Vesna Manojlovic

When designing technologies, networked systems, and measurements on the Internet, we must be aware of their implications and consequences for the society and participants. As engineers, scientists, programmers and other experts, we have moral obligations towards our peers, users of technologies we create, and the wider communities.

In this talk I want to talk both about general ethical considerations, and specific examples of moral dilemmas that come from building the RIPE Atlas system, and conducting measurements that reveal workings of Internet infrastructure and services.

RIPE Atlas is an extensive measurement network, where the vantage points (sources of measurements) are hosted by volunteers: mostly individuals at home, but also some institutions (ISPs, IXPs, academia, various other businesses). RIPE Atlas users are using someone else's Internet connection to do measurements. In order to recognise ethical considerations surrounding use of RIPE Atlas, we looked both into the historical considerations of engineers and scientists, and into practical constraints users should keep in mind, and we published some findings in this article: https://labs.ripe.net/Members/kistel/ethics-of-ripe-atlas-measurements

Cooperation and sharing are the keywords for this talk — sharing of data, of efforts, or results.

RIPE Atlas is a global network of probes that measure Internet connectivity and reachability. Out of 5000 active probes, more than 1000 support IPv6. Supported measurements are ping, traceroute6, DNS and SSL. There are API calls for starting your own measurements, and for downloading results of "built-in" measurements from all probes towards root nameservers. Code for analysing data is shared on GitHub.

Many analysis papers and articles were already published using RIPE Atlas data.

My goal is to encourage FOSDEM participants to contribute with their knowledge and their curiosity, by using the existing data and producing interesting research, and by sharing their code with others.

RIPE Atlas is a global network of probes that measure Internet connectivity and reachability, providing an unprecedented understanding of the state of the Internet in real time.

There are currently several thousand active probes in the RIPE Atlas network, concentrated in the RIPE NCC service region of Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, and the network is constantly growing. Probes are hosted by volunteers, individuals and organisations, who share a portion of their bandwidth and electricity, and allow all the other RIPE Atlas hosts to perform the measurements from their probe, thus contributing to the wealth of measurement data. RIPE Atlas users who host a probe can also use the entire RIPE Atlas network to conduct customised measurements that provide valuable data about their own network(s).

The RIPE NCC collects the data from this network and provides useful maps and graphs based on the aggregated results.

IPv6 is a popular topic for the research community, and there are many articles published already based on RIPE Atlas IPv6 data.

In my presentation, I will make an introduction to RIPE Atlas measurements, explain various IPv6-related features, point to the existing research and code, and invite participants to contribute their own.

IPv6:

• https://labs.ripe.net/Members/becha/world-ipv6-launch-ripe-atlas-use-cases
• https://labs.ripe.net/Members/stephane_bortzmeyer/how-many-atlas-probes-believe-they-have-ipv6-but-are-wrong
• https://labs.ripe.net/Members/emileaben/ripe-atlas-case-study-of-aaaa-filtering
• https://labs.ripe.net/Members/emileaben/ripe-atlas-a-case-study-of-ipv6-48-filtering

Measurements source code is public:

• https://labs.ripe.net/Members/philip_homburg/ripe-atlas-measurements-source-code

REST APIs for performing and analysing measurements are provided by RIPE NCC, and contributions are made by the community who share their code and provide tutorials:

• https://labs.ripe.net/Members/wilhelm/ripe-atlas-code-for-analysis-and-statistics-reporting

Nikolay Melnikov, Hands-on: RIPE Atlas, AIMS 2013

• http://cnds.eecs.jacobs-university.de/users/nmelnikov/aims2013-ripe-atlas.html

Stéphane Bortzmeyer, Creating and Analysing RIPE Atlas Measurements, RIPE67

• https://ripe67.ripe.net/presentations/153-ripe-atlas-udm-api-1.pdf