[ooni-dev] Cooperation between OONI & RIPE Atlas

Mon Sep 14 18:53:47 UTC 2015

Thank you Vesna!  Wow!  Okay, lets see what we can find to cooperate!

> We also have a conference coming up - RIPE71 - in Bucharest,
> where one of you could come to talk to network operators
> about your needs & your results: http://ripe71.ripe.net

Arturo/Naif: I defer this to you.  Seems like a good place to make friends.

> When is the "Berlin meeting"?
Sept 27 - Oct 3.

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2015SummerDevMeeting

Most of the Tor-dev team will be at the Berlin meeting, and we'd love to
have a presentation on your work!  One open-problem we have is how to
quantify the "AS topological diversity" of the Tor relay network.  One
recent proposal is to use data from:

http://labs.apnic.net/vizas

And prioritize placing Tor relays on the well-connected ASs that don't
already have relays.  Very interested in any ideas for using your data to
quantify Tor's topological diversity.

> it is now only possible to do HTTP measurements
> towards RIPE Atlas anchors.

>> doing this will yoke the interests of generic network
>> infrastructure people with those of Tor and OONI.

> That's certainly one way of "cooperating".

Forgive me, but I can't tell if you are being sarcastic.  The proposal is
encourage OONI agents to place an Atlas anchor next every major point.
RIPE gets dedicated volunteers placing quality Atlas anchors around the
world, and OONI gets the pleasure of knowing any detected censorship is
additionally detected as a network disruption.

> We can also somehow do it via MLabs,  alhou our cooperation
> with them is very slow -- two large bureaucracies add lots
> of inertia ;-)

I don't know this MLabs.  Elaborate?

-V

On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 5:46 PM Vesna Manojlovic <BECHA at ripe.net> wrote:

> Hi Arturo, Naif, Virgil, all,
>
> thanks for your interest, and for reaching out!
>
> I'll reply inline.
>
> On 12-sep.-15 12:55, Arturo Filastò wrote:
> > Hi Virgil,
> >
> > Thanks for reaching out about this subject.
> >
> > I have spoken to Vesna (that I add to the cc of this thread in case
> > she wants to chime in too) that runs the ripe atlas program in
> > various occasions as to how we can in some way collaborate or join
> > our efforts. I think the last consensus we reached is that our
> > efforts are both very important, though complementary.
>
> Indeed, and I try to promote OONI whenever someone asks "can we use RIPE
> Atlas for censorship measurements" -- I tell them to use OONI instead ;-)
>
> > We are always open to seeing if there are some ways to collaborate
> > more in the future, but from what I understand the policy and
> > governance model of ripe does not allow for the sort of data
> > collection we are currently mainly focussing on as OONI.
>
> Until few weeks ago RIPE Atlas was not allowing regular users to do HTTP
> measurements. That's going to change, *but* probably not sufficient
> enough for you needs -- it is now only possible to do HTTP measurements
> towards RIPE Atlas anchors.
>
> One of the reasons for this is ethical: protecting the safety of our
> hosts, but not allowing their probes to perform HTTP connections to
> random web sites requested by any other RIPE Atlas user.
>
> Here's a paper that describes different use cases, benefits and
> limitations of multiple platforms, and addresses this ethical issue:
> https://t.co/GKzQ0aZ1Te
>
> However, what *is* possible with RIPE Atlas is SSL/TLS measurements. We
> have 8600+ probes that could be used for this, and if any of you find
> this interesting, I 'd like to have a discussion about the possible use
> case, or any details you need from me.
>
> > That said we would be delighted to have them attend the OONI ADINA15
> > hackathon at the Italian parliament:
> > https://ooni.torproject.org/adina15/
>
> I will send the info about this hackathon to my colleagues who are
> developers, and if they are interested they might apply -- and they cna
> bring the experience of our own platform & visualizations with them,
> plus they can learn from this hackathon about your solutions & challenges.
>
> We also had a hackathon in March; all contributions are on GitHub:
>
> https://github.com/RIPE-Atlas-Community/ripe-atlas-community-contrib/blob/master/README.md
>
> & more tools by the community are in that repository too:
> https://github.com/RIPE-Atlas-Community/ripe-atlas-community-contrib
>
> We'll have another hackathon this year, I can let you know when&where.
>
>  > Virgil: What particular direction of collaboration did you envision?
>
> >> On 12 Sep 2015, at 09:18, Virgil Griffith <i at virgil.gr> wrote:
> >>
> >> http://atlas.ripe.net/
> >>
> >> The idea of putting their probes (or even anchors) next to Tor
> >> relays and/or OONI probes seems an immensely good idea because
> >> doing this will yoke the interests of generic network
> >> infrastructure people with those of Tor and OONI.
>
> That's certainly one way of "cooperating".
>
> We can also somehow do it via MLabs,  alhou our cooperation with them is
> very slow -- two large bureaucracies add lots of inertia ;-)
>
>
> >> I'd be happy to bring them to the Tor meeting in Berlin, but they
> >> seem a better fit for the OONI meeting in Italy.
>
> For the hackathon, you may want to make it easier and only combine
> existing RIPE Atlas data with OONI data.
>
> We have APIs that are documented; our data is open, and historical.
>
> We do constant, global pings, traceroutes & DNS lookups from _all_ the
> probes to _all_ root-namesservers; and "regional" measurements towards
> anchors. There are 143 anchors right now, and two of them are in Italy
> (17 in Germany, 5 of them in Frankfurt ;-)
>
> Plus there are about 5000 measurements at any moment started-up by
> users, to the targets of their own choice; these measurements can be
> from 5 probes or form 500 probes, and can be one-time or periodic,
> lasting for several months.
>
> >> Tell them to bring extra probes/anchors to give out to OONI
> >> attendees.
>
> If one of my colleagues comes, he can bring some probes.
>
> However, hosting a probe is NOT the requirement for taking part in RIPE
> Atlas; it's a good start, and we could use more probes -- althou not in
> Italy ;-) We are currently trying to focus on "topological diversity",
> that is -- covering as many ASNs with probes.
>
> On the other hand, we need people to *USE* that data!!
>
> >> If for whatever reason they can't come to the Italy meeting I'll
> >> invite them to the Berlin meeting.  Not as good a fit, but better
> >> than nothing.
>
> When is the "Berlin meeting"?
>
> We also have a conference coming up - RIPE71 - in Bucharest, where one
> of you could come to talk to network operators about your needs & your
> results: http://ripe71.ripe.net
>
> More things to share:
>
> - training material about RIPE Atlas:
> https://github.com/RIPE-Atlas-Community/syllabus
>
> - I just saw the article about measuring censorship, that mentions OONI:
>
> http://tma-2015.cba.upc.edu/images/TMA/Presentations/Monitoring_Internet_Censorship_with_UBICA.pdf
>
>
> - In 2013, there was a cross-cooperation mentioned with UC Louvain /
> tracebox & Tor / OONI: see this: http://www.multipath-tcp.org
>
> They wanted to add this capability to RIPE Atlas probe; however, as Art
> diplomatically put it: "the policy and governance model of ripe does not
> allow for the sort of" addition. Here is more recent article about their
> work:
>
> https://labs.ripe.net/Members/julien_colmonts/tracebox-a-nice-tool-to-detect-middleboxes
>
> Let's keep talking - I'd love to come up with a successful model of
> cooperation!
>
> Regards,
> Vesna
>
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