the largest ISPs have a single large prefix, whereas even moderate sized companies now have multiple ipv4 blocks in completely different ranges. Everything is routable and unique, so you don't have to worry about address conflicts or address translation. Running a network of any significant size using v4 is painful for these reasons.

Also even hosting services is painful now because of nat, used to be that you could use blacklists to block addresses which were the source of malicious traffic, but now you have a tiny pool of addresses shared by thousands of customers of the same isp. Block that address and you block one abusive user or infected machine and thousands of legitimate users.

And if you don't block, you have no way to differentiate between legitimate traffic and malicious traffic coming from the same address.

Also the problem is worse in most third world countries, having been much later to get connected they have extremely small pools of addresses. In the UK you will still typically get your own address for your household, but this is not the case in myanmar where every isp uses nat and you will have the same address as all the other users. Myanmar has 1 address allocated per 2600 citizens.

If you're using cgn you also have to log every connection made in order to track potential illegal activity... Some providers do this and it's quite a considerably burden, some providers just don't bother which makes them perfect for criminals as there's no way to trace a particular historical activity to an individual customer.

The lack of routable addresses also prevents you hosting anything and prevents the use of p2p protocols etc, no self hosting games, all traffic goes via third party servers instead of direct between users (ie more latency)...

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

*COUGH* "Now if everyone would just move to IPv6... "

nslookup -q=aaaa www.theregister.co.uk

[snipped]

Name: www.theregister.co.uk

' ' Nada. STILL no IPV6 address.

nslookup -q=aaaa www.ibm.com

[snipped]

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: e2874.dscx.akamaiedge.net

Addresses: 2a02:26f0:11a:499::b3a

2a02:26f0:11a:482::b3a

Aliases: www.ibm.com

www.ibm.com.cs186.net

outer-ccdn-dual.ibmcom.edgekey.net

outer-ccdn-dual.ibmcom.edgekey.net.globalredir.akadns.net

Fix your own house before complaining about everyone else's.

[Lee D]

Re: *COUGH* "Now if everyone would just move to IPv6... "

Nice to see that my efforts to push The Reg in this regard are not alone.

Every six months or so, I get a comment from a Reg person underneath a comment like this, that says something like "We're looking into it", or "We're working on it".

I think we're coming close to ten years or more of such comments now. And not even a "prototype, don't blame us if it's broke, www.ipv6.theregister.co.uk" or similar.

I hesitate to take my industry news, advice and updates from a place that cannot heed their own dire warnings in that regard. It's like frequenting a site running on Gopher saying how wonderful HTTP is and how we should all be moving over, but without a HTTP presence of their own, for ten years after HTTP was released.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: *COUGH* "Now if everyone would just move to IPv6... "

"Fix your own house before complaining about everyone else's."

I think that's known as "do as I say and not as I do", a bit like the way the Americans deal with the rest of the world, or politicians think about encryption and "necessary hashtags".

[swm]

Re: *COUGH* "Now if everyone would just move to IPv6... "

$ nslookup -q=aaaa www.google.com

Server: 127.0.0.53

Address: 127.0.0.53#53

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: www.google.com

Address: 2607:f8b0:4009:807::2004

sidney@server ~-1

$ ping 2607:f8b0:4009:807::2004

connect: Network is unreachable

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: *COUGH* "Now if everyone would just move to IPv6... "

"ping 2607:f8b0:4009:807::2004"

Might help if you used the right tool for the job .... ;-)

$ ping6 2607:f8b0:4009:807::2004

PING 2607:f8b0:4009:807::2004 (2607:f8b0:4009:807::2004): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 2607:f8b0:4009:807::2004: icmp_seq=0 hlim=56 time=85.077 ms

64 bytes from 2607:f8b0:4009:807::2004: icmp_seq=1 hlim=56 time=85.209 ms

google.com. 300 IN AAAA 2a00:1450:4009:80f::200e

$ ping6 2a00:1450:4009:80f::200e

PING 2a00:1450:4009:80f::200e (2a00:1450:4009:80f::200e): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 2a00:1450:4009:80f::200e: icmp_seq=0 hlim=60 time=1.099 ms

64 bytes from 2a00:1450:4009:80f::200e: icmp_seq=1 hlim=60 time=1.293 ms

64 bytes from 2a00:1450:4009:80f::200e: icmp_seq=2 hlim=60 time=1.321 ms

[Lee D]

Re: *COUGH* "Now if everyone would just move to IPv6... "

P.S. Any IP address of any kind is under no obligation to respond to ICMP anyway. It's nice, sure, but not necessary or required.

Google are telling people that over 25% of their accesses are coming in over IPv6... 1 in 4 people around the world are using it when they go on Google. Do you think they all sat there and deliberately configured it, or do you think it's just a base protocol that's part of the requirements of major technologies like 4G?

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

[Nanashi]

Re: *COUGH* "Now if everyone would just move to IPv6... "

I'd hate to do the "well, actually" thing, but actually... RFC 4443 section 4.1 requires hosts to respond to echo requests, and RFC 4890 sections 4.3.1/4.4.1 require networks and hosts to not drop echo requests or responses. Not that that stops people from doing it anyway, but hosts are indeed expected to respond to echo requests.

(And of course that's just echo requests, there are other ICMP types which hosts need to process.)

[Down not across]

Re: *COUGH* "Now if everyone would just move to IPv6... "

Google are telling people that over 25% of their accesses are coming in over IPv6... 1 in 4 people around the world are using it when they go on Google. Do you think they all sat there and deliberately configured it, or do you think it's just a base protocol that's part of the requirements of major technologies like 4G?

Google would probably very much like everyone to use IPV6, especially if they're not using RFC4941 (effectiveness of which depends on the implementation a lot).

[Aitor 1]

Re: *COUGH* "Now if everyone would just move to IPv6... "

www.google.com has AAAA address 2a00:1450:4009:819::2004

[Anonymous South African Coward]

The directors – who varied from Yong Wook-Kwan to Ahmad Al Bandi to Brian Sherman – were, it is claimed, entirely fictitious.

Wot? No Roger Amchip, Charles Omputer, Viktor Alve or Cecil Apacitor?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reverse Al-Caponed himself

"But that process ultimately opened Golestan up to criminal charges, since he seemingly provided affidavits under the names of the different company directors."

So sounds like previously they'd have struggled to charge him with much, presumably just send him to low security white collar prison, as I imagine part of any theft charge/sentense could relate to the value of what's taken, and they barely charge anything for the IPs that's not much (assuming it's based on that and not the possible resale value). Now though thanks to him trying to go on the offensive they can prosecute him on separate charges with the threat of sending him to federal pound you in the ass prison.

[Claverhouse]

The American legal concept of Wire Fraud is demented enough * without biblical penalties of 20 x 20 to punish someone for something that is barely any more a crime than buying and selling stock, and if if is a crime does not amount to much on the scale of human wickedness.

.

* No doubt back in the 1860s fraudsters in NY could face charges of Satchel Fraud if they kept their false documents in a valise.

[chivo243]

Peter Parker

Too bad he didn't use his awesome powers of administration for good instead of evil... Seems he understood the ins and outs of the system. Another case of the victim should hire the criminal to help fix their problems?