AS14843 THINGS-NET

Nine blocks, eight registrants, one of them the registry itself, and two addresses answering localhost.

What it's used for

• A small provider's network in Canada. 3,328 addresses across nine IPv4 prefixes, with three observed BGP neighbours and no IPv6 announced.

Notable

• The AS is registered to a numbered company, and only one block carries that name, under REPNET1.
• The others belong to Reptilian Research, Toronto Free-Net Inc., Verizon Business with a UUNET Canada Registrar contact, Proxy Communications Corporation, The Portage Group, a project whose registrant field trails off into somebody's first name, and American Registry for Internet Numbers itself under the netname NET204.
• Three of eighteen sampled addresses answered: one under infra-service.ca, and two returning localhost.

Interesting

• A reverse record answering localhost is a mistake with a long history. That name belongs to a machine talking to itself, and publishing it for a public address means somebody pasted a default zone file and never edited it. Any software that trusts reverse DNS will conclude these addresses are the machine querying them.
• One block is registered to the registry itself, which happens when an assignment predates the modern system and nobody ever claimed it. It is address space with no owner but a custodian.
• A community free network from the era when internet access was a volunteer project sits alongside a carrier that has changed names twice. This AS is a shelf of other people's history.
• A company identified only by its incorporation number is legal, ordinary, and completely opaque: the number is the name.