What does it mean when a legitimate business uses a "private" IP address?

What does it mean when a legitimate business uses a "private" IP address?

When I send email from my PCS phone, the information about me listed in the first Received header (reading from bottom up) is as shown below.

Received: from mymetropcs.com ([10.221.15.173]) by SRVR-DNS1.metropcs.net with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959); Sun, 28 Dec 2008 06:20:84 -0600

Googling, I ran an "arin" search, which only says this is a "Private" IP address. Is a legitimate business allowed to use a private IP address? And, can other information about me be gleaned from this one PCS header?

From reading the RFC, it seems like a legit business should not be doing this

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Reply to
Pat
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On Mon, 29 Dec 2008 07:10:18 -0800, Pat wrote in :

It simply means that you are behind NAT (Network Address Translation), best Internet practice for conserving public IP addresses.

Reply to
John Navas

What axe are you trying to grind here?

Using private addresses for devices that aren't direclty on the internet is fine. Plenty of businesses use them, along with homes, schools, or anything else you can imagine.

Reply to
Bill Kearney

With regard to IP addresses, "private" means invisible to the internet, not routed outside company networks. All companies worldwide (and anyone with a router) use the private IP ranges internally on their own network.

Yes, completely normal. Simply means the first 'hop' in the communications from you to whoever you're contacting has gone thruogh the internal network of metropcs.com.

Received: from mymetropcs.com ([10.221.15.173]) by SRVR-DNS1.metropcs.net with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959); Sun, 28 Dec 2008 06:20:84 -0600

It says "a server belonging to metropcs.com (srvr-dns1.metropcs.com) recieved an SMTP connection (email) from another metropcs.com computer whose IP addy on metropcs.com's internal network is 10.x.x.x (this is possibly your computer, possibly a router somewhere), and the server is using Microsoft windows mail version 6.x . And your timezone is GMT-6h."

I see from your current headers that you're posting from sbc.com, via prodigy.net. The x-userinfo line will tell your ISP your actual posting IP address and other stuff about you but only your ISP can disentangle that.

You've misunderstood the meaning of hte word private and the RFC.

Reply to
Mark McIntyre

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Here's more help.

Reply to
Himation And Chiton

An empty page. Most appropriate, since the post by "Himation And Chiton" is as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Why not leave insulting people for when its worth it? Otherwise you just waste your bile and look stoopid.

Reply to
Mark McIntyre

It means they are not wasting resources.

RFC1918 addresses may be used by ANYONE. The only requirement is that the "private" address not appear as a source or destination for a connection. These are called 'non-routable' addresses.

From that one header - not much. What might be in the rest of the headers is another story.

You're misinterpreting the RFC. Re-read the section 2 "Motivation". All RFC1918 is trying to do is to conserve scarce IP addresses. If you exclude RFC3330 address space (which includes RFC1918, multicast, and other reserved addresses), there are 3,706,453,504 so-called IPv4 addresses - like 69.110.28.244 which is the address you posted from in the Pleasanton area. As of about two weeks ago, 2,749,037,752 of those addresses (74.17 percent) were in use. That might seem like there is a lot of "free" addresses still available, but a year earlier the numbers were 2,564,407,724 and 69.19 percent, so 5 percent is gone in just one year. For perspective - your phone number might be something like 925-555-1234 - wanna count those digits and compare?

Your _telephone_ needs a unique phone number if someone is going to call you from anywhere in the world. But it can make do with an extension number - even one that can't be dialed directly - if all you are using it for is calling OUT and not in. Your PCS phone doesn't need a world reachable IP address for the same reason. It's not offering services to all other computers out on the Internet, so when you connect, you can use an address that is not world unique. See RFC3022 (or the older RFC1631) for details about Network Address Translation - which is the method used to share one public IP address among many (local) private addresses. If you are using windoze, you may be familiar with "Internet Connection Sharing" which is the microsoft attempt to implement this service.

Old guy

Reply to
Moe Trin

As already stated, it is not at all unusual for a business to relay mail via several internal hops before it hits the internet. In fact for a *large* business it would probably be considered normal.

Reply to
bod43

NOTE: Posting from groups.google.com (or some web-forums) dramatically reduces the chance of your post being seen. Find a real news server.

Notwithstanding section 3.8.2 of RFC2821 (or the comparable section within section 4.1.1 of RFC0821), you may find that "internal" relay lines may be obfuscated, encrypted or even missing in mail from organizations concerned with keeping the layout of their internal network from public view. This is the same reason that the various versions/look-alikes of traceroute and other network mapping tools are blocked at perimeter routers/gateways. Likewise, a number of codes and types of ICMP functions may be blocked.

Old guy

Reply to
Moe Trin

On Wed, 31 Dec 2008 20:54:12 -0600, snipped-for-privacy@painkiller.example.tld (Moe Trin) wrote in :

Not really -- very few people filter Google.

Reply to
John Navas

They are more interested in filteriing "google groups" than "Google".

Reply to
LR

On Thu, 01 Jan 2009 10:07:50 +0000, LR wrote in :

Childish and silly.

As I wrote, very few people filter Google, including Google Groups.

But then few people use Usenet at all. In case you haven't noticed, it's dying, and not because of Google.

Reply to
John Navas

alt.internet.wireless may be dying but some people don't believe Usenet is.

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"Usenet Experiences Unprecedented Growth; Giganews Announces Plans for Storage Upgrades"

Reply to
LR

On Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:01:10 +0000, LR wrote in :

Participation has been declining in all of the *text* newsgroups I've checked. What's still growing is *illicit trafficking in binaries*.

Reply to
John Navas

All this basically says is that giganews' traffic has jumped. Some of this is probably related to dinosaurs such as ourselves from Comcast and similar ISP that dropped Usenet entirely. Much may be related to picking up a couple of outsourced ISPs. Last year, IIRC ELN moved to giganews as their provider of Usenet services. No indication of what is happening to Usenet in general.

Reply to
Kurt Ullman

I think it is difficult for a general user to see what is happening with Usenet as groups come and go and with the expansion of internet access in "3rd world countries" there will probably be new local language groups which will appear for a while and then cease and then users will migrate to another group for while as their interests change.

If the recession lasts a long time how many of the present web based sites will continue to exist and if they do reduce in number perhaps people will return to a text based newsgroup.

Reply to
LR

I am convinced that usenet text newsgroups are declining and will continue to decline. I think that there are two main factors.

  1. Ease of creation of 'discussion groups' on numerous web sites along with the presumed ease of creation of such sites. There are dozens and dozens of sites.
  2. Unmoderated groups are in the long term less viable due to "bad actors". I have only regularly read a few groups (less than 10) and of those one has been destroyed by a single individual as a matter of his policy over a period of a *decade* and another two are presently wrecked. The damage being caused by a large volume of ridiculous (usually rude and insulting) posts. When a newcomer to such things appears and sees death threats then it does not take much to persuade them to go away quitely.
  3. Barrier to entry - news-servers, new-readers...

I looked at a video made by the Computer History Museum where a gentleman who may have been the founder of usenet newsgroups said that the idea had failed due to the influence of Bad Actors. i.e. people up to no good on the group.

I think this may have been it:

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There are significant barriers to entry unless you use Google Groups however there is a small but not completely insignificant pressure to banish google users from usenet by popularising the idea that they are undesireable. I bumped into a campaign website of such an organisation only today.

Reply to
bod43

Loads of sites and some would lose most of their content without Usenet e.g.

I agree to a certain extent about moderating threads although where do you stop. My ISP is BT in the UK and it has it's own newsgroups which are not accessible via Usenet and it has been known to remove threads because it did not like a discussion about the "Phorm" trials it was conducting.

News-readers are not a problem. A lot of people have never heard of Newsgroups so have not looked at them or when you tell them about them are still not interested. They are also not interested in web-based discussion forums as they consider they actually have a life.

Reply to
LR

"news.comcast.net" was a CNAME for corporate.giganews.com - so I'm not sure how ex-comcast customers would be an addition to giganews.

Old guy

Reply to
Moe Trin

NOTE: Posting from groups.google.com (or some web-forums) dramatically reduces the chance of your post being seen. Find a real news server.

1, 2, 3... OK - that's close

A problem is finding them. There is no "common" place to look. I add a single keyword to the newstool, and I get a list of the 110 thousand groups on the server I'm using.

You seem to be using a browser - they are rather limited in capability in such things as filtering.

[compton ~]$ grep -vE '^([%\\[ ]|Score|$)' /var/spool/slrnpull/score | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | column 1057 From: 16 References: 2 ~Subject: 2 Lines: 434 Subject: 35 Message-ID: 82 Xref: [compton ~]$

A lot of noise disappears that way.

I'm down to 76 groups - I mainly scan them, as you don't have time to actually read every word, but I can't say that I've seen death threats. Rude or insulting posts - I don't see many of those either, as it doesn't take much to enter that killfile.

That browser you are using can be used. You don't need to know anything about news servers, other than the name of one - just as you need to know the name of that web page. That's difficult? Spending a few minutes to learn how to use a real server does pay off in versatility. Plus, you aren't bombarded with all those advertisements. You probably don't have the tools to sniff the information that you browser is giving to the web site. Recall those sites depend on advertising revenue, and they get that by knowing all about you.

Tom Truscott, or Jim Ellis? Usenet originated as a UUCP scheme at Duke University in 1979.

You're using a browser - that's the minimum needed. The barrier is not very significant.

The main complaint about google _users_ is spam. Several of the groups I scan are constantly polluted by advertisements for shoes, fake sports goods, fake watches, cigarettes, and all of those pills you simply must be interested in. The problem is google absolutely refuses to control that spam. Complaints are ignored. Some people feel that if google ignores complaints, they can ignore google posts - it's trivial to do with even a half competent news reader. More competent news tools can even filter _replies_ to posts from google.

The Usenet Improvement Project:

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Probably that one - but you may notice that they suggest alternatives.

Old guy

Reply to
Moe Trin

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