In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston (https://blog.apnic.net/author/Geoff-Huston/) discusses Starlink again, and the ability of modern TCP flow control algorithms to cope with the highly variant loss and delay seen over this satellite network. Geoff has been doing more measurements using starlink terminals in Australia and the USA, at different times of day exploring the system behaviour.Starlink has broken new ground in Low Earth Orbit internet services. Unlike...

This time on PING, Dr Mona Jaber (https://www.qmul.ac.uk/dtsdg/team-details/profiles/jabermona.html) from Queen Mary University of London (https://www.qmul.ac.uk/) (QMUL), discusses her work exploring IoT, Digital Twins and Social Science led research in the field of networking and telecommunications.Dr Jaber is a senior lecturer in QMUL and is the founder and director of the Digital Twins for Sustainable Development Goals (DT4SDG) at QMUL. She was one of the invited Keynote speakers at the...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston (https://blog.apnic.net/author/Geoff-Huston/) discusses the European Union's consideration of taking a role in the IETF, as itself. Network engineers, policy makers and scientists from all around the world have participated in IETF but this is the first time an entity like the EU has considered participation as itself in the process of standards development. What's lead to this outcome? What is driving the concern that the EU as a...

This time on PING we have Phil Regnauld (https://www.linkedin.com/in/philregnauld/) from DNS Operations Analysis & Resource Center (DNS-OARC) (https://www.dns-oarc.net/) talking about the three distinct faces OARC presents to the community.Phil came to the OARC presidents role, replacing Keith Mitchell (https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmitchell/) who was the founding president since 2008 through to this year. Phil previously has worked with the Network Startup Resource Centre (NSRC) ...

In this episode of PING, APNICs Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses a new proposed DNS resource record called DELEG. The record is being designed to aid in managing where a DNS zone is delegated.Delegation is the primary mechanism used in the DNS to separate responsibility between child and parent for a given domain name. The DELEG RR is designed to address several problems, including a goal of moving to new transports for the name resolution service the DNS provides to all other Internet...

This time on PING we have Amreesh Phokeer (https://www.internetsociety.org/author/phokeer/) from the Internet Society (ISOC) talking about a system they operate called Pulse, available at https://pulse.internetsociety.org/ (https://pulse.internetsociety.org/). Pulse’s purpose is to assess the “resiliency” of the Internet in a given locality.Similar systems we have discussed before on Ping include APNIC’s DASH (https://dash.apnic.net/) service, aimed at resource holding APNIC members, and...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston (https://blog.apnic.net/author/Geoff-Huston/) discusses the role of DNS in directing where your applications connect to, and where content comes from. Although this more “steering” traffic than it “routing” in the strict sense of IP packet forwarding, (that’s still the function of the border gateway protocol or BGP) It does in fact represent a kind of routing decision, to select a content source or server logistically “best” or...

In this episode of PING, Leslie Daigle from the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) (https://www.globalcyberalliance.org/team-members/leslie-daigle/) discusses their honeynet project, measuring bad traffic internet-wide. This was originally focussed on IoT devices with the AIDE project but is clearly more generally informative. Leslie also discusses the quad-nine DNS service, GCA’s domain trust work and the MANRS project. Launched in 2014 with support from ISOC, MANRS now has a continuing...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston (https://blog.apnic.net/author/Geoff-Huston/) discusses the change in IP packet fragmentation behaviour adopted by IPv6, and the implications of a change in IETF “Normative Language” regarding use of IPv6 in the DNS.IPv4 arguably succeeds over so many variant underlying links and networks because it’s highly adaptable to fragmentation in the path. IPv6 has a proscriptive requirement that only the end hosts fragment, which limits...

In this episode of PING, Sara Dickinson from Sinodun Internet Technologies (https://sinodun.com/team/sara-dickinson/) and Terry Manderson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrymanderson/?originalSubdomain=au), VP, Information Security and Network Engineering at ICANN discuss the ICANN DNS stats collector system which ICANN commissioned, and Sinodun wrote for them.This system (https://github.com/dns-stats) consists of two parts, a DNS stats compactor framework...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston (https://blog.apnic.net/author/Geoff-Huston/) discusses the rise of Low Earth Orbiting (LEO) Satellite based Internet, and the consequences for end-to-end congestion control in TCP and related protocols.Modern TCP has mostly been tuned for constant delay, low loss paths and performs very well at balancing bandwidth amongst the cooperating users of such a link, achieving maximum use of the resource. But a consequence of the new LEO...

In this episode of PING, Verisign fellow Duane Wessels (https://blog.apnic.net/author/Duane-Wessels/) discusses a late state (version 08) Internet draft he’s working on with two colleagues from Verisign. The draft is on Negative Caching of DNS Resolution Failures (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dnsop-caching-resolution-failures/) and is co-authored by Duane, William Carroll (https://datatracker.ietf.org/person/[email protected]), and Matt Thomas...

In this episode of PING, instead of a conversation with APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston (https://blog.apnic.net/author/Geoff-Huston/) we’ve got a panel session from APNIC56 (https://conference.apnic.net/56/program/program/#/day/7/apnic-30th-anniversary-panel/) he facilitated, where Geoff and six guests got to discuss the 30 year history of APNIC.With Geoff on the panel were:* Professor Jun Murai (https://conference.apnic.net/56/program/speakers/#/jun-murai) known as the ‘father of the...

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 (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/), and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC (https://apc.org/)).Stephen has long championed the case (https://manypossibilities.net/2017/06/the-case-for-open-data-in-telecoms/) for Open Data in telecommunications decision-making and maintains a list...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston (https://blog.apnic.net/author/Geoff-Huston/) discusses the technique APNIC Labs uses to measure end user behaviour in the global internet. (https://stats.labs.apnic.net/) 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...

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...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston (https://blog.apnic.net/author/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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law), and halving of size of the technology inside a...

In this episode of PING Jaap Akkerhuis (NLNet Labs) (https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/jaap-akkerhuis/), Ulrich Spiedel (University of Auckland) (https://blog.apnic.net/author/ulrich-speidel/) and Russ White (Juniper) (https://rule11.tech/about/) 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...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston (https://blog.apnic.net/author/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 (https://www.stratix.nl/ons-team/rudolf-van-der-berg/) presented a talk titled "The EU Gigabit Connectivity Package and How It Will Hurt the Internet" (https://ripe86.ripe.net/presentations/28-Presentatie-voor-RIPE86-Rudolf-van-der-Berg-.pdf)Geoff...

In this episode of PING, Verisign fellow Duane Wessels (https://blog.apnic.net/author/Duane-Wessels/) presents the ZONEMD resource record, defined in RFC8976 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8976.html).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...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston (https://blog.apnic.net/author/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 (https://www.netnod.se/about-netnod/karin-ahl) presented a talk titled “How Sweden Built a World-Leading Time Network” (https://ripe86.ripe.net/presentations/16-Netnod_RIPE-86_v.2.pdf)A...

In this episode of PING, Christian Huitema (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston (https://blog.apnic.net/author/Geoff-Huston/) discusses the major themes from his recent blog on “Failed Expectations” (https://blog.apnic.net/2023/05/24/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...

In this episode of PING, Verisign Fellow Duane Wessels discusses notable changes in the DNS root zone over the last 13 years.Duane joined Verisign in the early stages of DNSSEC deployment and has conducted measurements of DNS for many years, in his measurement factory days, and in DNS OARC as well as inside Verisign. The significant changes to the DNS root zone, and it's implications for the root zone operators are discussed: Deploying DNSSEC, the first DNSSEC KSK key changes, the increase in...