Anyone who has operated a public webserver knows that the vast majority of the rabid, robots.txt ignoring hyperscrapers are from Chinese autonomous systems

I'm not shocked. ASN blocking is well-known among people who I can easily called experts (veterans which can set up a reasonable-ish firewall from base principles) and ASN control is exposed in major cloud firewalls, but younger people (except those who were trained with deep networking skills) don't really understand ASNs for some reason.

Holy cow. Didn’t realize there is an entire /4 reserved for future use.

240/4 can be hijacked/used as private IP space currently by a lot of devices. I think Windows might be the hold out. But for internal routing and IoT it’s very useful. Can never be used as publicly routable space.

I’d like to see it added to the official list of private space alongside RFC1918.

Why? It would be to the benefit of relatively few and be an enormous technical problem for decades for everyone. If we did this, the IPv4 addresses would run out again after a few months at most, leaving us all in the same position we are in today, but also with a huge technical problem of fixing all the old devices which had these now-repurposed networks hardcoded.

If you are fine with doing the work of obsoleting old equipment, then just start using IPv6.

No. It will take 10 years for everyone to update their router configuration/software to treat the new “formely-reserved” addresses as global unicast. There’s no point in doing that whatsoever. That effort would be spent much better by adopting IPv6.

That's a problem for the people in 5 years

We have been trying to deploy IPv6 for 20 years now. This would be comparatively easier and buy us another 20 years to finish v6 deployment.

The problem is that you can't really move completely to IPv6. You actually will have to run both IPv4 and IPv6 networks indefinitely. Which isn't a lot of fun.

> Either way, scanning that space is probably a waste of bandwidth

That's what the DoD wants you to think ;)

Maybe a bit off topic, but years ago I had a home linux server, used for usenet/torrenting. I was just poking about on it one day and ran some variation of netstat and could see a connection with a 6.x.x.x range IP address, which stood out. I didn't know a whole lot about networking at the time (still don't), couldn't say if I had misinterpreted what I saw in the netstat output. But it stood out so I looked it up and hoo-boy, it was a shock to see who owned that IP range, Army Information Systems Centre. I chalked it up to them maybe running a torrent tracker or something, or was the DoD in my PC?