Now that I understand why my Droid phone is using a panic-inducing IP address, I decided to try my hand again at getting the SIPdroid app to work with my home phone system.
My first try was to set my firewall rules to allow traffic from 28.x.x.x. The problem with this is that since the 28.x.x.x addresses aren’t advertised (and thus routable), my home server can get packets from them all day, but can’t send anything back. My ISPs routers don’t know what to do with them.
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A commenter’s tip has solved the mystery of why my phone’s voice traffic is coming from an IP address owned by the Department of Defense. By entering the code *#*#INFO#*#*, I was able to pull up a hidden menu which shows the rogue IP address as assigned to my phone.
The Department of Defense is squatting on a massive number of IPv4 addresses and is not using most of it. Phone networks like Sprint are borrowing these IP addresses because their networks are larger than the 16 million hosts that the 10.x.x.x network can provide.
It looks, as another MT.Net visitor theorized, like Sprint is assigning the (unused) DoD IP addresses internally to its phones and then NATting the traffic from the phones to the public IPs. Since SIP packets have an additional IP address embedded inside, Sprint’s firewalls aren’t NATting that IP and thus the ordinarily “private” IP address is getting through the NAT process.
Whew!
Update Nov. 10: The mystery has been solved. Sprint’s borrowing DoD IP addresses, most likely without DOD’s knowledge. It appears to be entirely harmless.
A few of my friends have weighed in with their theories as to why I was seeing my phone traffic coming from a DoD network. Many of these theories point out how the DoD is the owner of vast stretches of IP address space, many of which aren’t advertised as public routes. Some organizations treat these addresses as non-routable addresses, making it appear traffic originates from the DoD. One blogger discovered the IPs of the UK Ministry of Defence being used similarly by T-Mobile.
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I decided to see if I could find out more about this mysterious IP address that apparently belongs to the Department of Defense.
One of the best ways to do this is to run a traceroute, which shows the path back to the IP through the Internet’s routers. I also wanted to see if I could find any evidence that my router or my ISP’s router was compromised or broken.
Performing a traceroute from my home computer to the IP provides me this output:
root@maestro:# traceroute 28.191.58.169
traceroute to 28.191.58.169 (28.191.58.169), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 wireless.tonsler (192.168.3.252) 0.971 ms 1.419 ms 1.634 ms
2 user-0c2h181.cable.mindspring.com (24.40.133.1) 14.064 ms 13.993 ms 24.788 ms
3 66.26.46.13 (66.26.46.13) 18.689 ms 18.942 ms 19.029 ms
4 * * *
5 * * *
6 * * *
7 * * *
8 * * *
It’s not unusual that the traceroute dies on the way back: many hosts and/or networks go down and the packet trace stops. However, it is interesting that the traceroute dies on Time Warner’s network. That last router, 66.26.46.13, belongs to Road Runner:
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Update Nov 9 11:00 AM. Mystery solved! Sprint is apparently squatting on the DoD addresses, using them for their internal phone network. Sprint understandably wants to firewall these phones from the wild and wooly Internet, so it NATs the phone traffic from these supposedly-private IPs to the phone’s public IP address. SIP packets have the internal IP embedded in them, however, and aren’t easily NATted. This address slipped through Sprint’s firewall, causing me alarm (fortunately undue alarm!)
Break out your tinfoil hats because this will blow your mind.
I found something quite disturbing today while trying to get my Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V phone talking completely through Voice-Over-IP (VoIP). For reasons not entirely clear yet, I discovered that voice packets from my phone are being routed to an IP address belonging to the Department of Defense.
Some background
I had long been a “dumb phone” kind of guy when it comes to mobile phones but finally bit the bullet and got an Android phone from Virgin Mobile when the right plan came along. I am also a VoIP enthusiast and have been sending phone calls over the Internet for almost ten years now. I’m also a cheapskate, so naturally when I got my Android phone one of the first things I wanted to do was to figure out how to make calls with it completely over VoIP – using my unlimited data plan instead of burning my limited voice minutes. That’s what hackers do, you know.
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I managed to make it through the whole day yesterday without my usual twice-yearly rant about daylight saving time. The truth is that Kelly and I completely forgot about DST ending and woke up thinking it was later than it actually was. Other than resetting far too many clocks it was a smooth transition for us.
Since I’ve blogged before about DST’s dubious benefits, I came across an interesting National Geographic look at DST. Some excerpts:
Likewise, Matthew Kotchen, an economist at the University of California, saw in Indiana a situation ripe for study.
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It had been a challenging week for me, with the uncertainty of being unemployed and having Kelly gone all week for her work. I was feeling pretty lonely. I was happy to see Kelly again Thursday night, though, and by Friday we were our usual happy selves (with the exception of Travis, who left school early with a mild fever).
Saturday morning, Kelly took Travis to his piano lesson while I got ready for the Strickland Road Park Dedication at noon. Kelly took the kids to Hallie’s haircut while I was at the park. Afterward we went to Conn’s fall carnival.
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By Stephenson Brown
I learned of Andy’s death on Twitter this morning, not on TV or in the newspaper. I wonder what he would’ve thought about that.
I don’t know how much time he spent on the web, but Andy was a blogger before there were blogs. His telling-it-like-it-is style is an inspiration to me. But a blog will never compare to the pulpit Andy enjoyed every Sunday night, in front of millions of television viewers.
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Yesterday the daily deal marketer Groupon went public, with shares rising from $20 up to $31 in first-day trading. Even so, analysts have serious questions about the company, as do I. The business model is just not there.
I just read a story the other day that Groupon ranks last in digital media brand reputation (though I’m paraphrasing here – I need to find the source). There are plenty of horror stories from small businesses which have nearly lost their shirts due to Groupon promotions.
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This is a compelling op-ed on Bloomburg.com. American companies are way too stingy with vacation time! I’ve worked at a few companies that offered three weeks of vacation and it was heavenly. I’ve worked at others where you feel lucky to get two weeks.
Sooner or later, more American companies will learn that they don’t get more productive workers by keeping their noses to the grindstone.
By the mid-1970s, and especially after 1980, median wages weren’t keeping pace with increases in our capacity to produce. But flattening incomes didn’t derail the consumption train. Americans continued to buy more, in part by going deeper into debt, by having more members of the family enter the workforce and by working additional overtime. By the boom times of the late 1990s, Americans worked more than the notoriously workaholic Japanese.
The Europeans took a different path. In the second half of the 20th century, prodded by strong and active labor movements and social-democratic political parties, Europeans took a large chunk of their productivity gains in the form of more leisure. They now work only 80 to 85 percent as many hours as Americans, and when you consider that fewer people in Europe work and that they retire earlier, the difference is even greater.
via Americans Work Too Much for Their Own Good: de Graaf and Batker – Bloomberg.
