Anyone notice strange announcements for 174.128.31.0/24

Tue Jan 13 19:27:38 UTC 2009

Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
> Fortunately, people who run networks are not clueless ("jurors"?).  Or 
> at least they are not supposed to be clueless.

If Randy were to be charged under any of the various computer abuse 
statutes (which, given the history of their (ab)use, he certainly could 
be), jurors are who would be trying to figure out whether or not it was 
ok to use "your" integer in a specific place in the BGP announcement he 
made.

That's why *I* wouldn't have run such an experiment myself, because 
there's just too many cases these days where people have gotten 
convicted of doing things like putting the wrong integer in their 
MySpace profile.

> An ASN is a well defined resource, with publicly available ownership 
> information.  If anyone on this list does not understand this, I suggest 
> they do some more studying.

It is an integer. Under ARIN policy you certainly don't "own" it, you 
just use it. In some places, that integer has meaning. How important 
that meaning is, and whether or not someone else can use the same 
integer in a similar place where it has that meaning without getting 
charged with a crime, we don't know. What we *do* know is that some 
people think it is valuable to try it out to get some experimental data, 
and other people are all up in arms about it.

Matthew Kaufman