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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

Honestly stupid that USDoD controls at least 13/256 of all IPv4 addresses.

It seems some entities, e.g. IBM and MIT, have returned (sold?) their /8s to their RIRs though.

Given it was the DoD's time/money (or our/taxpayers' money indirectly, but their effort) that gave rise to the Internet (or ARPANet rather) back in the day, I'd cut them some slack for owning a large segment.... The problem's obviously far greater and no amount of releasing some of the IPv4 space is going to help. We all knew this day was coming...

Yeah to me it seems more egregious that Ford or Apple have held onto their /8.

Good on GEC, IBM, HP or Xerox for having relinquished their(s).

Well I can understand Apple, they are at least a major tech company. But Ford has no use for /8...

Even if those were completely reclaimed, it would only extend the IPv4 pain for another year.

I wonder when IBM sold off their /8. When I left IBM in 2012 it was still used internally. My department alone had about 10K addresses.

I figured IBM would eventually sell it off and I wasn't looking forward to the day I'd have to reIP all those systems. Glad I missed that party.

--Edit I just did a whois on some the IPs that I remember. Looks like IBM still has big chunks of the 9.0.0.0/8. Likely only sold off what they hadn't already used. Honestly I'm surprised they sold off any of them. With their cloud ambitions I'd think they want to keep them for use there.

IBM's 9.0.0.0/8 is still IBM's, except for the 9.9.9.0/24 subnet.

It is their network.

It’s the public’s network, funded by tax payer money. The fact that they KNOW that they are global targets for cyber attacks and maintain so SO much publicly routable area is beyond irresponsible. Even more irresponsible is I’m positive they IP addresses are hard coded in some of those old systems.

The DoD has it's own private internet. Anything truly important isn't exposed to the public.

Then fork it. The difficult part is figuring out where the minimal cut is.

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