They didn't actually need the addresses to be routable from the public internet (that was the whole point of the VPN). I think the requirement was really a way of making sure they were unique. I'm sure they had several partners who used 10/8 internally.
In my work we use 10.0.0.0/8 but of course some people use the same at home even though 192.168/16 is way more common. In general I find 172.16/12 the least common in the field.
It just looks nicer to me which shows the power of Apple and how easily I am influenced.
Still gives you fun issues though.
If you drive around with a WiFi stumbler running, you'll run into networks with names like "UTAH DATA CENTER" and "SIPRnet", etc for the same reason.
In that case there's never any chance it'll be needed by people using the public internet there, and never any chance it'll be used suddenly by a deployed internal service somewhere else from an outside vendor.
The default should reserve a single ip range and simply fail (with a nice message) if more are needed.
Made me wanna climb out of my FBI Surveillance Van and have a word with them.
Classic merger "solution".
Company A uses 10/8 Company B uses 10/8, company A buys company B and orders new subsidiary B to renumber into 11/8 "All you have to do is change every first octet to 11"
In both cases RFC1918 was used throughout their global network and while not fully used, had become highly fragmented over time.
