Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
Fortunately, people who run networks are not clueless ("jurors"?). Or at least they are not supposed to be clueless.
If Randy were to be charged under any of the various computer abuse statutes (which, given the history of their (ab)use, he certainly could be), jurors are who would be trying to figure out whether or not it was ok to use "your" integer in a specific place in the BGP announcement he made. That's why *I* wouldn't have run such an experiment myself, because there's just too many cases these days where people have gotten convicted of doing things like putting the wrong integer in their MySpace profile.
An ASN is a well defined resource, with publicly available ownership information. If anyone on this list does not understand this, I suggest they do some more studying.
It is an integer. Under ARIN policy you certainly don't "own" it, you just use it. In some places, that integer has meaning. How important that meaning is, and whether or not someone else can use the same integer in a similar place where it has that meaning without getting charged with a crime, we don't know. What we *do* know is that some people think it is valuable to try it out to get some experimental data, and other people are all up in arms about it. Matthew Kaufman