Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

.it could be as simple as the DoD has some extra bandwidth/infrastructure that they are leasing out to say Sprint?

Ok, I get that in principle... but that particular combination sounds awfully suspicious. The DoD just happens to have extra IP space, and they just happen to lease it to cell phone carriers? Hmmmmmmmmm....

I mean, yeah, it could all be totally innocuous, but I'm still suspicious that there might be something else going on. I'm not exactly a card carrying member of the tinfoil-hat brigade, but I trust our government about as far as I can throw it... :-)

View on HN

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addres...

Do a control-f for "DOD". These guys have so much IP4 space its not even funny. Being the government, they'll never give it up. So a total of 200 million IP4 addresses:

http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/02/13/where-did-all-the-ip-num...

So, when the country that starts the internet is also the country with the largest, by far, military and has obscene military spending, well, this is what happens.

I doubt the DOD purchased IP blocks much as I doubt Apple pays for their domain name.

Back before the commercialization of the Internet these things were relatively free.

Wow. For the curious but unmotivated, here are the /8 IPs they control:

7.0.0.0/8 11. 21. 22. 26. 28. 29. 30. 33. 55. 214. 215.

(omitted the 0.0.0/8 from all but the first for brevity)

I just had a LOST flashback.

Are you sure it wasn't a... flash forward?

DOD has 211 million public IP's! That is a way to reduce the budget deficit by auctioning off extra IP's. I doubt the DOD needs that many public IP's

The best part is that the DoD is working hard to limit the outgoing bandwidth to just a certain subset of IP addresses in an attempt to limit their attack surface, so most of those IP addresses are never going to be externally accessible and may simple be used internally for internal only networks.

Or like a tax refund they could give one to every adult in the USA!

Given that the DoD would probably still run the infrastructure.... no way I would accept that....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com