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UK Government Owns 16.9 Million Unused IPv4 Addresses

Posted by Unknown on from the who-needs-that-ipv6-thing dept.

hypnosec writes "The Department of Work and Pensions in the UK has a /8 block of IPv4 addresses that is unused. An e-petition was created asking the DWP to sell off the block to ease the IPv4 address scarcity in the RIPE region. John Graham-Cumming, the person who first discovered the unused block, discovered that these 16.9 million IP addresses were unused after checking in the ASN database."

2 of 399 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who cares by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Redundant

    What's with the number? TFA actually gives the exact value of 2^24 and then refers to it later as a block of 16.9 million addresses. Weird rounding scheme.

  2. Re:Who cares by jibjibjib · · Score: 1, Redundant

    No, in the late 90s, most Internet users connected via dial-up and didn't have a router at all.

    Of the three or four cheap routers I have tested, from different manufacturers, using different chipsets and different operating systems, none have used DHCP information to answer DNS queries.