Silly criminal, you're supposed to resign from your regulatory job first, then found a company to steal (er, efficiently allocate using the free market) public resources the next day!
Public-private organizations, but capitalism takes all the blame naturally. It's the perfect material for selling people on pure state-run businesses to less informed citizens IMO.
Don't get me wrong though, the public/private trend of the last two decades really has been a cancer on society. I wish more market-leaning people realized this, since a ton of conservatives push it as some half-baked solution to "big government". We're all sold these benefits of "free" markets when the organization looks or operates nothing like a marketplace with legitimate competition nor with the transparency or responsibility towards externalities that public organizations bring.
It really is an opaque proxy for politicians and corrupt business leaders in the community whose only skill is working gov contract systems to have even less transparency and plunder public money. It's a worse-worse solution, gift wrapped as some more efficient pseudo-market.
We need a stronger divide between either private or public. These compromised middle grounds are a disaster. The US health market is the obvious example but there are a thousands of smaller ones in every municipality.
And on top of that, one might argue that humanity is highly self-interested by nature, and people with the greatest self-interest will be much more likely to obtain power.
How self-interested someone is highly depends on the individual and their culture. Glorifying egoism, as common in capitalism, makes things worse than they have to be.
For this reason, we must glorify not-egoism and those selfless luminaries of Communism such as Stalin and Mao who would otherwise be forgotten. Indeed, the cult of personality where the middle class seeks anonymous salaryman status is the true danger.
Actually, we must glorify Stalin and Mao because literally the only other alternative is an Ancap dystopia in which homosexuality is <s>illegal</s> against the proprietors' covenant and children are traded on the free market.
Could also be power itself. Not sure if you've experienced this. I've seen it in the military and in my current workplace where people seek power over other people and don't care as much about the compensation. There's something about controlling others that is intoxicating for some.
Why would these spam marketing companies want to buy IPv4 addresses? Would IPv6 not work? Or were they trying to assume the identity and reputation of the companies that owned the IPv4 addresses previously?
Everybody on the internet has access to IPv4, the same is not true of IPv6 as of the end of 2019. IPv6 addresses are also pretty easy to get without doing shady deals.
I'm not sure how tolerated this is on HN, but I'm lazy to research background on this. Could you please explain what a /64 is and why it is significant in this regard?
A netblock. A "/n" means "a block of IP addresses where the first n bits are the same".
This comes from the CIDR notation 192.168.1.0/24 indicating the netblock from 192.168.1.0 - 192.168.1.255.
So the number after the slash corresponds to a network size. The smaller the number, the more bits are variable, i.e. the bigger the netblock.
An IPv4 /24 has 32 (address length) - 24 = 8 bits that are variable, i.e. 2^8 addresses. A /18 would have 32-18 = 14 variable bits, i.e. 2^14 addresses.
In IPv6, the address length is 128. A /64 (which happens to be the smallest routable network size in IPv6) is 2^64 addresses - but because it's easy to get large IPv6 netblocks (typical ISP allocations are /64, /56, and you can often get a /48 with relative ease), for abuse blocking purposes, you generally treat the entire /64 or even /56 as one entity (i.e. you ignore the rightmost 64 or 72 bits).
A /56 is 2^8 separate /64s. A /48 is 2^16 separate /64s.
Since none of us know exactly how much you already know about IP routing, we’ll likely either waste time providing an answer that assumes knowledge you don’t yet have, or waste time providing extraneous detail you don’t need.
I suggest googling something along the lines of “ipv6 allocation 56 64“ sans quotes.
[Edit: never mind; the HN community seems quite generous with their time today.]
The problem is that thinking for someone else doesn't "teach them to fish (learn independently)" and "be the change you seek," rather it enables co-dependency on others.
RIRs only handle transfers of /24s or larger. I suppose it might be possible for a "legacy" pre-RIR address holder to reassign ownership rights of a single address, but I've never seen it happen for anything smaller than a /24. Even if it did happen, the addresses would be unusable on the Internet, since it's common practice to reject announcements of anything smaller than /24.
Your friend (correctly, IMO) values his address block more than the market does. They're regularly selling for $5000-6000 these days.
Insider jobs are unusually common in the non-private sector in developing markets. They also occur in the non-private sector in developed countries but not at the same scale.
The only "solution" in most of these developing countries is to have open and transparent auctions without onerous rules (another way of gaming the process) or to turn them into being private.
Weird NGOs that straddle the divide, think tanks, white collar unions aka "professional associations" that somehow acquired regulatory powers; see medicine, law, engineering, architecture etc. Corruption exists in all sorts of places.
You framed it perfectly! There are so many non-private sector institutions out there that I refrained from calling them even quasi public sector. In fact the example you mention of "professional associations" that have acquired regulatory powers is great as most of them are rife and riddled with corruption and act to either the benefit of their management or members and against the public interest.
Some of the address space is reserved for particular purposes: 127.0.0.0/8 is for loopback, 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 and 192.168.0.0/16 for private addresses, 224.0.0.0/4 is for multicast, and 240.0.0.0/4 is class E and unallocatable for anything.
