The big US Pentagon Internet mystery now partially solved

A file photo of the Pentagon in Washington. After weeks of wonder by the networking community, the Pentagon has now provided a very terse explanation for why it hired a shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank to manage a colossal, previously idle chunk of the Internet that it owns. Many basic questions remain unanswered, beginning with why it chose for the task a company that seems not to have existed until September. — AP

BOSTON: A very strange thing happened on the Internet the day US President Joe Biden was sworn in. A shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank announced to the world’s computer networks that it was now managing a colossal, previously idle chunk of the Internet owned by the US Department of Defense.

That real estate has since more than quadrupled to 175 million addresses – about 1/25th the size of the current Internet.