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MIT No Longer Owns 18.0.0.0/8 (ttias.be)
An anonymous reader shares: MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8. That's a very big block of scarce IPv4 addresses that have become available again. One block inside this /8, more specifically 18.145.0.0/16, was transferred to Amazon.
Nobody envisioned more than a few thousand computers on the Internet. The notion that hundreds of millions would be limiting was ridiculous.
Technically, just the MIT LCS lab, not even the whole school, had the A block.
DEC also had a class A address block for a while. HP got this, plus their own, when they bought DEC. At one point, HP had twice as many IP addresses than China.
The Internet grew way more than any of the founders thought. 4 billion addresses seemed huge back then. Look at the List of assigned A blocks and how A blocks were thrown around in the early days.
Needs an "M" in there for "misleading". MIT hasn't released the entire /8 back to ARIN; AFAICT from whois queries they've transfered a whole bunch of /16s (20+) directly over to Amazon, all of which are above the 18.145.0.0 line. Given the highly non-contiguous allocations across the upper half of the /8 range the most likely cause is that they've received chunk of cash for giving Amazon all the /16s that they were not currently actively using.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
https://gist.github.com/simons...
"Fourteen million of these IPv4 addresses have not been used, and we have concluded that at least eight million are excess and can be sold without impacting our current or future needs, up to the point when IPv6 becomes universal and address scarcity is no longer an issue. The Institute holds a block of 20 times 10^30 (20 nonillion) IPv6 addresses.
"As part of our upgrade to IPv6, we will be consolidating our in-use IPv4 address space to facilitate the sale of MIT’s excess IPv4 capacity. Net proceeds from the sale will cover our network upgrade costs, and the remainder will provide a source of endowed funding for the Institute to use in furthering its academic and research mission.
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There is a lot of expensive real-estate tied up in these "8-blocks"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
HP, by virtue of their acquisition of the assets of DEC, has 2 8-blocks, which is probably worth a small fortune in real money. 33 million IP4 addresses.
Most (all?) of these were reserved in the great IP address land grab back in the early 90s.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
The internet back then was mostly dialup. Even most schools would exchange email/news with each other via automated dialup at night when phone rates were lower. Consequently, most of the Internet traffic was store-and-forward. You sent an email, your mail server dialed up your school's computer and delivered the mail to them. The school's computer would hold it until night, when it would dial out to the main university in the area and deliver your mail. The university computer, being a minor hub would dial out more frequently, so after say an hour it would dial out to the man hub in the region and deliver your mail.
The main hubs were the ones with always-on dedicated links to other major hubs. They were the ones which got the class A subnets. It made sense because then they could then parcel out the IP addresses to the minor hubs and spokes as they saw fit, and thus DNS resolution could always be handled locally (and thus immediately). For those of you who weren't on the Internet back then, because data was mostly being transmitted as store-and-forward, email typically was only slightly faster than postal mail (usually took a few hours to days to reach someone on another continent), and DNS changes could take up to a week to propagate through the entire Internet. So being able to resolve DNS changes locally quickly was a big deal.
Here's the changelog from the ARIN list if anyone's interested:
http://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-issued/2017-April/003050.html
14.0.0.0/8 and 15.0.0.0/8 could be combined to 14.0.0.0/7 (or 15.0.0.0/7 if you prefer). 15 and 16 can't be combined. Do it in binary and it will be more obvious.
Because IPv4 addresses are valuable ($10 range currently) Having 16.7 Million of them is a nice chunk of change, letting 65K of them go for free seems to be a breach of fiduciary responsibility by someone.
They are not resellable like that, what they have is not property just a reserved allocation, and one that can be revoked if they start treating it as resellable property.
The legal status of legacy allocations has never been especially clear. They were allocated before the RIRs even existed and long before anyone thought IP addreses would have any value.
In any case after arguing about it for years most of the major RIRs (ARIN, RIPE and APNIC) have allowed sale of IP addresses subject to some conditions. They have concluded that making IPv4 addresses a marketable commodity is the least-bad way to manage the post-exhaustion era.
I guess that MIT probablly cut a deal with ARIN allowing them to carve up the block into smaller sub-blocks (allowing them to sell the unused sub-blocks while keeping the used ones) in exchange for agreeing to ARIN taking a role in the address space's management.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register