[blinded]

100% this, my college had 2 /16s for no reason. The printers were all public, was a mess.

[miladyincontrol]

I mean having a public address doesnt mean it has to be publicly routable. Same thing applies to ipv6.

I speak as someone who worked at an institute that had similar abundance of address space.

[fulafel]

Indeed, the tragedy of the IPv4+NAT stockholm syndrome is that people view having to use ambiguous addresses as access control and can't distinguish reachability vs addressing.

[blinded]

In my case it was publicly routable. The ips and ports of key infra were on https://www.shodan.io/.

[wpm]

My workstation used to have a public address system it was awesome.