AS10255 SINISTER

SINISTER — registered as Sinister and Solitary — is the ASN of the Cambridge Bandwidth Consortium, a small non-profit network run by Boston-area networking professionals for their own use. It is a member co-operative, not a commercial provider.

What it's used for

Giving members provider-independent connectivity and addresses. The CBC registers itself as a 501(c)(12) corporation — the "non-profit rural telco" category — and delivers most member connectivity over GRE and 6in4 tunnels rather than physical last-mile plant, which is how a handful of engineers can hold real address space without owning any access network. It is present at MASS-IX in Boston with an open peering policy and self-reports traffic in the 0–20 Mbps band: hobby scale, deliberately.

The AS announces 7 IPv4 prefixes totalling 2,560 addresses and 2 IPv6 prefixes, including 2620:131:f000::/40. Sampled reverse DNS is the tell: FLY-BY-NIGHT.IHTFP.ORG, yay.tim.org, ether.elbows.org — members' personal domains and personal machines, not a customer base. IHTFP is MIT hacker slang, which places the culture as precisely as the routing does.

Notable

Classified other, deliberately. The space is neither eyeball broadband nor commercial hosting: it is individual members' home networks and personal servers, reached over tunnels, under one shared ASN. Two observed BGP neighbours rules out any transit role. Geolocation to eastern Massachusetts is reasonable, but do not infer an organisation behind any given address — each one is somebody's own box.