PING
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 ...
Recent Episodes
20
Oct. 14, 2026
The [dismal] economics of AI
In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston reflects on the tremendous economic consequences of the surge in capital investment in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the associated Data Center (DC) build out. This not involves so much money, it represents a tenth or more of the US annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and has significance outside of the application of AI to problems in the world. As technology consumers we’re already used to the idea the cost of basic inputs like RAM
19
Sept. 30, 2026
The October 2026 Root KSK roll
In this episode of PING we’re hearing from Duane Wessels, a fellow from Verisign who researches DNS and who we’ve had on PING before. This time Duane is discussing the history of changes of top level Key Signing Key (KSK) called “roll-over” of the KSK at the root of the DNS. This month on the 11th of October, we will complete deployment of the 3rd KSK, in the second rollover. It’s a multi-year process. This second key roll was delayed from the first rollover in 2017 by some unexpected circumstan
18
Sept. 16, 2026
"Just say no" isn't as simple as you think
In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston and I continue a discussion about the repeat queries Geoff sees on the APNIC Labs experiment. Across time this number has changed, as DNS protocol usage has changed. We now have DNS records which didn't exist when the problem was first seen, and we therefore have multiple queries about multiple things. Geoff has been exploring two facets of the DNS. Firstly, Exploring the effects how you answer "NO" has on the amount of queries you see,
17
Sept. 2, 2026
Measuring the impact of locally served root zone
In this episode of PING, we talk with Willem Toorop from NLNet Labs and Ilyas Rahimi who recently completed a masters in Security and Network Engineering at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). They’ve been looking at the effects of local root serving. Ilyas was on a masters programme called “OS3” at UvA (from the triplet of Open Standards, Open Software and Open Security). NLNet labs is on the campus of UvA and Willem has been working with the masters programme for some time, pursuing research in
16
Aug. 19, 2026
DNS Cold Start
In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston and I discuss the behaviour of the DNS system when you have to come up from nothing: the “cold start” where no data exists from prior queries in your “cache”. This stems from a talk given by Ondřej Surý, that Geoff saw at the recent RIPE-92 Meeting held in Edinburgh, in the DNS working group. Cache, is the things you hold on to, from prior work done. It’s a fundamental technique in computer science to avoid the massive disparity in spee
15
Aug. 5, 2026
Canonical Cache Representation
In this episode of PING, we talk with Job Snijders about secure Internet routing again, focusing on an approach to preserving the state of RPKI as a longterm historical record for research and analysis. Job was last on PING to discuss the “Erik” protocol. Job has been running an archive of RPKI state for some time, as a volunteer activity but an exercise which was feasible when BGP speakers producing ROA objects was measured in the hundreds to low thousands is significantly more expensive when t