why in the world are POS systems connected to the internet on public ip addresses?
Historical reasons? target does has a /16.
They can probably fill that block many times over now, but it would make sense that their numbering scheme has historical roots and to continue using that space for interstore communication today. They got it in 1993, back when we were still pretending like exhausting the v4 space wasn't a thing and before everyone started acting like the fact a many-to-one NAT requires what is effectively a statefull firewall somehow offered a security advantage you couldn't get by just writing those firewall rules.
I was at an organization with a large v4 block once. It took a few years of having my desktop, laptop, and cellphone wifi connections all with routable v4 addresses before I stopped thinking it was weird, bad design and really came to appreciate: "oh shit, this is how the internet is supposed to be and it is so much nicer to work with."
Historical reasons? target does has a /16.
They can probably fill that block many times over now, but it would make sense that their numbering scheme has historical roots and to continue using that space for interstore communication today. They got it in 1993, back when we were still pretending like exhausting the v4 space wasn't a thing and before everyone started acting like the fact a many-to-one NAT requires what is effectively a statefull firewall somehow offered a security advantage you couldn't get by just writing those firewall rules.
I was at an organization with a large v4 block once. It took a few years of having my desktop, laptop, and cellphone wifi connections all with routable v4 addresses before I stopped thinking it was weird, bad design and really came to appreciate: "oh shit, this is how the internet is supposed to be and it is so much nicer to work with."