
Shell companies that hoard and sell IPv4 addresses - bootload
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/16/ipv4_hijacking/
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hansjorg
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?

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scurvy
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.

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ryanlm
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?

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scurvy
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.

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dang
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.

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

lol @ "criminals"

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

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

Edit: I am an idiot

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msbarnett
Scalpers generally own the tickets they're selling.

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hartpuff
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.

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

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c3534l
The same can be said of drug dealers.

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

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hga
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession)

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jdalgetty
Seems strange to call them criminals.

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cdelsolar
Why does it keep saying criminals?

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Figs
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.)

