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ICANN does not assign domain names but TLDs. The .kz TLD was assigned to some government body in Kazakhstan and Google paid that body (not ICANN) to get their google.kz domain.

Moreover, paying for that google.kz doesn't mean it is owned by Google, only merely assigned. I am quite sure the national registrar retains full rights over the domain itself (just like the government still owns the passport, while you and me are only passport "holders").

Basically the Kazakhstan government can do whatever they want about .kz domains and Google decided not to comply (assuming the consequences, obviously).

Amazing what I learn by posting my mistaken opinions on this forum! I kinda wish the learning process was more dignified...oh well, better than not learning at all.

You're right about how assigning domain names works—"registrars" accredited by ICANN actually assign individual domain names within top-level domains to which they have access. Here is the info from ICANN about registrar accreditation. In my defense, I do believe that, once upon a time, back in the ancient days, ICANN actually assigned all the domain names. But there weren't many domains back then. And they all belonged to us Americans...

The .kz domain is actually registered to:

Association of IT Companies of Kazakhstan
6/5 Kabanbai Batyra
Office 3
Astana AST 010000
Kazakhstan

To get more info about the AoITCoK, I had to go to the IANA (which is actually run by ICANN...isn't this fun?). I found this interesting report from 2005 about the management of the .kz domain:

The Association is a non-profit, and organizes activities regarding the Information Technology needs of Kazakhstan. It was established in April 2004 and as of November 2004 incorporated 32 companies including software companies, system integrators, Internet providers, telecommunications companies, and others involved in the sector.

KazNIC is a member of the Association, and has been subcontracted by the Association to continue providing services for the ccTLD.

In 2004 the Kazakhstan Government chose to take a more active role in the management of the ccTLD, and during meetings with Mr. Gusev it was agreed that the Government would be given control of the domain...

From reading this, you'd think that the AoITCoK pretty much has the ICANN/IANAsanctioned right to assign and govern the .kz domain name. But then there's this bit:

The GAC Principles serve as "best practices" to guide governments in assuming proper roles with respect to the Internet's naming system, which the GAC has observed is a public resource to be administered in the public interest. In general, they recognize that each government has the ultimate responsibility within its territory for its national public-policy objectives, but also that ICANN has the responsibility for ensuring that the Internet domain-name system continues to provide an effective and interoperable global naming system.

So the "GAC principles" (Government Advisory Committee) somewhat limit the powers of national governments, should it conflict with the "effective and interoperable global naming system". Also, what does it mean to "control" a TLD? As far as I know, it means you can issue rights to domain names within that TLD, and that's about it. It's not clear you can revoke the rights to those domain names, once you've issued them, unless a time limit was part of the agreement. Domain names aren't like passports, which are, by long-standing practice and tradition, internationally recognized legal documents owned by the issuing governments. They're more like radio station frequencies or cal

This time, the IANA hasn't exactly allowed for land grabs, except that with everybody in the world owning a country the size of Russia, why exactly would they want it?

If you look @ the IANA assignments in the links above, the first 2 bytes that the IANA has for now is 2001::/16, second 2 bytes in the Global routing prefix has been delegated to the various RIRs, so that wouldn't have been available to Facebook, Google, the US government, or anybody, since it's from the RIRs. ARIN cannot give face::/16 to anybody, since the IETF has reserved it for future use.

However, in many cases, only the first 23 bits have been locked, but after that, anything can be assigned. So ARIN (or any other RIR) can assign something like 2001:04fa:ceb0::/48 to Facebook, and the latter can do what it likes w/ the rest of it.

All that said, if an organization is pretty happy putting its name in the Interface ID space, good for it!

4b10 is allocated to RIPE - see here So RIPE apparently gave BBC 2001:4b10:bbc::/48

Unlike in the 70s, I don't see why Google or BBC need a /32. If their providers do what's standard and just use the 45 bit global routing prefix themselves, it will give both these orgs 16 bits for a possible 65536 subnets, and then 18 quadrillion addresses within each of those subnets. So the address that the BBC has is all they'll ever need.

In the 70s, when IPv4 addresses were being distributed like confetti, you had companies like IBM, DEC, HP et al being given public Class A addresses, which would have allowed them to have 16 million addresses. I doubt that throughout its history, any of them have had 16 million employees, devices and everything even worldwide, even though departed employees wouldn't have taken any w/ them. But this time, the IETF is pretty conservative about how it's distributed the addresses - only 2001::/16 has been given to the IANA so far, and from that, each RIR has been allocated a fair amount. And none of them will have any reason to run short, since every organization will need only one /48 global routing prefix, and from there, it would be good to go for 'ever'

When the word's population is 1 quadrillion, it will be time to start designing IPv7, assuming that other technologies haven't made IP totally redundant by then.

4b10 is allocated to RIPE - see here So RIPE apparently gave BBC 2001:4b10:bbc::/48

Unlike in the 70s, I don't see why Google or BBC need a /32. If their providers do what's standard and just use the 45 bit global routing prefix themselves, it will give both these orgs 16 bits for a possible 65536 subnets, and then 18 quadrillion addresses within each of those subnets. So the address that the BBC has is all they'll ever need.

In the 70s, when IPv4 addresses were being distributed like confetti, you had companies like IBM, DEC, HP et al being given public Class A addresses, which would have allowed them to have 16 million addresses. I doubt that throughout its history, any of them have had 16 million employees, devices and everything even worldwide, even though departed employees wouldn't have taken any w/ them. But this time, the IETF is pretty conservative about how it's distributed the addresses - only 2001::/16 has been given to the IANA so far, and from that, each RIR has been allocated a fair amount. And none of them will have any reason to run short, since every organization will need only one /48 global routing prefix, and from there, it would be good to go for 'ever'

When the word's population is 1 quadrillion, it will be time to start designing IPv7, assuming that other technologies haven't made IP totally redundant by then.

There are 2 things you could do.

1. The easiest thing you can do is to use a DNSSEC capable resolver and give it the 'root key material' and have it setup to update automatically. Every 6 or so months a new key will be generated, so it needs to be updated. Most of the software has a mechanism for that. The root key material is at: https://data.iana.org/root-anchors/ If you use Unbound, you just create a file with the right information and put in the configuration file: auto-trust-anchor-file: "/usr/local/etc/unbound/root.key"

That way, everything which can be checked will be checked and you will be less vulnerable to DNS attacks.

2. Deploy DNSSEC for the zones you manage: The most used TLDs are all signed, although they may not all be available to the general public yet. You will obviously need DNSSEC-capable authoritive DNS-server software or use Phreebird as a proxy. When your zone data is signed, obviously clients/resolvers need to be able to check what you signed, you do this by communicating the 'DS'-record (dig +norec @ns1.zone.tld zone.tld DS) to your registrar or TLD-operator, the same people who you are paying for the domain/where you communicate the name and possibly IP-addresses of your DNS-zone. Some registrars might not be ready, but other are. You might need to shop around. Unfortunately you will need to that every X months as well.

On desktops and so on, there currently are very little tools which make use of it.

You could put the SSH-fingerprint in DNS which is signed by DNSSEC and enable VerifyHostKeyDNS, that way when you choose yes when connecting to a SSH-server the first time, you can have more confidence that what you are connecting to is the real server.

There are efforts to make it available for the browsers and so on:

https://os3sec.org/

There is a DANE-proposal which makes it possible for the browser to check DNS/DNSSEC and use it for certificate-chain checking for HTTPS instead (or together with) the current CA-system.

A glance at the master IANA table here seems to say that the USA got the majority of ipv4 addresses, even though today the majority of devices is elsewhere.

ARIN has no say over these. They are legacy blocks (allocated before 1997, the founding of ARIN). See http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml

Since these blocks are legacy ARIN doesn't have any say over them. They were not allocated by ARIN, but were claimed before that http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml

Actually, no -- HP has both the 15.*.*.* and 16.*.*.* A class blocks. 15/ was their own and got 16/ from DEC via compaq. Not to mention chunks of smaller blocks from their acquisitions like EDS...Speaking of sitting on a gold mine.
Ref: http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml

Based on this list Nortel was not the holder of any class A block.

015/8 Hewlett-Packard Company 1994-07 LEGACY
016/8 Digital Equipment Corporation 1994-11 LEGACY

Why on earth would you want DHCPv6? Router advertisements and SLAAC is much easier

Here is your list of reasons... http://www.iana.org/assignments/bootp-dhcp-parameters/bootp-dhcp-parameters.xml

apple, us postal office, ford motor company, hp to name a few companies hoarding 16,7 millions ip-addresses each.

http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml

IANA kept track of other kinds of numbers besides IPv4 addresses, and their job wasn't just to hand out unique numbers, but to keep track of who owns the numbers that are out there. And if you think IPv4 number ownership is going to stay stable now that they're all gone and you can only get them from other people, you may be a bit surprised.

See http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml
224/8 to 239/8 are actually used for multicast. We use them in our company for example (makes for *great* bandwidth saver for media streamings and stuff)
240/8 to 255/8 (so called E-classes in old days) however were "reserved for future use".

The problem with reusing them is exactly what you state -- way too many firewalls and routers around the world drops those, and so they are effectively unusable for global (Internet) routing - you would need to fix the whole world before you could safely use them (who'd want IPv4 adresses that won't work on 99% of the Internet?), and apparently fixing the whole world is much much more complicated than just deploying IPv6.

The rule is that when there are only 5 left, one is automatically earmarked for each of the five major RIRs (effectively, one /8 for each continent). The only reason they're still shown as unallocated is that IANA presumably hasn't yet decided which continent gets which /8 (which is of course mostly irrelevant, as they're just numbers). Also, http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xhtml is a rather more readable version of your link.

He won't, it won't look original any more.

But you can do it. Here's the source data.

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com

HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Location: http://www.iana.org/domains/example/
Server: BigIP
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Length: 0

If that breaks your program, you're doing it wrong.

Compaq gave up DEC's /8. HP gave up Compaq's. HP only has a single /8 rather than the 3 it could possibly have ended up with.

Not according to the latest IANA allocation data

015/8 Hewlett-Packard Company 1994-07 LEGACY

016/8 Digital Equipment Corporation 1994-11 LEGACY

15.0.0.0/8 and 16.0.0.0/8 were being advertised by AS71 last time I checked (five minutes ago).

Start here:

"K section of ccTLDs in the IANA human readable database.

Human readable delegation record.

IANA report on the assignment of the North Korean TLD.

Click some links to clear up any misunderstandings you may have about whether the assignment (rather late) of the TLD automatically means that they have fiber lit and active into the DPRK. Especially, click on the link on the delegation record to the URL for registration services.

BTW, what the AC who talks about North Koreans residing in Japan (Zai-nichi kita chousen-jin) says is fairly accurate, if incomplete. Most of the Korean residents living in Japan are quite aware that supporting the current North Korean government is not in their own best interests.

Unfortunately, there are still many who are afraid to formally register as residents of Japan, and many who are afraid of what the DPRK government could do to their families.

In addition, much of the legitimate effort to send money and aid back to family in North Korea gets siphoned off to the DPRK government.

And, no, cynical as it all seems to say it, the DPRK government is not in any hurry to even have very much of their military connected to the outside world by the internet.

Start here:

"K section of ccTLDs in the IANA human readable database.

Human readable delegation record.

IANA report on the assignment of the North Korean TLD.

Click some links to clear up any misunderstandings you may have about whether the assignment (rather late) of the TLD automatically means that they have fiber lit and active into the DPRK. Especially, click on the link on the delegation record to the URL for registration services.

BTW, what the AC who talks about North Koreans residing in Japan (Zai-nichi kita chousen-jin) says is fairly accurate, if incomplete. Most of the Korean residents living in Japan are quite aware that supporting the current North Korean government is not in their own best interests.

Unfortunately, there are still many who are afraid to formally register as residents of Japan, and many who are afraid of what the DPRK government could do to their families.

In addition, much of the legitimate effort to send money and aid back to family in North Korea gets siphoned off to the DPRK government.

And, no, cynical as it all seems to say it, the DPRK government is not in any hurry to even have very much of their military connected to the outside world by the internet.

Start here:

"K section of ccTLDs in the IANA human readable database.

Human readable delegation record.

IANA report on the assignment of the North Korean TLD.

Click some links to clear up any misunderstandings you may have about whether the assignment (rather late) of the TLD automatically means that they have fiber lit and active into the DPRK. Especially, click on the link on the delegation record to the URL for registration services.

BTW, what the AC who talks about North Koreans residing in Japan (Zai-nichi kita chousen-jin) says is fairly accurate, if incomplete. Most of the Korean residents living in Japan are quite aware that supporting the current North Korean government is not in their own best interests.

Unfortunately, there are still many who are afraid to formally register as residents of Japan, and many who are afraid of what the DPRK government could do to their families.

In addition, much of the legitimate effort to send money and aid back to family in North Korea gets siphoned off to the DPRK government.

And, no, cynical as it all seems to say it, the DPRK government is not in any hurry to even have very much of their military connected to the outside world by the internet.

Start here:

"K section of ccTLDs in the IANA human readable database.

Human readable delegation record.

IANA report on the assignment of the North Korean TLD.

Click some links to clear up any misunderstandings you may have about whether the assignment (rather late) of the TLD automatically means that they have fiber lit and active into the DPRK. Especially, click on the link on the delegation record to the URL for registration services.

BTW, what the AC who talks about North Koreans residing in Japan (Zai-nichi kita chousen-jin) says is fairly accurate, if incomplete. Most of the Korean residents living in Japan are quite aware that supporting the current North Korean government is not in their own best interests.

Unfortunately, there are still many who are afraid to formally register as residents of Japan, and many who are afraid of what the DPRK government could do to their families.

In addition, much of the legitimate effort to send money and aid back to family in North Korea gets siphoned off to the DPRK government.

And, no, cynical as it all seems to say it, the DPRK government is not in any hurry to even have very much of their military connected to the outside world by the internet.

0000::/96 was previously defined as the "IPv4-compatible IPv6 address" prefix. This definition has been deprecated by [RFC4291].

There is also ::ffff:0:0/96 which is used locally to provide a single API that applications can use to talk IPv4 using IPv6 addresses. But on the network it is still IPv4 with all the restrictions you get from that, the only purpose of this address format is for applications to not have to support both APIs simultaneously.

I was thinking more or less the same thing.

The point is that a good domain name system implementation needs to be secure against protocol attacks. DNSSEC secures it against hackers, but makes it more vulnerable to political attacks.

You do know that DNS root servers are located (and co-located) around the world (20+ countries I believe off the top of my head), and they are all equal. The only US-centric part is that the designated maintainers (ICANN and IANA) are US based organizations, in large part due to historically originating in the US, and this does have the benefit being one of the best legal protection for free-speech in the world.

If you want an alternate system, edit your DNS root hints file.

Join the Internet Society, ICANN, and your national domain registrar if you want to make difference.

Addresses are assigned to the RIRs by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, NOT the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. I know, all of these acronyms made up of Is, As, and Ns blur together.

That map has some errors.

The big green block in the top right (240-255) is unusable.

The 10 block is reserved for RFC 1918.

Aside from that, only the following blocks remain unallocated. everywhere else is white.

005
023
037
039
100
102
103
104
105
106
179
185

IANA has a report of what blocks are assigned/reserved, to whom and when they were given out.

http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml

Why do we have to have this conversation every single time the issue comes up? gods...

We have allocated 14 /8 networks since January of 2010 (source: http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.txt )....meaning we go through about 1.5 /8s every month. Reclaiming a /8 will take more than a couple weeks, so the simple fact is that reclamation isn't worth the effort: we would burn through several /8s in the time it would take us to reclaim one of them.

I was really struck by this image, actually. It gives you a visual feel for how vast the net is, with all the favicons stretching back into space until they're just indistinguishable dots. And for those who complain about uselessness, download it and give it a go yourself! To get ranges, just use whois or a http://www.iana.org/numbers/ search on a relevant ip/hostname, and to map routing paths use the zenmap frontend - the radial visualization is great, but a bit slow for large numbers. You can also use the -oX option to output a scan in XML, and import it into zenmap later; zenmap also aggregates scans for you. The script scan engine is also geared towards penetration testing/exploitation, of course, but you can ignore "offensive" parts. Just remember to read the documentation, if you want to keep a low profile.

I did just as you suggested and went to check the list on iana.org... Holy crap!

I stand very corrected. The info I was using hasn't been updated since May of 2009!

It seems their old text file list is now defunct. If you go to the old base URL in a web browser, it redirects you to a new XML formatted version, which you can then change the extension to .txt to get the current new text file (With the proper updated date at the top)

So thank you for pointing that out. The number of unreserved blocks was right (well off by one, oops) but none of the past year of updates are on the old file

http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.txt

Another detail i notice, the new txt file doesn't list status dates for the unallocated blocks any longer.
Possibly a sign that reallocation is coming sooner than later?
One of the original plans was to allocate them in order of how early they were reserved, making the higher number blocks go first. Now it seems some of the lower blocks are allocated out as well.

Looks like the 42./8 has moved up to #6 on the list, assuming they go in ascending order.
I generally check 3-4 times a year for that very reason, as I know it's getting closer to crunch time and will have to deal with that soon on my end.

Those corporations, the lucky owners of the grandfathered "Class A" address space, realize their value. They're holding out, as the price can only go up over time, as demand pressure increases. The auctions, in a few years, should provide considerable income. When IANA finally announces they're completely out of IPv4 addresses, you know which stocks to buy!

Better yet, why not just repurpose some of those useless "Class D" and "Class E" allocations?

Multicast is from 224 to 239.

According to http://www.iana.org/assignments/multicast-addresses/ only these have been allocated: 224, 232, 233, 239

This leaves 12 unused /8 networks: 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238

Add that to the 16 "future use" networks of Class E, to get a total of 28 /8 networks that are ripe for the taking. That's more address space than in your entire list above!

Ports from 49152 through 65535 are reserved for Network address translation. If your assume every customer has ~8 computers and 1 IPv4 address is shared among 32 customers, that yields a port window of 64 address on average.

It is unlikely they will all be browsing complicated "web applications" at the same time. If they want to do something like bittorrent; they just have to fire up IPv6, assuming the ISP routes the packets.

GE - 3.nnn.nnn.nnn
IBM - 9.nnn.nnn.nnn
AT&T Bell Labs 12.nnn.nnn.nnn
Xerox 13.nnn.nnn.nnn
HP 15.nnn.nnn.nnn
DEC 16.nnn.nnn.nnn
Apple 17.nnn.nnn.nnn
MIT 18.nnn.nnn.nnn
Ford 19.nnn.nnn.nnn
CSC 20.nnn.nnn.nnn
Halliburton 34.nnn.nnn.nnn
Eli Lilly Co 40.nnn.nnn.nnn
Bell Northern Research 47.nnn.nnn.nnn
Prudential 48.nnn.nnn.nnn
UK Work and Pensions 51.nnn.nnn.nnn
Dupont 52.nnn.nnn.nnn
Cap Debis 53.nnn.nnn.nnn
Merck 54.nnn.nnn.nnn
USPS 56.nnn.nnn.nnn
Defense doesn't need 7 - count them - 7 all to itself!
That's 26 - more than 10% - that can be mostly harvested.

You guys know how the internet works don't you? The only central authority is the IANA, and all they really do is make sure people don't reuse the same IP addresses (and assign the more important AS Numbers. When we're IPv6 in under five years (Sorry, but thanks Microsoft), they will be even less important (still important though). Other than that, it's just private organziations agreeing with each other to carry traffic through their routers. At one point this was Ma Bell but now you have radio links, satellite links, mesh networks, lasers, fiber optics, etc. It's too late for the government. They are going to keep trying to shut us down but the people of the world can all communicate on equal terms now and we know now more than every that we're all pretty much alike.

I think what the Obama policy is about is getting involved in the international aspects where diplomacy is needed. We need more relationships happening across international borders that foster this kind of communications. This will lead to a future where humans across the global can fully communicate on equal terms. At that point we don't really have a use for diplomacy and war because there will just be a lot of small disagreements rather than these large nationwide ones that are questionable anyway. In fact this is going to be the key to opening up new markets.

To think that this was ever the goal of the neo-cons and that Obama is somehow worse is falase beyond almost anything I've ever heard. The neo-cons are so embroiled in World War III, just read a history of president Reagan and all the weapons and stuff we developed then. No one seems to remember the rediculous cold war that looks REALLY rediculous now. That's the system Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld grew up in, forged with their own hands, saw it crumble with the public failure of the Soviet Union. All the power in the world, gone in 2 years.

Thus the fairly false threat of terrorism. Sure, it's a minor fear, but nothing compared to total nuclear anihilation. Anyway, your breathless posts about how Obama is not doing what he said he'd do is wrong. He said he would do all of this. Quit listening to the media and actually listen to the man.

The disagreements will be between corporations, not governments. Lets face it, many internet corporations will have to go out of business just to keep other older more established businesses in business. This is about corporate monarchy deciding rules on an international scale to benefit cartels and corporate profits.

It has nothing to do with individual interests. Our interests are not considered because we don't own blue chip corporations. At some point the blue chip corporations and the copyright royalty owning corporations decided that it is better to destroy freedom on the internet than to invest in new technologies. It's very much like the phone companies trying to destroy the internet rather than invest in broadband technology. It has nothing to do with consumers, or child protection, or privacy.

You guys know how the internet works don't you? The only central authority is the IANA, and all they really do is make sure people don't reuse the same IP addresses (and assign the more important AS Numbers. When we're IPv6 in under five years (Sorry, but thanks Microsoft), they will be even less important (still important though). Other than that, it's just private organziations agreeing with each other to carry traffic through their routers. At one point this was Ma Bell but now you have radio links, satellite links, mesh networks, lasers, fiber optics, etc. It's too late for the government. They are going to keep trying to shut us down but the people of the world can all communicate on equal terms now and we know now more than every that we're all pretty much alike.

I think what the Obama policy is about is getting involved in the international aspects where diplomacy is needed. We need more relationships happening across international borders that foster this kind of communications. This will lead to a future where humans across the global can fully communicate on equal terms. At that point we don't really have a use for diplomacy and war because there will just be a lot of small disagreements rather than these large nationwide ones that are questionable anyway. In fact this is going to be the key to opening up new markets.

To think that this was ever the goal of the neo-cons and that Obama is somehow worse is falase beyond almost anything I've ever heard. The neo-cons are so embroiled in World War III, just read a history of president Reagan and all the weapons and stuff we developed then. No one seems to remember the rediculous cold war that looks REALLY rediculous now. That's the system Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld grew up in, forged with their own hands, saw it crumble with the public failure of the Soviet Union. All the power in the world, gone in 2 years.

Thus the fairly false threat of terrorism. Sure, it's a minor fear, but nothing compared to total nuclear anihilation. Anyway, your breathless posts about how Obama is not doing what he said he'd do is wrong. He said he would do all of this. Quit listening to the media and actually listen to the man.

The disagreements will be between corporations, not governments. Lets face it, many internet corporations will have to go out of business just to keep other older more established businesses in business. This is about corporate monarchy deciding rules on an international scale to benefit cartels and corporate profits.

It has nothing to do with individual interests. Our interests are not considered because we don't own blue chip corporations. At some point the blue chip corporations and the copyright royalty owning corporations decided that it is better to destroy freedom on the internet than to invest in new technologies. It's very much like the phone companies trying to destroy the internet rather than invest in broadband technology. It has nothing to do with consumers, or child protection, or privacy.

You guys know how the internet works don't you? The only central authority is the IANA, and all they really do is make sure people don't reuse the same IP addresses (and assign the more important AS Numbers. When we're IPv6 in under five years (Sorry, but thanks Microsoft), they will be even less important (still important though). Other than that, it's just private organziations agreeing with each other to carry traffic through their routers. At one point this was Ma Bell but now you have radio links, satellite links, mesh networks, lasers, fiber optics, etc. It's too late for the government. They are going to keep trying to shut us down but the people of the world can all communicate on equal terms now and we know now more than every that we're all pretty much alike.

I think what the Obama policy is about is getting involved in the international aspects where diplomacy is needed. We need more relationships happening across international borders that foster this kind of communications. This will lead to a future where humans across the global can fully communicate on equal terms. At that point we don't really have a use for diplomacy and war because there will just be a lot of small disagreements rather than these large nationwide ones that are questionable anyway. In fact this is going to be the key to opening up new markets.

To think that this was ever the goal of the neo-cons and that Obama is somehow worse is falase beyond almost anything I've ever heard. The neo-cons are so embroiled in World War III, just read a history of president Reagan and all the weapons and stuff we developed then. No one seems to remember the rediculous cold war that looks REALLY rediculous now. That's the system Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld grew up in, forged with their own hands, saw it crumble with the public failure of the Soviet Union. All the power in the world, gone in 2 years.

Thus the fairly false threat of terrorism. Sure, it's a minor fear, but nothing compared to total nuclear anihilation. Anyway, your breathless posts about how Obama is not doing what he said he'd do is wrong. He said he would do all of this. Quit listening to the media and actually listen to the man.

You guys know how the internet works don't you? The only central authority is the IANA, and all they really do is make sure people don't reuse the same IP addresses (and assign the more important AS Numbers. When we're IPv6 in under five years (Sorry, but thanks Microsoft), they will be even less important (still important though). Other than that, it's just private organziations agreeing with each other to carry traffic through their routers. At one point this was Ma Bell but now you have radio links, satellite links, mesh networks, lasers, fiber optics, etc. It's too late for the government. They are going to keep trying to shut us down but the people of the world can all communicate on equal terms now and we know now more than every that we're all pretty much alike.

I think what the Obama policy is about is getting involved in the international aspects where diplomacy is needed. We need more relationships happening across international borders that foster this kind of communications. This will lead to a future where humans across the global can fully communicate on equal terms. At that point we don't really have a use for diplomacy and war because there will just be a lot of small disagreements rather than these large nationwide ones that are questionable anyway. In fact this is going to be the key to opening up new markets.

To think that this was ever the goal of the neo-cons and that Obama is somehow worse is falase beyond almost anything I've ever heard. The neo-cons are so embroiled in World War III, just read a history of president Reagan and all the weapons and stuff we developed then. No one seems to remember the rediculous cold war that looks REALLY rediculous now. That's the system Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld grew up in, forged with their own hands, saw it crumble with the public failure of the Soviet Union. All the power in the world, gone in 2 years.

Thus the fairly false threat of terrorism. Sure, it's a minor fear, but nothing compared to total nuclear anihilation. Anyway, your breathless posts about how Obama is not doing what he said he'd do is wrong. He said he would do all of this. Quit listening to the media and actually listen to the man.

It's a shame they're only avaiable for intergovernmental organizations. Really :-( .

Why does Hewlett-Packard have not one but TWO /8 IPv4 address ranges?

Because HP was around when the 'net was created, and acquired 15./8.

And because DEC was around when the 'net was created, and acquired 16./8.

And because Compaq acquired DEC and HP acquired Compaq, leaving HP with 15./8 and 16./8 as well as a bunch of smaller blocks. (But when HP begat Agilent, while the heart and soul of the company was fractured, HP kept the IP blocks.)

15./8 used to be directly routable, then that went away but public DNS would still resolve all the internal systems. Then that went away and only a few internal systems were published in external DNS. Then that went away and only Mx records remained.

Strange how this mirrors the physical world... Someday, when all the physical land has been sold, HP will probably figure out a way to sell virtual land, aka IPv4 addresses.

sdb -- once at hpbs2024 and linux.boi.hp.com, and also hpdmd48.

P.S. Remember when hpdmd48 was a UUCP hub? ;)

...or has ICANN managed to weasel its way into IP allocations?

The major address blocks 1.0.0.0/8 and 27.0.0.0/8, are chosen accordance with a decision by ICANN to assign the least-desirable remaining IP address ranges to the largest regional registries first

I thought IANA was responsible for IP allocations. Don't tell me ICANN has IANA in its evil grasp as well!

Why does Hewlett-Packard have not one but TWO /8 IPv4 address ranges?

I'm sure you mean "why was HP allowed to keep DEC's /8 network after DEC's sell-out-to-Compaq/merger-with-HP?"
What should they do? Give such a valuable asset back to IANA saying, thank you, we've got enough IPv4 and we will spend lots of money to reallocate all the DEC/Compaq infrastructure's address assignments?

Why does Hewlett-Packard have not one but TWO /8 IPv4 address ranges?

Where do you see that? As far as I know, they have a single /8 and a bunch of /16s.

The answer, of course, is that they were assigned before subnetting (CIDR) was deployed.

Why does Hewlett-Packard have not one but TWO /8 IPv4 address ranges? Ain't they heard of NAT? How many other corporations have legacy /8 addresses and are holding on to them, not because they need them but because their laziness to move towards efficient use of those addresses creates a sense of entitlement to those very addresses.

How about the Class E (reserved for future use) range? That's another 15 "Class A" blocks excluding RFC0919.

How many people use anything but 224/8 for Multicast applications? IANA seems to have most of that space reserved or experimental.

When IPv4 addresses were first being handed out, they were given at a rate of 5-10 Class A's a week.

Um, this is basic math. If we would have been giving out 5-10 /8s per week, we would have exhausted the complete range of addresses in less than a year. I don't think that happened back in the 90s.

No, not really. There's companies with whole fucking /8 that have no real purpose to own them, but they've just always had them:

003/8 General Electric Company 1994-05 LEGACY
004/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc. 1992-12 LEGACY
008/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc. 1992-12 LEGACY (two /8's ?)
009/8 IBM 1992-08 LEGACY
013/8 Xerox Corporation 1991-09 LEGACY
015/8 Hewlett-Packard Company 1994-07 LEGACY
016/8 Digital Equipment Corporation 1994-11 LEGACY
017/8 Apple Computer Inc. 1992-07 LEGACY
019/8 Ford Motor Company 1995-05 LEGACY
034/8 Halliburton Company 1993-03 LEGACY
044/8 Amateur Radio Digital Communications 1992-07 LEGACY
045/8 Interop Show Network 1995-01 LEGACY
047/8 Bell-Northern Research 1991-01 LEGACY
048/8 Prudential Securities Inc. 1995-05 LEGACY
052/8 E.I. duPont de Nemours and Co., Inc. 1991-12 LEGACY
053/8 Cap Debis CCS 1993-10 LEGACY
054/8 Merck and Co., Inc. 1992-03 LEGACY
056/8 US Postal Service 1994-06 LEGACY

Just get rid of the companies that are reserving such huge spaces without having a real reason to do so, other than that they were there to reserve them in start of 90's. Also US and UK army and defence and other ministers have several /8, but why really? Other countries do just fine without too.

Port 54 is assigned by IANA for "XNS Clearinghouse". See http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers.

It would be safer to pick something that isn't already assigned. If everyone just picked arbitrary ports for their "private" communications, there would be pandemonium. Sniffers also use this registry for displaying packets properly in "user-friendly" formats. The IANA registry exists for a reason.

Yes, I meant TLD's not webistes. (sic) I wasn't aware that .con wasn't a valid TLD . And .og was meant to be a joke.

Which makes your comment worthwhile how, exactly ? Please refrain if you have no idea what you're talking about or take a minute to use your search engine of choice to see what the hell it is that people are talking about. As a rule geographic TLDs match the two letter country codes (as defined by ISO, see ISO-3166-1, relevant table is "alpha 2") most of the time.
See the handy table at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1#Officially_assigned_code_elements or http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/ for the real (internet-related) thing.

I'm not an internet expert, [...]

You don't say...
But that's not a handicap. We all start that way, and then we learn (if we are so inclined).

http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers

AFAIK There is no torrent client out there that mimics the HTTP protocol (yet?). Of course there is nothing stopping you from setting the port for incoming connections to port 80 (or 8080, or 21, 23, etc http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers). This trick works for some ISPs but fails for others.

If your ISP only gives you a /64, you'll only be able to run one subnet. IANA suggests giving everyone a /48:

http://www.iana.org/reports/2002/ipv6-allocation-policy-26jun02 (section 2.7)

But I think some ISPs are planning to do something in between.