On the 29th of November, shortly after 10am UTC (12pm Damascus time), the Syrian state telecom (AS29386) withdrew the majority of BGP routes to Syrian networks (see reports from Renesys, Arbor, CloudFlare, BGPmon). Five prefixes allocated to Syrian organizations remained reachable for another several hours, served by Tata Communications. By midnight UTC on the 29th, as reported by BGPmon, these five prefixes had also been withdrawn from the global routing table, completing the disconnection of Syria from the rest of the Internet.

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In response to the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s recent Further Notice of Inquiry on the Internet Assigned Names and Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions [Docket No. 110207099-1319-0], I submitted the following comment:

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On June 8 2011 a group of content providers, including Google, Yahoo and Facebook, are going to dual-stack their content, in an event called World IPv6 Day. This trial will enable content providers to gain experience with increased levels of IPv6 traffic and gauge the extent and effect of broken dual-stack end-users. CAIDA is cooperating with RIPE NCC’s measurements on this day, providing a dozen Ark monitors to increase the number of vantage points from which RIPE will actively test a set of dual-stacked websites for levels of IPv6 support: existence of AAAA records; ping/ping6 response; traceroute/traceroute6; and HTTP reachability.

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I recently remotely attended my second meeting of the FCC’s Technological Advisory Council (slides but no video archives). The chairs of four working groups created at the first TAC meeting (Critical Transitions; IPv6; Broadband Infrastructure Deployment; and Sharing Opportunities) presented their interim results. The FCC then issued a set of “TAC recommendations” (which the TAC never saw); it is mostly a wish list from industry to the FCC. Ironically, IPv6 did not appear anywhere in the recommendations, despite being the most popular topic at the first TAC meeting last November, and despite us running out of IPv4 addresses since the last TAC meeting. But the TAC’s IPv6 WG did commit to (on slide 53) delivering a report by November 2011 on what the FCC could or should do to help promote IPv6 deployment. Specifically, the WG has the following charter:

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In pursuit of more rigorous data on IPv6 deployment, CAIDA has undertaken four IPv6 measurement and analysis exercises: address allocation data; traceroute-based topology; DNS queries from root servers; and a global survey of network operators in 2008.

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Amidst the recent political unrest in the Middle East, researchers have observed significant changes in Internet traffic and connectivity. In this article we tap into a previously unused source of data: unsolicited Internet traffic arriving from Libya. The traffic data we captured shows distinct changes in unsolicited traffic patterns since 17 February 2011.

I post this article to describe the results of my five month visit to CAIDA and UC San Diego, and to thank the organizations that collaborated to make this work possible.

• CAIDA welcomed me as a visitor to UCSD’s renowned San Diego Supercomputer Center, to work on a new tool for Internet data visualization which we are calling “Caidagram”;
• RIPE NCC sponsored my visit at CAIDA, part of their continual efforts to cooperate with top Internet research groups in the world;
• Roma Tre is the University where I started a PhD program with the Compunet research group, after obtaining my Master’s degree accompanied by an internship held at the RIPE NCC.

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Last month I submitted two proposals to the National Cyber Leap Year call for input from the U.S. Networking Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program. I submitted two ideas, the International Bureau of Internet Statistics, and Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems (COMMONS, a two-year old idea). The Bureau of Internet Statistics still strikes some as batty, but over the holidays I caught up on some panicky OECD state-of-malware-landscape papers on how uninformed we are and how little data we have, while the only concrete recommendation in the “ITU’s study on the financial aspects of network security: malware and spam” report was

Although the financial aspects of malware and spam are increasingly documented, serious gaps and inconsistencies exist in the available information. This sketchy information base also complicates finding meaningful and effective responses. For this reason, more systematic efforts to gather more reliable information would be highly desirable.

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i gave a (faster, less understandable) version of this talk (pdf or slides+audio quicktime) at the October 2008 ARIN meeting in Los Angeles (original October version) and again to ISOC’s advisory council meeting in November. motivation: the end of the current addressing architecture, with scant understanding of how to retain all its positive features in the face of inevitable change. a topic i worry about more each year.

(peter cincotti sings as if we knows what we’re going through.)

CAIDA, ISC, OARC, and The Measurement Factory managed to repeat our annual Day in the Life of the Internet data collection experiment this year — using a 2-day window of 18-19 March 2008. As with last year’s DITL (DITL2007 announcement, DITL2007 summary), we tried to capture a complete 48-hour interval of traffic to as many DNS root nameservers as could participate, and also invited other data providers to participate on terms compatible with their data sharing policies. if you engage in ongoing measurement of an operational network, and collected data for some or all of 18-19 mar 2008, it’s not too late to contribute data or metadata to DITL2008!

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