PING

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PING is a podcast for people who want to look behind the scenes into the workings of the Internet. Each fortnight we will chat with people who have built and are improving the health of the Internet. The views expressed by the featured speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC.

  1. 29 OCT

    Greasing the wheels

    In this episode of PING, Shumon Huque from Salesforce discusses how protocols with extensible flag fields can benefit from regular testing of the values possible in the packet structure. This technique is known as "greasing" and has a strong metaphorical meaning of "greasing the wheels" to ensure future uses aren't blocked by mistaken beliefs about the possible values. Intermediate systems (so-called "middleboxes") have to try and determine "risky" packetflows, and one of the mechanisms they use is to consider unexpected values in the known packetflows as possibly dangerous. This is an over-simplistic approach, and risks "ossifying" a protocol into the range of values which are actively in use now. Protocols usually include extra potential values for flag-fields, settings, options and the like, and these frequently have a large range of "reserved" values which are held in trust in an IANA registry, for future use. Greasing is a proposed mechanism to test out some of these values, and see what happens "on the wire" for the protocol in question. Shumon and his co-author and collaborator Mark Andrews from ISC have been applying the greasing model to the DNS, and we talked about it's history in other protocols, and how in practice greasing can be applied on the global internet.

    37 min

  2. 15 OCT

    Geolocation and Starlink

    In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses a problem which cropped up recently with the location tagging of IP addresses seen in the APNIC Labs measurement system. For compiling national/economic and regional statistics, and to understand the experimental distribution into each market segment, Labs relies on the freely available geolocation databases from maxmind.com, and IPinfo.io -which in turn are constructed from a variety of sources such as BGP data, the RIR compiled resource distribution reports, Whois and RDAP declarations and the self-asserted RFC8805 format resource distribution statements that ISPs self publish. At best this mechanism is an approximation, and with increasing mobility of IP addresses worldwide it has become harder to be confident in the specific location of an IP address you see in the source of an internet dataflow, not the least because of the increasing use of Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and address cloaking methods such as Apple Private Relay, or Cloudflare Warp (although as Geoff notes, these systems do the best they can to account for the geographic distribution of their users in a coarse grained “privacy preserving” manner). Geoff was contacted by Ben Roberts of Digital Economy Kenya, a new boardmember of AFRINIC and long-time industry analyst and technical advisor. He’d noticed anomolies with the reporting of Internet statistics from Yemen, which simply could not be squared away with the realities of that segment of the Internet Economy. This in turn has lead Geoff to examine in detail the impact of Starlink on distribution of internet traffic, and make adjustments to his measurement Geolocation practices, which will become visible in the labs statistics as the smoothing functions work through the changes. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Space delivery of Internet has had rapid and sometimes surprising effects on the visibility of Internet worldwide. The orbital mechanics mean that virtually the entire surface of the globe is now fully internet enabled, albiet for a price above many in the local economy. This is altering the fundamentals of how we “see” Internet use and helps explain some of the problems which have been building up in the Labs data model.

    51 min

  3. 1 OCT

    Measuring RSSAC047 Conformance

    RSSAC047 - a document from the Root Server System Advisory Committee proposed a set of metrics to measure DNS root servers, and the DNS root server system as a whole. the document was approved in 2020, and ICANN worked on an implementation of the metrics as code, and a deployment into 20 points of measurement distributed worldwide. ISC and Verisign, two of the root server operators proposed a review of this measurement and retained SIDN Labs (who are part of the Dutch body operating .NL as a CountryCode Top-Level Domain or ccTLD) to look into how well the measurement was performing. In this episode of PING, Moritz Mullër from SIDN Labs and Duane Wessels from Verisign respectively, discuss this "measurement of the measurement" exercise, what they found out, and what it may mean for the future of metrics at the DNS Root. It's an interesting "meta conversation" about measuring things which themselves are measurements. We see this all the time in the real world, for example diagnostic imaging machines designed to measure bone density (for osteoporosis checks) require calibration, and when you want to compare a baseline over time that calibration and the specific machine become questions the clinician may want to check, assessing the results. Change machine, you get different sensitivity. So how do you line up the data? Moritz's investigations show that in some respects, the ICANN implementation of RSSAC047 was incomplete, and didn't tell an entirely accurate story about the state of the DNS Root Server System. Also, there are questions of scale and location which means a re-implementation or future improvement is worth discussing.

    31 min

  4. 17 SEPT

    Faster Network design with simpler hardware: TCP Flow control and ECN.

    In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston shares a story from the recent AusNOG in Melbourne and connects it to measurement work at APNIC Labs, exploring how modern IP flow control manages ‘fair shares’ of the network. At AusNOG 2025, Geoff attended a talk by Lincoln Dale of Amazon AWS titled “No Packet Left Behind: AWS’s Approach to Building and Operating Reliable Networks”. The presentation examined how AWS scales its data centre networks, highlighting massive investments in high-speed routers and switches to support both global internet services and the vast flows of traffic between servers and other Amazon resources. What AWS doesn’t do is rely on highly complex protocols like Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6), Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP), or other modern traffic engineering techniques unless absolutely necessary. Instead, they use a radically simplified, on-chip model of data management, pushing as much processing as possible into a single VLSI circuit and minimizing the amount of ‘smart’ work in the network. The question is: How can simplifying the IP stack to this extent actually work? Geoff has long been sceptical of higher-layer protocols that try to manage bandwidth reservation and shaping. He recalls an earlier attempt by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to signal congestion with Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), a mechanism that still exists in the protocol stack and now underpins new bandwidth management approaches such as Apple and Comcast’s ‘L4S’. APNIC Labs has measured how the wider Internet responds to ECN signals using an advertising-based model, and the results suggest this approach struggles outside tightly controlled, ‘walled garden’ networks. He contrasts this with advances in flow control through Google’s BBR, now in its third version, which refines the aggressive, bandwidth-seeking behaviour of TCP window management.

    53 min

  5. 3 SEPT

    Whats going on in bad traffic in 2025

    In this episode of PING, Adli Wahid, APNIC's Security Specialist discusses the APNIC honeypot network, an investment in over 400 collectors distributed throughout the Asia Pacific, collecting data on who is trying to break into systems online and use them for malware, destributed denial of service, and command-and-control systems in the bad traffic economy. Adli discusses how APNIC Members can get access to the results of honeynet traffic capture coming from their network address ranges, and originated from their AS in BGP using the DASH system. and explores some work planned for the APNIC Honeynet systems to extend their systems coverage. As well as publishing reports on APNIC's Blog and presenting at NOG meetings and conferences, Adli has coordinated information sharing from this collector network with a range of international partners such as the Shadow Server Foundation. He continues to offer training and technical assistance in security to the APNIC community and works with the CERT, CSIRT and FIRST community at large.

    27 min

  6. 20 AUG

    The Inevitability of Centrality

    In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, discusses the economic inevitability of centrality, in the modern Internet. Despite our best intentions, and a lot of long standing belief amongst the IETF technologists, no amount of open standards and end-to-end protocol design prevents large players at all levels of the network (from the physical infrastructure right up to the applications and the data centres which house them) from seeking to acquire smaller competitors, and avoid sharing the space with anyone else. Some of this is a consequence of the drive for efficiency. A part has been fuelled by the effects of Moore’s law, and the cost of capital investment against the time available to recover the costs. In an unexpected outcome, networking has become (to all intents and purposes) “free” and instead of end-to-end, we now routinely expect to get data through highly localised, replicated sources. The main cost these days is land, electric power and air-conditioning. This causes a tendency to concentration, and networks and protocols play very little part in the decision about who acquires these assets, and operates them. The network still exists of course, but increasingly data flows over private links, and is not subject to open protocol design imperatives. A quote from Peter Thiel highlights how the modern Venture Capitalist in our space does not actively seek to operate in a competitive market. As Peter says: “competition is for losers” – It can be hard to avoid the “good” and “bad” labels talking about this, but Geoff is clear he isn’t here to argue what is right or wrong, simply to observe the behaviour and the consequences. Geoff presented on centrality to the Decentralised Internet Research Group or DINRG at the recent IETF meeting held in Madrid, and as he observes, “distributed” is not the same as “decentralised” -we’ve managed to achieve the first one, but the second eludes us.

    1h 1m

  7. 6 AUG

    Rob Kisteleki on RIPE Atlas

    In this episode of PING, Robert Kisteleki from the RIPE NCC discusses the RIPE Atlas system -a network of over 13,000 measurement devices deployed worldwide in homes, exchange points, stub and transit AS, densely connected regions and sparse island states. Atlas began with a vision of the world at night -a powerful metaphor for where people are, and where technology reaches. Could a measurement system achieve sufficient density to "light up the internet" in a similar manner? Could network measurement be "democratized" to include internet citizens at large? From it's launch at the RIPE 61 meeting held in Rome Italy. with 500 probes based on a small ucLinux device designed as an ethernet converter, to 5 generations of probe hardware and now a soft probe design which can be installed on linux, and an "anchor" device which not only sends tests but can receive them, Atlas has become core technology for network monitoring, measurement and research. Rob discusses the history, design, methodology and futures of this system. A wonderful contribution from the RIPE NCC for the community at large.

    40 min

  8. 23 JUL

    A Day in the Life of BGP

    In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, discusses "a day in the life of BGP" -Not an extraordinary day, not a special day, just the 8th of May. What happens inside the BGP system, from the point of view of AS4608, one ordinary BGP speaker on the edge of the network? What kinds of things are seen, and why are they seen? Geoff has been measuring BGP for almost it's entire life as the internet routing protocol, but this time looks at the dynamics at a more "micro" level than usual. In particular there are some things about the rate of messages and changes which points to the problems BGP faces. A small number of BGP speakers produce the vast majority of change, and overall the network information BGP speakers have to deal with as a persisting view of the world increases more slowly. Both kinds of message dynamics have to be dealt with. Can we fix this? Is there even anything worth fixing here, or is BGP just doing fine?

    1h 1m
See All (50)

About

PING is a podcast for people who want to look behind the scenes into the workings of the Internet. Each fortnight we will chat with people who have built and are improving the health of the Internet. The views expressed by the featured speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC.

Information

  • Creator
    APNIC
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2025
  • Episodes
    50
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 PING
  • Show Website
    PING

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