PING

In this episode of PING, we talk with Willem Toorop about a measurement of 6 choices for naming the root servers of the global DNS. This measurement was motivated by RSSAC 028, a 2017 technical analysis for ICANN of the naming scheme used by the root DNS servers. Root name servers are part of the global DNS system, and they provide basic bootstrapping for every other DNS resolver and authoritative...

In recent PING episodes, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston has asserted that Internet routing has shifted away from traditional IP packet forwarding. Instead, it is increasingly driven by processes that map names to addresses. It’s no longer just about your IP address or the specific endpoint you think you’re connecting to, it’s about your location and which intermediary services can most effecti...

In this episode of PING we’re hearing about secure Internet Routing and its data distribution problem from Job Snijders who has been on PING before talking about his measurements in BGP and RPKI. We caught up at IETF125 in Shenzhen where Job presented to the SIDROPS working group on a new protocol he’s been designing, called Erik. The Erik protocol was named in honour of Erik Bais who died in May...

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston and I discuss Network Time Protocol or NTP. NTP is one of the older systems we depend on, designed and implemented by Dave Mills who died in 2024. Dave had been working on time synchronisation from the mid 1970s, and cared deeply about synchronising the emerging ARPAnet and the Internet, with the pre-existing worldwide collaborative frame...

This time on PING I'm talking to Alban Kwan from the Trusted Notifier Network (TNN). I caught up with Alban at the APRICOT/APNIC61 meeting held recently in Jakarta, where Alban was attending the policy and governance sessions with a particular interest in the problem of online abuse mitigation. Alban is interested in bridging the gap between the business and technical communities in this problem s...

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the tortuous history of The CIDR report Classless Inter-Domain Routing or CIDR, is a mechanism defined in the 90s, to replace the former model of fixed sized networks defined in RFC791 called class-A class-B or class-C (there were actually class-D and class-E but for now we can ignore them) -the "Classless" part means no longer...

This episode of PING is an interview with Marc Blanchet from Viagenie in Quebec, Canada. Marc has been active in Internet Procotols and the IETF for decades, most recently focussed on Internet Protocol communications in deep space. Marc presented at the recent APRICOT/APNIC61 meeting held in Jakarta. We've got used to the idea of IP working in Low Earth Orbit, with the rise of Starlink as a high s...

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses an emerging concern about how the IETF interprets the concept of ‘Best Current Practice‘ (BCP). In his previous episode, Geoff explored emerging questions around DNS provisioning over IPv6, including experimental observations on its performance characteristics. Towards the end of the discussion, we turned to how the Internet Eng...

This episode of PING features Thomas Alfroy and Thomas Holterbach from the University of Strasbourg, talking about bgproutes.io - A new approach to BGP data collection and analysis. We've featured bgproutes.io on PING before, when we discussed GILL and DFOH with Professor Cristal Pelsser from Louvain University. At that stage, the project was in an early stage and we focussed on the machine learni...

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses running advertising-based experiments and a problem of interest in the modern DNS. DNS fundamentally requires end users, their chosen resolver provider, and the authoritative servers for the names they query to cooperate in a coordinated exchange over IP protocols to answer DNS questions. The specifics of how these queries are e...

This episode of PING features two members of the Thai academic and research community and was recorded last year at IETF 122 in Bangkok. With a population of more than 70 million, Thailand has around 80 publicly funded universities and a further 70 or more private institutions, and undertakes substantial research in telecommunications and computing. A leading example is the Asian Institute of Tech...

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston returns with his annual review of BGP, reflecting on developments across 2025. Geoff has been publishing this year-in-review analysis of BGP dynamics for more than a decade, and this time he has uncovered some genuinely surprising shifts. His 2025 analysis has been published in two parts on the APNIC Blog. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is...

Welcome back to PING for 2026 and season 6. This time on PING, we have a pair of interviews with students from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal (NITK), recorded last year at IETF 122. This is the second time we've heard from students from NITK. We previously heard from Vanessa Fernandes and Kavya Bhat when they attended IETF 119 in 2024. NITK is a large, technically focuse...

In the final podcast for 2025, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the problem of independent measurement in an Internet which is increasingly “going dark”. Communications has always included a risk of snooping, and a matching component of work to enhance privacy, from the simplest ciphers used in ancient times, techniques of hiding and discovering messages, attempts to prevent and detect...

This time PING features Emile Aben from the RIPE NCC R&D Department. Emile is a Senior Research Engineer, and for over a decade and a half has been looking at Internet Measurement at RIPE in the Atlas system, and in the RIPE RIS BGP data collection. Emile and a collaborator Romain Fontugne from IIJ Labs in Tokyo have been exploring a model of the influence and effect on global connectivity in BGP...

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston explores the complex landscape of undersea cables. They have always had a component of strategic interest, communications and snooping on communications has been a constant since writing was invented, and the act of connecting two independent nation states by a telegraph wire invokes questions of ownership and jurisdiction right from the...

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-cal...

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, an...

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 revi...

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...

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...

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 appl...

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 sy...

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 lif...

In this episode of PING, Doug Madory from Kentik discusses his rundown of the state of play in secure BGP across 2024 and 2025. Kentik has it’s own internal measurements of BGP behaviour and flow data across the surface of the internet, which combined with the Oregon University curated routeviews archive means Doug can analyse both the publicly visible state of BGP from archives, and Kentik’s own...