[HN Gopher] RIPE meetings: IP addresses as spoils of war
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RIPE meetings: IP addresses as spoils of war
Author : iam-TJ
Score : 201 points
Date : 2022-10-31 07:11 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techaint.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techaint.com)
| fazfq wrote:
| computer wrote:
| There is no such thing as a politically neutral place.
| Especially not for an organization that has financial ties to
| many other organizations around the world.
| throw_a_grenade wrote:
| This is not what the text says at all.
| sofixa wrote:
| Yes, it's interesting how one finds how to be preoccupied
| with the plight of the poor Russians in an article literally
| focused on Ukrainians being forced to do things at gunpoint
| and how that can be blocked.
| fazfq wrote:
| Sorry, next time I will ask you what part of the article I
| should comment on before I post.
| sofixa wrote:
| You're free to comment on whatever you want, same as
| we're free to comment on whatever you chose.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Starting to wonder how much the global takeoff of the Internet
| and specifically the WWW was due to the "end of history" period
| from 1989-2001, when there wasn't significant conflict between
| major powers. I suspect the spillover from this will be
| increasing Balkanisation of the Internet simply in order to limit
| the extent to which it's a cyberwarfare or propaganda
| battlefield.
| bombcar wrote:
| The takeoff of the Internet was mainly because nobody was
| paying attention to it and it became a new frontier - literally
| - and was very wild-west for a time. That time is ending.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > limit the extent to which it's a cyberwarfare or propaganda
| battlefield.
|
| This was already done years ago by concentrating "the internet"
| and limiting it to a few companies with ban-hammers ready.
|
| What once used to be many many different personal webpages,
| blogs, forums, chat sites (and protocols), is now basically
| limited to facebook (facebook, whatsapp, instagram), twitter
| and google (plus some outliers, such as telegram). Even with
| the mainstream news services, a huge percentage of people read
| that (MSM) news on sites like facebook and twitter (or atleast
| get linked from there).
|
| Other countries have their own bundles of services (wechat in
| china, yandex+vk in russia, etc.)
|
| So basically from a million different sources, pages, social
| groups, we've gone down to single digits per language group...
| and all of them can be monitored and censored by a few
| individuals with few agendas.
| jpe90 wrote:
| Personal webpages and blogs still very much exist, though. I
| started one recently and I'm positive it gets more traffic
| than it would if I started it 20 years ago. I don't think
| censorship is the issue so much as the fact that many more
| people hopped on the internet and are more interested in
| social media than small blogs, even though they coexist.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| This feels more like a thing that "just happened" rather than
| something that was intentionally done.
|
| Blogs and such are still there, they just take an much work
| as they always have. And the centralized sites don't require
| nearly as much intentionality.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > rather than something that was intentionally done
|
| Normal users cannot even put a link into an instagram post
| (pointing to whatever external site).... it seems pretty
| intentional to me (to keep you on their platform)
| pjc50 wrote:
| Intentionally done .. as an anti-spam measure. It's also
| there to limit the extent to which Instagram is part of
| OnlyFans customer acquisition.
|
| As someone who lived through it, I don't think
| decentrafans really appreciate that we _had_
| decentralised services and spam turned them into unusable
| wastelands.
|
| AI makes this worse, not better: the chance that a random
| site which looks like an interesting personal blog or
| small forum is a disguised sales op increases.
| shrubble wrote:
| There's been a push since 1997 at least to have gatekeepers
| added to the Internet.
|
| All kinds of politicians, international and national,
| including Hillary Clinton (senator and Secretary of State,
| 3rd or 4th in line to the Presidency) have been saying for
| 20 years they want gatekeepers.
|
| There were laws passed that specifically enabled
| consolidation and centralization.
|
| You figure that congress and the senate "just happened" to
| pass those laws?
| samstave wrote:
| uhm... kosovo, congo, rwanda???
|
| Fucking massive genocides happen in the 90s.
|
| But if youre solely talking about cyber war -- ESCHELON,
| CARNIVOR I mean cyber war was super deep... NSA was requiring
| backdoor access to all routers as early as 1995... and not only
| that Cerberos group bought MAE-West in San jose and PAIX in
| palo alto to spy on everyone... I know a lot about these spying
| ops.
| JauntyHatAngle wrote:
| The OP said major western powers.
| samstave wrote:
| who the heck western power do you think i was talking
| about???
| prvit wrote:
| It is pretty surprising that RIPEs solution to sanctions is to
| just offer their services for free to those who can't pay due to
| sanctions.
| mtmail wrote:
| The United Nations also allows 2 years non-payment before a
| member looses voting rights, currently 4 countries
| https://www.un.org/en/ga/about/art19.shtml One of the
| countries, Venezuela, can't pay due to sanctions
| https://www.france24.com/en/20200622-venezuela-blames-us-san...
| [deleted]
| wmf wrote:
| Apparently the sanctions also don't requite cutting Internet
| access to Russia. As long as Russia is still on the Internet we
| should maintain accurate records. If that means maintaining
| records for free, so be it.
|
| This is akin to the fact that some US states will issue
| identification to people regardless of their immigration
| status.
| prvit wrote:
| IPv4 space is a super scarce resource, this is IPv4 space
| held by non-paying RIPE members. Why should it not be
| distributed among paying members, many of which are desperate
| for more IPv4?
|
| It's not like it's _impossible_ for Russian entities to pay
| either, I regularly receive payments to my European account
| from Russian companies.
| bombcar wrote:
| Many things operate this way - you want to charge people who
| _can_ pay but offer the service for free to those who actually
| _cannot_ pay (either because of sanctions or lack of funds,
| etc). The tricky part is avoiding abuse; but "country claiming
| it is sanctioned when it is not" is pretty unlikely.
| egorfine wrote:
| > The adoption of a new policy would take at least months
|
| Of course. One must form a committee to thoroughly research the
| matter and collect feedback from all involved parties. /s
| throw_a_grenade wrote:
| Is there a linkable example of how such forced transfer looks
| like?
| iam-TJ wrote:
| There are many discussion threads at the RIPE Network
| Coordination Centre (NCC) Services Working Group (ncc-services-
| wg) mailing list with a lot of direct and ancillary information
| [0].
|
| There is also a detailed factual exposition of the technical
| changes forced by Russia since 2014 in Crimea and later Kherson
| "Rerouting of Kherson follows familiar gameplan" [1].
|
| In [3] below Viktoriia Opanasiuk writes:
|
| "responding on <<As this only affects LIRs, I doubt there will be
| significant participation by non-LIRs>> I must say that it
| affects all internet service providers that use IP resources. In
| Ukraine there are more than 5 000 registered ISPs, but not all of
| them are LIRs.
|
| The situation that we have now is that when russian troops
| withdraw from our territory, they dismantle and take with them
| not only washing machines, but also telecom equipment, TV- and
| radio-transmitters, leaving people who live there without any
| information channels and means of communication. We have to re-
| build telecom and internet infrastructure, and yes, we could
| bring new equipment there, but if the IP addresses of local
| Internet Providers will be transferred to other parties, we will
| not be able to restore even our critical infrastructure there,
| and there is no place to get new IPv4 addresses.
|
| Therefore any solutions that involve allowing transfers now and
| somehow reverting them later are not solving this immediate
| problem that we have."
|
| The threads with most focus seem to be:
|
| "Protecting Resource Holders in Distressed Areas" [2]
|
| "IP adress transferring in Ukraine" [3]
|
| "UA IP transfer" [4]
|
| "UA IP transfers situation" [5]
|
| [0] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-
| wg/2022...
|
| [1] https://www.kentik.com/blog/rerouting-of-kherson-follows-
| fam...
|
| [1] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-
| wg/2022...
|
| [2] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-
| wg/2022...
|
| [3] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-
| wg/2022...
|
| [4] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-
| wg/2022...
| iam-TJ wrote:
| In the interest of balance this ncc-services-wg message by Max
| Tulyev appears to provide some background and seems to imply a
| possible power-play by Ukraine parliament/government people and
| for which no evidence of actual 'rogue' transfers are provided
| [0].
|
| Although as people may have guns at their heads it would be
| difficult to know if a block transfer were under duress or not.
| It would seem possible to analyse transfers since 2014
| affecting Crimea and the Donbas regions, and transfers since
| February 2022 affecting occupied territory.
|
| [0] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-
| wg/2022...
| t-3 wrote:
| These problems could be easily solved by moving to IPv6, but that
| doesn't leave any room for rent-seeking, so people would rather
| complain about nonsense like stealing IP addresses.
| humble_dude_1 wrote:
| "There is no downside to IPv6, besides inertia."
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| I thought IPv4 is used in order to not rebuild infrastructure
| from scratch.
| rascul wrote:
| Does infrastructure need to be rebuilt from scratch for
| ipv6?
| wmf wrote:
| Not "from scratch" but there are tons of routers that
| either don't support IPv6 or have broken support and thus
| need to be replaced.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Not "from scratch" but there are tons of routers that
| either don't support IPv6 or have broken support and thus
| need to be replaced.
|
| A fair point. Many older (and possibly some current)
| _consumer_ routers don 't support IPv6 and would
| obviously need to be replaced.
|
| That said, AFAICT, all the Tier I and Tier II providers
| and most major ISPs routing infrastructures support IPv6.
| Depressingly, many of those don't offer IPv6 to their
| customers.
|
| This is anecdata, but my ISP (Spectrum) doesn't offer
| IPv6 to _me_ (presumably based on my location), but does
| offer it to _other customers_.
|
| And unless (this is US-centric, I know it's different
| elsewhere) you have an organization of a certain size[0],
| and most small businesses and consumers aren't anywhere
| near big enough, one needs to rely on their ISP for IPv6
| allocations/support.
|
| I'd add that most modern (last 10-15 years) OS
| implementations have IPv6 baked in, and most routers have
| supported dual stack for quite some time, IPv6 _should_
| be much more widely deployed in the US.
|
| According to Google[1], less than half their users (~41%)
| access their services via IPv6. That's a significant
| increase since 2013 or so, but I suspect much of that is
| because India has ~80% IPv6 utilization.
|
| All that said, I hope IPv6 adoption increases across the
| world in the near to medium term, and more importantly
| (to me at least) that my ISP starts offering it in my
| area.
|
| [0] https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/ipv6/first_reque
| st/#end...
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#t
| ab=ipv6...
| wmf wrote:
| _Spectrum doesn 't offer IPv6 to me, but does offer it to
| other customers_
|
| There's _something_ they have to change to turn on IPv6
| for your area, whether it 's swapping a CMTS or updating
| an IPAM database or whatever, and that change costs both
| time and money so Spectrum is gradually rolling it out
| across the network. The cost of the migration is so large
| that it has to be spread over a decade or more so the
| shareholders don't revolt. It's frustrating but it's not
| evil (if they truly hated IPv6 they'd just never support
| it at all).
| t-3 wrote:
| No, that's the whole point of having a layered network
| stack.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Suppose you are a small Ukrainian ISP working in Berdyansk or
| Melitopol.
|
| In 2022 you essentially become an ISP working on Russian-held
| territory. Does RIPE want to just confiscate your address pool
| and redistribute it back in Ukraine in some form, leaving you
| without address space?
|
| How does that help the people living on that territory?
| bombcar wrote:
| There are millions of questions like this - and at some point
| the small Ukrainian ISP is _de facto_ a small Russian ISP.
|
| Often the best thing to do in (reality, practicality) is let
| things continue as they were, even if technically you could cut
| them off entirely "as punishment to the Russians" - because it
| wouldn't actually punish any Russians whatsoever, but would
| hurt the people on the ground.
| wazoox wrote:
| People in these territories face a life of pain any way you
| look at it, frankly. IP addresses are probably pretty low among
| their current concerns...
|
| They're currently living in a war-torn country under Putin's
| iron fist. If at some point the Ukrainian army reconquer these
| areas, there will probably be a witch hunt if not plain ethnic
| cleansing. If they stay Russian, they'll live forever under the
| power of Putin's militias and oligarchy. Unfortunately I see no
| possible positive outcome for them. That's horrifying.
| skyfaller wrote:
| It may not directly help that ISP, but increasing numbers of
| the people living in that territory will be Russian invaders,
| as the Ukrainians living there are murdered or deported. And
| helping the invaders is problematic.
|
| It may indirectly help that ISP or other ISPs in the future if
| the world makes a general policy of not supporting looting of
| IP addresses or anything else. If profits from looting are
| reduced, it may make invasions less likely, as both the rank &
| file and the leaders/oligarchs have less to gain. And people
| working at ISPs would generally benefit from their country not
| being invaded.
| zajio1am wrote:
| The IP addresses are assigned to organizations (ISPs), not
| countries, so if you are the same ISP, it does not really
| matter which country held the territory. The article is more
| about risk of ukrainian ISPs on occupied territories being
| forced 'at gunpoint' to transfer their IP addresses to russian
| ISPs.
| afhammad wrote:
| What are some non-obvious or second order effects of this?
| [deleted]
| martinskou wrote:
| All Ripe assigned AS, IP and routing in Russia should be disabled
| until Russia has removed its forces from Ukraine.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It was always a bit confusing how RIPE got around the Crimea
| switchover in 2014. They must have found a way to reallocate the
| system over to Russian companies as Ukranian ISPs no longer serve
| the region, but how they managed to do so without officially
| acknowledging Russian sovereignty is a mystery. Especially since
| they keep extensive paperwork.
|
| I asked about it on SE,
| https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/64179/does-acceptanc...,
| and there doesn't seem to be a way that this could have been
| legally accomplished without at the least rescinding recognition
| of Ukranian sovereignty over Crimea.
|
| Which would imply, since all UN countries recognize RIPE NCC as
| the final and exclusive authority on internet allocation matters
| in the European region, that the world has stopped recognizing
| Crimea as Ukrainian, via one degree of separation.
| bombcar wrote:
| The reality that people don't want to admit in all these things
| is that the laws, etc, get pushed aside to acknowledge the
| "reality" in the end - might makes right and possession is
| 9/10ths of the law always triumphs.
|
| And those involved often know not to push things too far when
| it's "working" - something like "we'll let the Russians route
| these IPs as long as they don't crow about routing these IPs".
| rsj_hn wrote:
| This reminds me of the Chinese revolution, where after the
| Communists took control of everything except Taiwan, many
| international organizations continued to insist that Taiwan
| was the actual representative of China, and Taiwan held the
| Chinese vote at the UN until 1971. So that's about 22 years
| of pretending.
|
| I'm no fan of either communism or the chinese revolution, but
| I always thought that was ridiculous, that a country so big
| as China had no UN representation except via Taiwan, and that
| Taiwan held a permanent member UN security council seat.
|
| If, for example, Russia conquers all of Ukraine, then how
| long will some guy sitting in London keep pretending to be
| the Government of Ukraine? At some point, all the social
| media accounts, internet registries, country codes, etc --
| they have to be updated to reflect reality.
| bombcar wrote:
| That actually happens -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_in_exile is the
| term of art - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvian_diploma
| tic_service_in_... is an example of basically exactly that
| with regards to Latvia.
| moberley wrote:
| The oldest one would probably be the Rada of the
| Belarusian Democratic Republic [1] which went into exile
| in 1919 and unlike similar bodies from other ex-Soviet
| republics remained apart after 1991.
|
| 1. https://www.radabnr.org/english
| mormegil wrote:
| What about six years until the country gets liberated
| again?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovak_government-
| in-e...
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Yes, and I understand waiting until the war ends. And
| even waiting for a few years after. But at some point,
| you do need to accept realities. The Golan Heights, for
| example, has Israeli registries, phone numbers, etc. If,
| in the future, Syria recaptures it, they can make another
| adjustment.
| dathinab wrote:
| This kind of absolutist thinking has little to do with reality.
|
| One one side the situation is technically very different and
| might not have involved RIPE.
|
| One the other hand just because one company does something
| unlawful and is in general recognized doesn't at all imply that
| countries changed the recognizing of boarder, like at all.
| Governments sometimes "accidentally overlooking" or delaying
| some problem is a pretty common diplomatic tool. For example
| most US tech companies would have had to stop providing
| anything involving server data storage to the EU years ago due
| bad interactions between GDPR and Cloud Act.
|
| National law is not code. It's not meant to be as ridged as
| code. That would be an catastrophe.
|
| Geopolitics are in some way even less ridged then national law.
| hansel_der wrote:
| > how they managed to do so without officially acknowledging
| Russian sovereignty is a mystery. Especially since they keep
| extensive paperwork.
|
| that's it. they just did what needed to be done and kept quiet
| about the political implications.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| I don't follow the logic that RIPE has to acknowledge Russia's
| claim on Crimea as legit to do this.
|
| As far as I can tell, the following statements are true
| independent of who you think rightly owns Crimea:
|
| 1. RIPE is the ultimate authority over IP address assignments
| in Europe as recognized by the relevant governments here
|
| 2. The Crimea region became served by different ISPs than
| before (for whatever reason)
|
| 3. RIPE exercised its authority to transfer Crimea's IP address
| assignments to the company(s) currently serving the region
| malfist wrote:
| I agree with you. The GP's argument is like saying I mailed a
| letter addressed to "Crimea, Russia" and the post office
| delivered it, therefor the US (or NATO as their claim makes a
| few jumps) recognizes Russia's claim to Crimea.
|
| RIPE doesn't have the authority to make that decision. Just
| as the friendly person at the post office making sure my
| letter gets where I meant it to, doesn't either.
| nirimda wrote:
| As far as I know most countries do or at least did in fact
| refuse to deliver mail addressed to "Crimea, Russia". In
| order for it to get through, you either need someone to
| bounce it within Russia or to disguise it from your
| national post office but not from the Russian post office
| (no doubt this is easy: just omitting "Crimea" or using the
| Cyrillic alphabet would probably work).
|
| In the same way, they refuse to accept a Russian passport
| issued to someone in connection with Crimea. These are not
| recognised as purely domestic matters; the statehood is
| intimately connected with the territory it controls.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Well there are a couple of contradictions, though they don't
| imply that Russia's claim is recognized, just that Ukraine's
| claim is no longer recognized.
|
| For example, their accounting department is likely accepting
| money from companies that have no legal basis under Ukrainian
| law for activities in Crimea. Unless they've waived all fees.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Companies here in the US do things that are illegal all the
| time. That doesn't mean they don't recognize the US
| government.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| >Ukranian ISPs no longer serve the region
|
| Maybe that's the reason?
| znpy wrote:
| Possibly unrelated, but: so far russia has invaded the east part
| of ukraine, with the west part relatively "calm" despite being of
| course involved in the conflict.
|
| I wonder: has no one from the companies on the east side thought
| of "lending" their address blocks to companies on the west side,
| momentarily, in hope of ucraine to survive the hostile invasion?
|
| A bit like asking companies on the west side to act like
| trustees, if you will.
|
| Just a thought, an honest question.
| gbil wrote:
| I didn't activelly join the latest RIPE meeting a few days ago,
| for sure this was not raised in any voting which is a bit strange
| since the time between the meeting and when this situation
| started was more than enough for at least a basic voting. But
| isn't this the same topic as with all other centralized (in a way
| services), wouldn't the same discussion apply for DNS too ?
| hug wrote:
| At the risk of sounding flippant, por que no los dos?
|
| Any valuable domains are at the same risk, but that's outside
| of the scope of RIPE or IANA.
|
| Fight this. Also fight that.
| AndrewUnmuted wrote:
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(page generated 2022-10-31 23:02 UTC)