Using unallocated address space

Tue Feb 13 15:33:27 UTC 2001

Other-Sean writes:

| Other than making it difficult for people to figure out WHOIS using that
| ASN, "yanking" an ASN's registration has little practical effect.  You
| can use an un-allocated ASN almost as easily as using an un-allocated
| address block.

Well, the hidden point here was that the registries act on behalf
of the communities of ISPs who form the registries' paying customer
base / membership, and there is no particular reason why they could
not alert their membership to "evil doers".   What is done with
such an alert is of course up to each individual member/network,
however I imagine several of them would set up filtering, perhaps
including the ones closest to the source of the "evil doing".

Obvious candidates for reportable behaviour include the use
of unregistered prefixes and ASNs.

In the past in the odd case where an addressing registrar
asked for assistance in dealing with such a thing she or he
had discovered, I was happy to provide it.

	Sean.