Shell companies that hoard and sell IPv4 addresses | Hacker News Reader

Shell companies that hoard and sell IPv4 addresses

theregister.co.uk

17 pointsbootload24 comments

Can't argue that it's fraudulent, but if those addresses truly are "dark" and it's not possible to contact the owners, maybe it's not so bad that they're doing this?

FWIW anyone can get a /22 from RIPE right now. Just need to pay that 1500 euro membership.

Not that a /22 is huge but it beats dealing with sketchy people.

How exactly does one buy IP addresses? Do you have to run your own BGP instance and peer with others? Could I, for personal use by a /22 and control my own network? How much does that cost to do?

First you need to get a ASN. Not hard these days with 4 byte AS support. NRC and yearly fees for this.

Next you need to either get a direct allocation from a RIR (RIPE, ARIN, APNIC, etc) or buy/transfer IP's from another party. Depending on the IP's history, it may or may not be subject to transfer regulations (showing a need for it).

Once you've got an AS and IP's, you can advertise them out multiple ISP's with BGP. If you've only got a single provider, you can have them announce it for you and statically route it to your side of the interface.

Not exactly "anyone," you have to demonstrate a need for a /22 without lying.

No. Not true. All RIPE participants can get another /22 right now. [0]

"We are now allocating from our last /8 block of IPv4 address space.

This means that LIRs can request one final /22 IPv4 allocation (1,024 addresses) from the RIPE NCC."

It's part of RIPE's IPv4 depletion playbook. They're in the 'you can't get anything larger than a /22, but everyone gets one last /22' phase.

[0] https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/ipv4/request-an-ipv...

I was responding to the assertion that "anybody" can get a /22 from RIPE right now.

Anyone can join RIPE and get another /22 now. How is that not clear?

I don't know how much of an impediment it is, but doesn't the link itself say you have to already have an ipv6 block?

https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-622#51

Anyway, I think I started all of this with a semantic quibble.

Since everyone is objecting to the word "criminals" (and indeed the article is strangely all "criminals criminals criminals") we've taken that out of the title above.

Seems like a market economy is forming for a finite resource... unprecedented... how could we have predicted this?!

lol @ "criminals"

Maybe it's finally time for people to get serious about IPv6?

How does this differ from Ticket Scalpers? (that noone seems to care about legislating against)

Edit: I am an idiot

Scalpers generally own the tickets they're selling.

Scalpers would be more like the second example of the hoarders.

*Edit: Auto-correct Correction

So "crims" (if they're criminals why isn't it a simple case of prosecuting them and confiscating their ill-gotten gains?) are making otherwise unusable IPv4s usable? That seems to be the bottom line to this story.

The article calls them criminals, but they seem to be providing a valuable service...

The same can be said of drug dealers.

First ping is always free.

A better comparison would be someone who steals unused houses and sells them to people.

There's a legal real estate doctine for this, based on the idea that it indeed can be a good thing to bring unused property back into use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession

Seems strange to call them criminals.

Why does it keep saying criminals?

Because they're falsely claiming to be the original registrant where invalid contact details exist in order to take over control of address blocks so they can re-sell them. (At least that's my interpretation of what appears to be going on based on text later in the article.)

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