PING

In this episode of PING, Stephen Song discusses his work mapping the Internet. This is a long-term project, which he carries out alongside and supported by Mozilla Corporation, and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC).Stephen has long championed the case for Open Data in telecommunications decision-making and maintains a list of resources for capacity building and development of the Internet with a particular focus on Africa.The combination of some opaque business practices and the change from end delivery to mediated proxies from the content distribution network model raises questions about where the things users engage with and depend on are, so network infrastructure can be efficiently and openly planned. The latest episode of PING explores the issues inherent in understanding ‘where things are’ in the modern Internet.Explore Stephen’s resources:Many Possibilities websiteConnectivity indexes, maps, and reports (GitHub)Open Data map of Content Distribution Networks around the worldAfter FibreVillage Telco

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the technique APNIC Labs uses to measure end user behaviour in the global internet. This is probably the only worldwide web advert based measurement system in continuous use since 2010.Originally written in Adobe Flash, the system is now coded in Javascript and HTML5, and continuously samples as many as 25 million users per day, across mobile devices and desktop PCs, Android, iPhone and Chromebook.The system was first designed to inform the community on the rate of IPv6 deployment. The APNIC Labs measurements now encompass IPv6, RTT, HTTP/3 (Quic) adoption, DNSSEC, use of public DNS resolvers, IPv6 EH support, RPKI validation amongst other measurements.Data is available at a per-economy, and per-AS (origin-AS) level, both as a web view and as JSON downloads. No end user identifying material is held, or distributed in any way. The measurement program is generously supported by Google, ICANN and APNIC.Read more about some recent research outcomes from the labs advert on the APNIC Blog:Measuring the use of DNSSEC (September 2023, Geoff Huston)Measuring NXDOMAIN responses (July 2023, Geoff Huston)A Further Update on IPv6 Extension Headers (June 2023, Geoff Huston)A second look at QUIC use (September 2022, Geoff Huston)

In june of this year, the Dashboard for AS Health or DASH, a service operated by APNIC saw a leak of approximately 260,000 BGP routes from a vantage point in Singapore, and sent alerts to around 90 subscribers to our routing mis-alignment notification service which is part of DASH.BGP is the state of announcements made and heard worldwide, calculated by every BGP speaker for themselves and although its globally connected and represents “the same” network, not everyone sees all things, as a result of filtering and configuration differences around the globe. BGP also should align with two external information systems, the older Internet Routing Registry (IRR) system which uses a notation called RPSL to represent routing policy data, including the “route” object, and Resource Public Key Infrastructure or RPKI, which represents the origin-AS (in BGP, who originates a given prefix) in a cryptographically signed objected called a ROA. The BGP prefix and origin (the route) should align with whats in an IRR route object and an RPKI ROA, but sometimes these disagree. Thats what DASH is designed to do: tell you when these three information sources fall out of alignment.I discussed this incident, and the APNIC Information Product family (DASH, a collaboration with RIPE NCC called NetOX, and the delegation statistics portal called REX) with Rafael Cintra, the product manager of these systems, and with Dave Phelan who works in the APNIC Academy and has a background in Network Routing Operations.You can find the APNIC Information products here: (note that the DASH service needs a MyAPNIC login to be used)https://dash.apnic.net the DASH portal login page (MyAPNIC resource login needed)https://netox.apnic.net NetOX the Network Observatory web servicehttps://rex.apnic.net Resource Explorer: delegation statistics for the worldAnd you can read about the Information Products family in these blog articles:New Alert Options for DASHRouting Status added to DASHSuspicious Traffic Alerts added to DASHUsing DASH to rank economies by suspicious trafficHow DASH helps monitor Network HealthWorldwide REXIntroducing REX a new approach for the internet directoryHands-On with APNIC’s NetOX

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the coming future of VLSI with Moores law coming to an end. This was motivated by a key presentation made at the most recent ANRW session at IETF117, San Francisco.For over 5 decades we have been able to rely on an annual, latterly bi-annual doubling of speed called Moore's Law, and halving of size of the technology inside a microchip: Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI), the basic building block of the modern age being the transistor.From it's beginnings off the back of the diode, replacing valves but still discrete components, to the modern reality of trillions of logic "gates" on a single chip, everything we have built in recent times which includes a computer, has been built under the model "it can only get cheaper next time round" -But for various reasons explored in this episode, that isn't true any more, and won't be true into the future.We're going to have to get used to the idea it isn't always faster, smaller, cheaper, and this will have an impact on how we design Networks, including details inside the protocol stack which go to processing complexity forwarding those packets along the path.A few times, Both Geoff and myself get our prefixes mixed up and may say millimeters for nanometers or even worse on air. We also confused the order of letters in the company Acronym TSMC -The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.Read more about the end of Moore's law on APNIC Blog and the IETF:Chipping Away at Moore's Law (August 2023, Geoff Huston)It’s the End of DRAM As We Know It (July 2023, Philip Levis, IETF117 ANRW session)

In this episode of PING Jaap Akkerhuis (NLNet Labs), Ulrich Spiedel (University of Auckland) and Russ White (Juniper) discuss the issues behind Sunspots, ionisation in the atmosphere and its effects on satellite communications and terrestrial infrastructure based on wires in the air: Power grids and data services.In two blogs Good day sunshine and Solar Storms and the Internet we've highlighted the potential risks from increases in solar activity such as solar flares and the associated Coronal Mass Ejection or CME.Spectacular as the effects on earths atmosphere can be, The risk of these events is quite high, if things line up badly for us: It's possible for there to be compounding effects on Satellite systems orbit, their electrical components, their lifetime in orbit (due to repositioning costs burning fuel to cope with the event) as well as effects on land as the suspended wires in power grids and data communications act as antenna, and produce voltage "spikes" to attached equipment at the end, as well as along the path.However, as explored in this episode of PING the situation is often overblown by the news cycle, and it's more a story about being prepared with resilience in systems exposed to risk and understanding those risks.Read more about solar storms and their impact on infrastructure, satellite communications and space weather:Good day, sunshine (George Michaelson, May 2023)Solar storms and the Internet (Ulrich Spiedel, July 2021)APNIC Blog articles about Satellite CommunicationsThe Space Weather website (as mentioned by Jaap in the podcast)

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the eternal tension between content and carriage.At the RIPE 86 meeting held in Rotterdam in May of this year, Rudolf van der Berg presented a talk titled "The EU Gigabit Connectivity Package and How It Will Hurt the Internet"Geoff has looked at the tensions between content and carriage, Transit and CDNs, the economics of networks for decades, and a conversation about the problems has gone on for some time now, some of which repeats here, but with a new twist: some inside information from Vodafone about their underlying cost and price issues which perhaps undermine the basis of the complaint from the European operator community to the EU seeking regulation of the "cost" side of carrying the content domestic consumers seek.Read more about the economics of the Internet on the APNIC Blog:RIPE 86 bites - Gigabits for EU (June 2023, Geoff Huston on this RIPE86 presentation)On Internet Centrality and Fragmentation (July 2023, Geoff Huston)The Internet as a Public Utility (May 2023, Geoff Huston)An Economic Perspective on Internet Centrality (March 2023, Geoff Huston)Sender Pays (September 2022, Geoff Huston)Content Vs Carriage: Who Pays? (June 2022, Geoff Huston)Watch Rudolph Van Der Berg's talk at RIPE86, or read his slides (pdf)

In this episode of PING, Verisign fellow Duane Wessels presents the ZONEMD resource record, defined in RFC8976.The “MD” in ZONEMD stands for “message digest” and this resource record (RR) is a checksum over the state of a zone, including all its records and the zone serial record (“start of authority” or SOA) which includes a serial number.This means that by fetching an entire zone, either in the DNS or “out of band” from an FTP or Web server or however you receive it, if it has the ZONEMD record you have a way to check that the entire zone, as it should be for that serial, is exactly what you have in-hand.ZONEMD is going to permit people who copy zones to serve them (locally, or more widely) now have a basis to trust the state of the zone before publishing it.Duane talks about the long lifetime of this idea with roots back into the 1990s, and the road to RFC8976 taken by the co-authors. A ZONEMD record with an un-testable signature will be placed in the root zone of the DNS in September of this year, and will become testable in December to allow time for the community to understand it’s behaviour.This podcast is accompanied by a repost of a Verisign blog Duane wrote recently which has just been republished here on the APNIC Blog: Adding ZONEMD protections to the root zoneRead more about DNS, ZONEMD, and other blogs and podcasts by Duane on the APNIC Blog and elsewhere online:The Root of the DNS revisited(2023, Geoff Huston)Notes from DNS OARC 38 (2022 APNIC Blog post by Geoff Huston)Notes from DNS OARC 35 (2021 APNIC Blog post by Geoff Huston)RFC8976 (2021 RFC D. Wessels, P. Barber – Verisign; M. Weinberg – Amazon; W. Kumari – Google; & W. Hardaker – USC/ISI)[Podcast] A look back at notable root zone changes (Duane Wessels on PING discusses 3 significant root zone changes over the last decade)

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses how Sweden built a national time distribution system and the nature of time in the modern Internet.At the RIPE86 Meeting held in Rotterdam in May of this year, Karin Ahl, the CEO of Netnod presented a talk titled “How Sweden Built a World-Leading Time Network”A central problem in time distribution on the Internet is firstly the lack of security inside the Network Time Protocol (NTP), and secondly the sources and reliability of the time information. The first problem is solved by using the newer Network Time Security (NTS) protocol which adds TLS, and the second by investment in reliable and strategically placed time distribution servers, which is the basis of the Swedish national time initiative.Geoff attended the Netnod presentation and reflects on the complex and murky history of time, and the emergence of worldwide communities that coordinate both civil time (what the time of day is, in the world) and the nature of how time is measured (how a ‘second’ is defined, for example).Geoff discusses historic and current attempts to standardise time measurements (such as UT1 and UTC) — with their inherent compromises — against Earth’s revolutions and rotations around the Sun. These measurements have become increasingly critical to modern technology, such as GPS.Read more about NTP, NTS, and the time problem at the APNIC Blog and elsewhere online:Watch Karin Ahl’s presentation at RIPE86 RotterdamRIPE 86 bites — what’s the time? (2023 Geoff Huston’s APNIC Blog write-up on the issues)Network Time Security: new NTP authentication mechanism (2021 APNIC Blog by Martin Langer)How do you know what time it is? (2020 APNIC Blog by Patrik Fälström)Putting a stop to Internet Time Shifters (2019 APNIC Blog by Neta Rosen Schiff)Is the Internet Running Late? (2018 APNIC Blog by Geoff Huston)Steve Allan blogs on time (background reading)Tony Finch blogs on time (background reading)The views expressed by the featured speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC.

In this episode of PING, Christian Huitema discusses how looking into the IETF data tracker allowed him to assess "how well we are doing" at document production.As the IETF has grown, and as the process of developing standards has got more complex its understandable it takes a bit longer to produce a viable RFC but some questions have been made about exactly where in process the delays come from. Are we really doing better or worse than we used to? and, why might that be?Christian took an interesting approach to the problem, using a random sample of 20 documents from 2018 (initially) and a hand method of collating the issues, and then applied the same methodology back into 2008 and 1998. His approach to measurement was rigorous and careful, separating his own opinions from the underlying data to aide reproducibility.Christian has a long history of network development and research, with experience in industry, and in the french national computing research institute "INRIA" before joining Bell Communications Research, and Microsoft. He worked on OSI systems, X.500 directories, Satellite communications, and latterly the IPv6 stack including the "Tededo" transition technology, the H/D ratio used in determining IPv6 allocations and assignments in the RIR model, and the QUIC transport layer protocol.The views expressed by the featured speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC.

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the major themes from his recent blog on “Failed Expectations”In a trip down memory lane, the podcast ranges over the 40 year plus history of how we came to have the current Internet as we know it, and some of the “road not taken” alternates which were under consideration at the time. In this context. “Failed” doesn’t have to mean “failed to work” -it can mean the technology simply wasn’t chosen, or it can be the “failure” to turn off something which was believed to be at best temporary!In part, the story of IPv6 deployment is part of this mismatch of expectations and reality, because nobody sought the outcome we’re now living through, of a 20 plus year transition from 32 bit addresses to a world of 128 bit addressing. IPv6 was designed with an eye to the needs of addressing at scale, but the emergence of a transfer model, and continued improvement in NAT (and deployment of Carrier-grade NAT or CGN) at scale, worldwide has perpetuated a 32 bit address and routing world. IPv4 Internet is the “little network which could” and refuses to go away quietly.The views expressed by the featured speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC.