Episodes

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston and I discuss a traffic behaviour in the DNS which Geoff has noticed in the labs advertising based experimental data capture. Virtually every DNS query Geoff sees, he sees twice (or more). For a cohort of about 150 million unique DNS labels on a given day, The Labs system is collecting 270 million incoming DNS queries. Thats a lot of duplication. What's going on? The advertising data collection depends on issuing unique DNS queries, whi...

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 name server worldwide. This is their primary role, but they also handle query load relating to the ...

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 effectively handle your request. How does this actually work in practice? What processes determine where yo...

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 2024. Erik was a stalwart of the RIPE routing community. He was a chair of the Address policy workin...

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 framework which regulates our sense of time, and how it relates to the world of science, astronomy and ci...

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 space. When it comes to crafting a response, business tends to focus on brand integrity and the real ...

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 obeying the fixed bit-pattern at the "top" of the address (in the top 3 bits) which defined which cl...

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 speed service which in many cases out-performs terrestrial services available in rural and remote loc...

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 Engineering Task Force documents standards and protocols through Best Current Practice (BCP) publicatio...

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 learning and approaches to selecting the "Most valuable Vantage Point" or MVP in the data sources availabl...

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 encoded and transmitted become complex very quickly, but a particular issue is emerging in how we def...

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 Technology (AIT), which has run the AINTEC conference across the Asia Pacific. Both of our guests on thi...

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 the mechanism by which network operators announce their Internet address space to the rest of the w...

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 focused university located on India’s south-western coast in the state of Karnataka. The state is home to ...

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 intrusion of the mail, to adoption of telegraph codes, the cutting of telegraph wires in wartime (t...

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 for different AS, based on the impact they have on other AS’s transit choices. They call this “AS He...

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 start. After the initial physics of running a long distance wire to make an electric circuit was wor...

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...