[arin-discuss] Offer to buy IP space

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

On 7/2/2010 3:18 PM, Bill Woodcock wrote:
>>>>> I'm pretty sure the people who solicit address space like
>>>>> this don't understand route aggregation.
>
> You guys all seem pretty exited to waste a day discussing what idiots
> you think these folks are.  Has it occurred to any of you that you
> simply don't know their business, and they do?

After your post I went and investigated and now I'm positive
that anyone here (except for you, possibly) knows their business
better than they do.

 From the original post from them:

"...Our company Ideco is located in Russia and is in the business of
developing and selling Internet gateways for small and middle
businesses in Russia as well as billing software for ISPs.

We’re now starting a new project for Russia and Eastern Europe
that will provide secure Internet access for educational institutions,
commercial and non-profit organizations..."

It would take very little effort for them to design their
gateways so that the gateway boots, then using a FQDN, contacts
a server of theirs and obtains the DNS server numbers they actually
want to be used.

Or they could create a website so that the educational network admin
could go to that site and click a button and an active X control
could fill out the correct IP address in his Windows server.  (I'm
assuming that any customer who couldn't be trusted with typing in
an IP address correctly would be using a Windows server)

In short, there's many creative ways that they can distribute a
difficult-to-remember IP number, one that could change dynamically.

> If they're trying to
> sell a service that requires that end-users memorize an IP address,
> it's pretty darned important to them that the address be memorable.

A service that requires end-users to memorize an IP address is
not well-enough designed to be worth paying money for, IMHO.
Why do you think Google is giving away that 8.8.8.8 nonsense?
Google wants people to use 8.8.8.8 so they can use the query data
to do market research to benefit THEM, and they have the nerve
to slander legions of ISP's with bogus claims that ISPs run
insecure, overloaded DNS servers to get people to use their
servers.  Ideco is probably doing the exact same thing - on
one side they are going to claim that they are giving away
to nonprofits all this filter blocking stuff for free then
they are going to turn around and sell all the statistical query
data to spammers.

DNS query data should not be casually bandied around in this way.
To give you
an example if I'm a spy for the PRC all I have to do is break
into a DNS server that is known to be run by an ISP that is
friendly to Chinese political opponents and start logging hostnames
and after a while I'll be able to mine that data for
all of the hosts that my political opponents are using.

> What they're offering is entirely within legitimate ARIN policy,
> legitimate business practices, the law, and good judgement.
>

Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD do
something.

Ted

> These are not the droids you're looking for.  Move along.
>
> -Bill
>
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