We can’t get food in the supermarket. People get scared. Better not poke the bear. This government sucks, let’s get the populist one that will fix all this overnight somehow.
PSA that if you have a ham radio licence, anywhere in the world, there are IPv4 addresses available for you for the taking at ARDC (AMPR)[1].
You can either get a block of /24 to announce yourself (you've got to cover all the technical setup and costs of this) or use their free 44net.connect service and just organise a wireguard tunnel.
Ok so I was looking at the market rates for ipv4, and it appears that $20 per IP is a common figure, which means that a /24 block is worth about $5000.. so, what's the catch? And how many /24 blocks does ARDC have available, really?
I'm most curious to understand why didn't bad actors gobble up all those /24 blocks already.
You're absolutely correct - it's an incredibly valuable asset.
It's a really interesting piece of internet history. The whole 44.0.0.0/8 was assigned for loose 'amateur radio use' back in the 80s. For the most part it was used for building mesh networks over RF in different locations.
Then IP addresses became quite valuable. Now, I feel that what was really going to happen is that, with no real organisation around it, and not that much use of a very valuable asset, it would have been not unthinkable for the whole lot to have been taken away [by ARIN/ICANN/whoever] and assigned for general use. Certainly easier than taking it away from the US military. So, about a third of this space was sold to AWS and the money used to fund an actual organisation with staff - but mainly to issue grants to amateur radio projects around the world.
They therefore really do have [tens of thousands - sorry I don't remember how to calculate it right now] of /24s available.
Internally - they allocate it how they want, some are only used on mesh networks, some are used for infra, some only private networks, but plenty for people to announce.
When they assign it to you, they're only giving you a Letter of Authorisation, and creating a route in a routing DB saying that your ASN is allowed to announce that allocation. They can withdraw that at any time which means the routes will be ignored by others.
Having the ham radio licence requirement is a reasonably accessible, yet robust entry barrier. The catch is you can't use the addresses for commercial purposes. They have staff and volunteers pretty much full time so if they find that they just cut you off.
An interesting parallel is the ham radio frequencies themselves. I love messing around with building equipment and transmitting, but actually getting an exclusive licence for a chunk of spectrum would cost me an impractical amount.
But in many countries (including Germany), you are not allowed to encrypt your transmissions via ham radio, e.g. using TLS with such IPv4 addresses is against the law.
No that would only be if you were to use actual packet radio across the amateur bands with these. Some of them are used for that purpose indeed.
But the ones I’m referring too are just internet addresses you use on the public internet. Eg, ssh-ing to a raspberry pi, setting up an SDR, or just leaning BGP and suchlike.
'[the] actual telecommunications agencies [under defined circumstances have] .. legislative authority to enter premises and what have you to resolve issues'
No, OFCOM in the UK or Traficom in Finland (the two I'm familiar with) don't have armed units going door to door but if circumstances & the law deem it so then they can show up with the police and the necessary warrants/orders and do so.
People say 'Europe', speak as if their experience is the same across the continent, and anyone with a different experience is somehow not in the Europe they mean. It's very annoying.
European healthcare is run very differently across the continent. 'Insurance' can mean a [state] social insurance institute that the doctor must bill. Some countries would employ the doctor directly as part of a nationalised health system. Some places it might be the municipality or city that would then get some subsidy from central government. Some it is a mix of all of this. 'Free' healthcare might actually mean a few hundred Euros, or literally nothing.
This! We went to a pediatric dentist with my kid on Monday, with a referral from another dentist, both private. After small talk, their first proper question was: "Do you have insurance?". Before I could respond, my wife responded affirmatively. Insurance here in Ireland means private insurance. After an x-ray, we were presented with a menu of treatment options ranging from around €2k to €5k.
Later I requested the clinic to share the x-ray with me and consulted with another pediatric dentist from another EU country. His assessment was completely different, and recommended very minimal intervention.
We can’t get food in the supermarket. People get scared. Better not poke the bear. This government sucks, let’s get the populist one that will fix all this overnight somehow.
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