I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases
87 points by taavi
87 points by taavi
ENUM (e164.arpa) was an idea from the early 2000s […] It never really took off though, and even back in its early days it saw barely any use.
AIUI ENUM is used within the private VOIP infrastructure of mobile networks, but this widespread usage isn’t visible on the public Internet.
There’s a fun prehistory from the early 1990s involving fax-over-internet using the tpc.int domain (“the phone company”). Unlike e164.arpa it allowed users to write phone numbers in undotted big-endian order or dotted little-endian order or a mixture, e,g. 337733.1223.44.tpc.int, It died partly because this feature depended on a hacked version of BIND4, and the patches were not maintained.
Very interesting, do you know why the string "TPC" was chosen? Was there an actual phone company behind it or just a silly name?
Just a silly name, I think? Maybe influenced by an old Saturday Night Live skit about “the phone company” and its approach to customer service.
(Possibly worth also noting that there was a period when .int was used for internet infrastructure things like ip6.int, before they realised that .arpa would not be a temporary transitional domain (like 10.0.0.0/8 was for addresses) and had become impossible to decommission, and they had created a conflict of naming authority in .int between international treaty orgs and internet stuff; so ip6.int was moved to .arpa, .arpa was retconned as the “address and routing parameter area”, and .int’s purpose was clarified.)
I'm surprised - and delighted! - that they didn't get arrested after reporting this.
It sounds like they are not in the USA/UK or citizens of either, so it's probably more hassle than it's worth. If they happened to be in either of those countries and easily accessible, who knows what could have happened.