These are unedited transcripts and may contain errors.
Plenary Session
4 p.m. 15 October, 2013.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Okay, people, let's get seated because we have to get going with the panel and then we have lightning talks, but I'm missing a panelist here. Geoff Huston, identify yourself...
This is the brokers and IPv4 transfer market panel, welcome. I'll briefly go through like why we are even having this.
Well, brokers' business and the transferred markets, they have been quite prominent during the recent discussions as we see them. It's becoming an interesting parameter within the scheme of the whole addressing system that we are used to to see for the last three decades or so, and their integration to the RIPE community is getting interesting as well as they bring their businesses to our notice. And there seems to be a whole lot of various different ideas about them, about their businesses, about their integration to the community, how we interact, how they fit in with the whole registry system of today and tomorrow maybe. So, we will try to talk about those ideas generally, and, in fact, yesterday I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine, and this is not an exact quote, but he told me this is actually a bike?shed conversation, meaning it is very easy to have an an opinion because it's such a complex issue. With that, I want to introduce our panelists to you. We have Peter Thimmesch, Louis Sterchi, and we have Sandra Brown, they are the brokers here, three of them. And why do we have these brokers here next to me on the panel, and maybe you are a broker out there and you are not here, I'll explain immediately.
These guys all submitted content for the RIPE 66 programme, meeting programme way back for the Dublin meeting, and, by then, when this came to our attention, and our attention meaning RIPE Programme Committee's attention, we declined them mostly ?? there was a time limit here, 20 minutes here, different formats they wanted to do different things and because it wouldn't scale, we thought, and we decided maybe it is best to talk about this together with the transfers and the address landscape all together in one panel. And in that sense, we hope that this is going to be beneficial to you all guys, as well as they can hear your views too.
Having said that, I have also Andrea Cima, our RIPE NCC Registration Services Manager, and he is going to inject some factual facts where necessary in regards to the address space allocation and the transfers, as they experience from the RIPE NCC side, and we have Geoff, whom I pulled from a conversation by force recently, and he is wearing his researcher hat with a strong interest in economies and markets, so he is going to share his opinions with us in that respect while he is still, his affiliation is still APNIC.
And I want to move on quickly with the house rules. As usual, this is, you know, a regular RIPE Meeting panel. There will be an open mic session at the end. You can queue up, please wait for my queue for that, I will open the conversation to open mic. We first want to spread a few round of questions between these guys to get ideas running, you know, having some maturity around some sort of topics. While doing that, you please identify yourself and, if you like, your affiliation, obviously.
I have stalked them for a while and they will well know that there will be no marketing talk here. They are here to discuss generic broker business and motions and ideas, so those rules ?? and they agreed, thanks to them ?? and hopefully, you know, you will agree with that, too, and you come to the mic, that's the same expectation and the same rules apply to you too.
And we have limited time. There will be some timing consideration here, Shane will help there with his little iPad app, telling them how much time they are left with as they have their rounds, and I will inject, if I see a consideration, somebody is, you know, using too much time over a topic. Again same rules apply to the floor, and one last thing, I'm doing this as an independent person and I'm wearing my RIPE PC Chair, as I said. I am not involved with RIPE NCC, I'm not involved with any of the broker businesses. Like I said, this whole idea came up to RIPE PC as a collective when we received the request from these guys and also seeing all these discussions in various lists.
So I am just the moderator here but I have the mic and I have my PC member colleagues who are quite agile separating people from mics if necessary. So...
Let's roll. I'll start with Andrea, and there are a few things that I'm wondering obviously when we have the open mic, you are free to shoot whichever request you want to shoot at them. But what's the current landscape if you want to share us some numbers, and the other question I ?? when I ask that, I'm asking about what is allocated already, you know, fair enough, you are already still giving out some allocations, but you also see transfers being made. So, anything you can share there.
The second question of mine is: RIPE NCC has published a list at the beginning of the year, I believe, as the RIPE NCC recognised brokers. What exactly that means. Can you please explain. And you have five minutes.
ANDREA CIMA: Thank you. I'll try to make it within those five minutes. First of all, I would like to start by saying that it's about one year ago that the RIPE NCC exhausted its regular pool of IPv4 addresses. That does not mean that the RIPE NCC has exhausted all of its IPv4 address space, that it does not allocate IPv4 any more because each LIR can still receive one /22 according to the last /8 policy.
Of course, for some organisations, a /22 is enough address space. For other organisations, this is not enough address space. And to ensure that businesses can continue running, the RIPE community made it possible for IPv4 address space to be transferred by creating a transfer policy.
Now, according to this transfer policy, the receiver of the IPv4 resources must justify the need for these resources. And this must be evaluated and assessed and approved by the RIPE NCC.
Now, as I said, transfers are being made, and, in the first six months after the exhaustion of the regular IPv4 pool, the number of transfers was really low. Let's say that from September, October, until April 2013, we could see just a handful of transfers on a monthly basis and the average number of IP addresses transferred per month would be around 50,000.
Since May 2013, we have seen a sharp increase in transfers in our region, possibly due to the fact that LIRs have finished their reserves of v4 addresses, and let's say we have about between around 15 transfers on average per month and the number of IP addresses transferred on a monthly basis, the average is about 250,000. But we have seen peaks of more than 400,000 in a month.
All this information is listed on our website as mandated to us by the RIPE community according to policy. The statistics do show the organisation that used to have those resources, the organisations to which those resources have been transferred to, what IP range and when those resources have been transferred.
I would like to clarify that those statistics do include only IPv4 allocations which are subject to RIPE policy according to the transfer policy, and this means that early registration resources are excluded but also transfers due to mergers and acquisitions.
With regards to mergers and acquisitions, we have not seen an increase. The average is still of about 30 per quarter over the years, so it means that no organisation has made use of the mergers and acquisition possibility to actually transfer some resources to them.
Finally, you asked about what the RIPE NCC considers by the listed brokers on our website. What I can say is that we have seen there are organisations that need resources. How they organise the search for those IP addresses and how they organise the transfer of those resources is, the RIPE NCC is not involved in this. We leave this up to our members. We try to support them. We have provided a listing service, an IPv4 transfer listing service where organisations that have a surplus of resources can talk to organisations that have a need for resources but for the rest we stay out of the transfer part.
So, some organisations we have seen that are looking for an external party that can help them finding resources, brokers, or that can facilitate with knowledge of policies and procedures. And for this reason, they take the intervention of brokers.
Now, what the RIPE NCC is keen on is that the policies by the RIPE communities are being applied, and that the quality of the registry data stays high. So, what I could say is that the brokers that are listed on our website have signed an agreement with the RIPE NCC according to which they will fulfil and will follow and will make sure that RIPE policies are applied and that the registry data is being kept current, up to date and correct, and that is what for us it the important part is.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Thank you.
ANDREA CIMA: Exactly five minutes.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Well, done, so now I want to turn to the brokers there, and I'm going to ask a very simple question here. What is a broker really? How you define it? And when you, you know, when you explain it, please focus on you know how you help the system, if you believe you are helping the system, the registry system and how you see that helps within the context of transfers obviously, that is the main area that we are seeing the activity on. And please also reflect on, if a broker means, in your opinion, okay, is it like a reseller organisation? So they collect address space and then they find interested parties, or are they connecting facilitators so you find the parties and then you meet them, maybe you don't seen see the address space as such in between. So, can I start with Peter and each of you will have maximum two minutes when you go through that. I hope it will be shorter to save time too.
PETER THIMMESCH: Thank you. We look at it from a different perspective. First of all our platform doesn't take control or own any of the blocks, we don't try to take and then resell them. So yes, we would fit the model more of a pure market place that does not take control. We invest in identifying and locating unused or fallow blocks, most of them, are early registration and then we work with them to build the structural components that matter to the transfers, the purchase agreement, the escrow agreements and the process it goes through to ensure a successful transfer. So, the mechanics of what is done is the legal and the financial and the structural capabilities because I'd like to say this room is filled with the technical discussion, but we hear this a lot. It is now leaving the technical discussion and now entering into the business realm and that's part of what the facilitation is. It's now that you are interfacing with the business side of the company.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Thank you.
LOUIS STERCHI: I would like to agree with what ?? we see things somewhat the way Peter does. A lot of these businesses are, you know, in the business of doing whatever, working on their specific product and we help them outsource this part of that business being sort of their in?house expertise and acquiring or divesting of these assets. And I don't use that the word 'assets' in, not in an insightful manner.
We ?? there is a level of financial acumen that comes with our backgrounds of being involved in various pockets of business and transactions across different business lines that might be lost to, you know, some folks who are simply maybe more on the technical side. It's strictly a service that we provide. We're not resellers. We think that to the extent that we ?? that there was a place to be resellers, that the market would have more liquidity and that might be a good thing. But we're not quite there yet. So now we are strictly helping companies navigate a process that otherwise to them is still somewhat nebulous and uncertain.
SANDRA BROWN: Thank you, Filiz, for the opportunity to participate in this panel. In our business model we act as the facilitator to enable the transfer of IPs from the organisations that have an excess number of IPs so the sellers to organisations that have needs, or the buyers. So our transfer process is kind of what I want to talk about.
The first activity is the initial planning step where an organisation does network engineering planning, they define the block size that they need, they do financial planning, they do an internal business case and they secure their internal financial approval to secure IPs. So, we as a company are not usually involved in these internal steps that go on within your organisations.
The second step a buyer would do is go to the RIPE NCC at this time to secure the pre?approval step and again, usually the company does this on their own, but if they come to us and say can you help us to go through the steps with RIPE NCC to get approval? We will help you and we'll walk you through those steps in talking to RIPE NCC.
The next step is market research, where the buyer would get a list of sellers, prices and block sizes and we can help with that. We can tell you what's available and at what price.
Next, we do a non?disclosure agreement between buyer and seller and we accept with that and usually we part of the NDA. The buyer would then examine the block with our extensive help both legally and technically. We would then do an asset purchase agreement which defines the contractual terms and conditions between the parties. We then arrange payment, which can be via escrow, solicitor agreement, letter of credit, we have seen prepayment done, post prepayment done, lots of means of payment. The transfer is done with our help using the tools provided by the RIPE NCC, a transfer memo is sent usually accompanied by the organisation documents of the two companies. And the IPs are then announced by the buyer. And the last step is the cleanup stage where usually a bill of sale is provided and any final steps, including the release of escrow, if escrow is part of the arrangement.
So those are the kinds of services we provide in transferring IPs from seller to buyer.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Thank you. And my second round of questions are, in fact, about the procedures that ?? some of the procedures that I'm really interested on, specific ones, and Sandra stepped into that a little bit. It's basically, what are the mechanisms you are applying to ensure that you're talking maybe the rightful holder, if somebody comes to you as okay, I have this address space, can you connect me to somebody who would like it to be transferred to themselves. What are the mechanisms or the checks you apply?
And when I'm asking this I'm also very much interested ?? well, we have seen those, you know, words mentioned in the previous sessions today, the hijacks and address blocks that are being maybe not so rightfully captured by certain people. Do you find yourself or consider yourselves liable in terms of this issue? Do you consider this is something that you should be looking into? And what is your liability maybe if you find out after a transfer that you have facilitated that has been the issue or there is some kind of dispute? And I would like to start with Louis this time, if I may.
LOUIS STERCHI: Most of the folks who are sellers of the space that we represent are not in the technology business, and the space is lying fallow. They are in lots of businesses potentially but it's generally not the technology space. The space generally is not being used. They are, a lot of times, publicly traded organisations, and in addition ?? there is not a whole lot that we do on our end other than making sure that the title is correct in the registry. Once there is an NDA that's been signed between the buyer and the seller, we let the buyer do a fair amount of the due diligence and let them get comfortable with the ?? I'm going to use the word "asset" again ?? the same way as they would in any other transaction. We do not take liability should there be something they do not uncover during their period of looking at the range themselves. Similarly, where if you are, you know, a banker on any other, you know, real estate or company and you find out that there is something that's there ex post facto, you know, we are not making representations or warranties that something is what ?? that we did not uncover during the period of due diligence. Thank you.
PETER THIMMESCH: We kind of look at it from two perspectives because there is two types of number offerings. The RIPE allocated, or allocated PA is fairly easy. We require that the seller verify through RIPE that they are actually the holder. They have to maintain and do things through RIPE. That's actually fairly easy so when it comes to verification, that's a lot easier. It's the early registration blocks of something that was given out between 1983 and 1997 and God knows how many organisations the company has gone through. You are now looking at chains of custody of paperwork that does require some verification. We do require the seller to hold all the liability. And that the mechanism for escrow is required so that the buyer, the network that needs the space, can actually get a hold of it, update the maintainer and utilise it prior to the release of funds.
So, we try to derisk it for the system. But the early registration blocks generally, RIPE maintained registration blocks, it's the only ones we are talking about here, those are ones that require a little bit more work and they are not always easy to verify a corporate structure that may have reorganised, been acquired or changed, since these companies are not in the technology space. They may be hospitals, they may be county governments, they may be a variety of things, that have nothing to do with technology. By the way, none of these people are in this room and they don't know it exists, so as the mechanism is they have never even heard of RIPE, 90% of them. So that's the other portion of the verification is the introduction to RIPE NCC.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Thank you, Sandra.
SANDRA BROWN: In the RIPE region, IPv4 market group does three things. First, we consult the RIPE registry to look at the entry. We consult the registration papers and compare the registration to the RIPE registration and in the RIPE region with all the transfers we have done here, we have not yet encountered one situation where the registered owner has not matched the company contacting us. So, in other words, we have not seen any hijacked blocks.
Number two, a further concern is not just the legal ownership of the block but the quality of the block. And we look at block blacklisting to ensure the block quality has not been spammed on or e?mailed on.
Number three, referring to my past answer, step 5 in our transfer process, is the block examination by the buyer, and we support the buyer in its performance of any additional due diligence, and that would be both on the legal side and on the technical side in in what they do.
Lastly, when the RIPE NCC transfers the block from the seller to the buyer, RIPE requires the transfer request to be accompanied by the organisation documents of both of buyer and seller, so RIPE itself does some due diligence to make sure that the ownership is what it says it is, so there is a lot of fact?checking to make sure that there is not hijacking during the sales process.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Thanks again. And I want to now ask again to Andrea if he has any reflections on the ?? because this is often an issue for you guys that you want to make sure that, you know, things are under control in the sense that these instances are minimised as much as possible. What are your reflections on that as the RIPE NCC.
ANDREA CIMA: One thing that I can say is that hijacking of resources had never been an issue in the RIPE region since the start of this year we are starting experiencing them. My colleague, Andrew de la Haye, tomorrow will give a bit more detail in the presentation of the NCC Services but we solved in the last six months about 30 hijacking cases of 30 different resources and we are still investigating about 50 resources being hijacked. So it is something that is starting to take place more in our region. And I want to come back to the accuracy of the registry data, how important it is. Just making a brief example of one case that we have been dealing with very recently in which the resource holder was using the address space within their internal network, not visible, in the routing tables, therefore from the outside world many people thought probably this is not in use. The address space ?? the domain name of the organisation was expired, they let it expire, meaning the e?mail addresses were not corresponding any more to the current ones in the RIPE database and some organisation managed to get hold of those resources. We have been contacted by the legitimate holder of the organisation asking us what was going on, someone was routing the space, and once after checking with both parties involved, talking to all the parties involved, we decided to revert the changes that were made to the RIPE database object and give back the address space to the legitimately holder. But those are the kind of cases that we are facing more and more nowadays.
FILIZ YILMAZ: All right. Thank you. Well now, there is another part that I want to run in regards to moving towards your relationships with the RIRs and how the policies work for you and the procedures that you may want to have a change, what are the impacts of the in?place policies in the RIR regions for you, as well as the procedures, your reflections on that, I want to take.
But I also want to, you know, inject yet another question there while you are responding that, and again not on behalf of your own company or anything, but in general, why would the broker would like to be an RIR member if that would be an option, and is this a thing that you make a judgement on your own when you think about your activities? Peter?
PETER THIMMESCH: First of all, [Adrex] is a member of RIPE, we believe that's important. We also have spent a lot of time reviewing the current policies and we are only going to talk about RIPE, RIPE policies, and I think it will surprise some that while we always question whether things can be made a little tighter or whatever, it's actually probably better to let it sit for a while. There is a little bit too much concern because, well, this room doesn't mind policy changes, the legal side of the purchasers and the network operators, they are kind of getting dizzy and they get nervous and if it could just settle for a little bit and let things work through, it might actually be more positive, because that's a concern that we hear a lot.
So, while, yes, we're not sure if everything is perfect, we believe it's probably best to take a breathe and let it just work through. As Andrea pointed out, the market is starting to pick up, it is not a time to actually make changes in mid?stream. Let it kind of roll. So that's how we look at it. And yes, we think it's important that there is a recognition of participation in the community more than just trying to be a latter group of peer sales, but it's actually support and work through it.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Let's try to minimise the time now because we want to really open the floor.
LOUIS STERCHI: So we're RIPE brokers and members and we're APNIC members and brokers as well and we are just ARIN facilitators. Generally, the registries want to, they generally like that, so that they can, you know, when there is an agreement between the brokers and the registries, that the brokers represent that they would adhere to the policies of the registries which we think is a good thing to align the interests, make sure that people understand that to which they are being held to.
So, that's ?? it's also good to be a part, to be I think as Peter said, a part of the community. But it's very much something that the registries are very ?? have been strongly been keen on. Thank you.
SANDRA BROWN: So, we have been involved in policy development in this region for quite sometime. You'll recall I authored 2012?02 and 2012?03 related to inter?RIR transfers and those proposals met with some apt thee in terms of not being passed yet and we are at the point now with Tore Anderson proposal for no needs justification, which Filiz knows and loves well, that needs justification will be eliminated probably by the end of this year, and that will supersede, I believe, 2012?03 where I had proposed 24 months needs justification so now we will have no needs justification and I think that's a good thing and I'd like to see all of the RIRs adopt that policy.
I think it's an important step to get the LIRs to not have the burden of administration, and I think that's part of Tore's point as well, so that LIRs can just run their businesses really and its business demand.
There is two other policies I think that would help LIRs that aren't on the box yet. The first is to allow legacy IP owners to come into the fold. That's where we're going with 2012?07. So I'm a big supporter of that. That relates to the accuracy of the registry. And the second point I'd like to make, is a policy to allow PI holders to come into the fold as well. We get a lot of calls from PI holders with small spaces and they do want to pay the RIPE dues and they need to do something with that space and again using the word "fallow" again, you have got fallow space, usually small, sitting there that needs to be dealt with. So, those are some of the things I hear about a lot and I think that needs to be dealt with within the RIPE Community.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Andrea. Very shortly, if you want to.
ANDREA CIMA: I'd like to add something. It's about PI holders requesting transfers. We have seen also as RIPE NCC, an increase in PI holders requests the address space to be transferred, which currently is not allowed by RIPE policy, and actually this is one of the pieces of feedback that we as registration services department will bring back during this RIPE Meeting to the address space Working Group.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Well, now, you have been waiting there patiently, Geoff. I want to pick his brains on a few things, and obviously they are going to be about your reflections on the economy mix and the business models, if this kind of business is sustainable, what is the impact of it, you know, the markets over the registry system. Also, your views if you see speculation as an impact in the general field, knowing that or being aware that now there is not much transfer are there any numbers, how much something costs, and different regions running out different times, please.
GEOFF HUSTON: Thanks for that, Filiz, and certainly I'm speaking here as someone who is just a keen and interested individual here, and does not necessarily reflect on the APNIC position.
But, you know, it's pretty clear that there are some very fundamental changes going on and they quite well anticipated. We knew this was going to happen from about the last 20 years. But a bit like climate change, even so, we still managed to surprise ourselves. We started off as an allocater, and the registry was actually a registry of what we did. It was just saying today I gave Fred some addresses, just wrote it down. And we had Address Policies and all these kinds of things that talk about how we pass these resources out and underneath it we heard mantras that we repeated to ourselves: addresses are not property, they are the means to facilitate the Internet, you can't buy and sell these things, you can always come to a registry and receive addresses on the basis of your need, demonstrate the need, you get addresses, the price is not onerous.
But, we ran out. And you want more. Like I said, this was not a surprise. This was one of the most fundamentally anticipated things. And at the time when we were running out we did discuss what happens afterwards. And there was certainly discussions, some of them in this room, some of them in other rooms, about what is our role as registries, these regional Internet registries in this depleted world. Do we run a market? Do we facility a market? Are we the brokers? And it was pointed out pretty quickly, almost straight after that thought had entered our heads that it's a bit of a conflict of role to be the title registry, the thing that everybody is forced to trust, because that's the record of where each of those resources are, and also facilitate the market. You kind of wondering then who is really the independent authority. So, certainly our decision, on almost all the RIRs, as far as I can see, is there are folk who will quite happily help people meet their needs, and that's great. But our job is actually a subtle change, it's not just what we did. Our job is now a registry and when we think about that, there is some very interesting challengeses I think we have got to understand.
Certainly for this job, for v4 addresses, it's not allocation policies any more. It's registry policies. But what do they mean? We have had a long discussion about what it takes to enter a transfer into the registry and some folk think we should have policies that try and create certain market behaviours. You can only be a buyer or a seller if you meet this criteria or that criteria and if you don't meet it, you can't enter that into the registry.
But that kind of things behind that, the thought is that the registry has an enforcement capability. I don't know about you, but my arms are pretty short. And typically, title officers are not the best way to enforce market behaviours. There are other folk, other regulatory bodies that do a damn fine job and perhaps we should consider what we want out of the registry and what other folk should be doing as their roles.
So, as an enforcer of market behaviours, I'm not sure the registry is the most appropriate mechanism. That said, certainly we reflect the interests of the folk who register. And we reflect their interest in trying to make sure that this transferring of resources is open, is efficient, doesn't create victims, and certainly we would like to see practices that encourage brokers, market makers, facilitators, whatever happens, to operate in the interests of an Internet that works, rather than one that fundamentally fractures our address plant. Because if we break addresses, there is no plan B.
So, yes, we register brokers. We have these unilateral things that say please sign up and here is a code that you might want to declare to the folk who are going to use your services, because we think they reflect the interests of folk who are listed in the registry. That very critical piece of coordination and coherence. There is also another practice though that I'd like to highlight in the few remaining seconds here that I think is a very fundamental thing we have to think about as a community.
We are seeing now the concept of leasing. There is a lot of uncertainty about what the price will be for addresses, will it go up, will it go down? Will there be folk who are speculating and so on? Inside that uncertainty some folk think instead of selling my address, I'll lease it for a year. Where is that leasing reflected? What we have heard so far are these folk use our registry as a registry of title. Are you entitled to sell that address? It's the proprietary, dare I say it, the owner. At the same time, we have tools like RPKI. What is RPKI? Well, that actually reflects the registry as a registry of operators, the leasees, not the leasors. These are the folk who are trying to use that address on the Internet and if if you are leasing you are not necessarily the owner.
So we have this sort of conflict that we are busy using the registry for what is now apparent as two subtly different roles. And maybe we should think a bit about how we actually create services for folk who use addresses on the Internet and that subtle distinction between folk who are the effective owners or the leasors of the addresses and how and where they say interests are expressed in registry.
So I suspect in registry, there is a lot of work to do at quite a fundamental level, and it's more than allocation policy. It's actually about what is a registry in this new world? And how do we make it work for the Internet? Because without uniqueness, these addresses are just numbers and lousy numbers at that. What makes it work is uniqueness and what makes uniqueness work is a registry we all agree upon that we all trust. So, to my mind, that's where we go.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Thank you. As I suspected, this could be the last words before we open the mic, I think. Normally, I was going to ask for a round of last words from you guys. Take a break here and let's hear from the audience if ?? are those relevant questions that we are asking? There anything maybe you want to provide answers rather than asking questions as well, which should be welcome too. The mics are open now. You may start queueing. Elvis.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Elvis Daniel. Hello everyone. Elvis. First of all, I'd like to say that although I thought this would not be a marketing presentation, I had the feeling that a the three brokers here were presenting their services, and that for me at least that felt more like a marketing show than a presentation of what a broker should actually do or what a broker does. Anyway, never mind that.
I do have a few points. Before the panel was announced, I did offer myself to join it as well and I was told that this will be more brokers on the panel would actually mean more confusion, more problems, a discussion that might not actually be relevant any more.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Can you take the question. I'm going to address these.
ELVIS DANIEL: I think that the added value of a broker is not just the financial part that some of the brokers here are doing. I think that the other value of the broker is also helping the two parties that are trying to transfer communicate with the RIPE NCC as well and I think that's one of the valued services that the broker could offer.
Additionally, there are other services offered by other brokers as well, I'm not going to start telling what kind of services we're mentioning but there are other what services we're offering but there are other services like maybe labelling addresses, Sandra did mention something about looking at blacklisting but maybe that's not the only thing that should be done.
The inter?RIR transfers, that was mentioned as well, has been blocked for a few years, maybe there should be some kind of ?? for a year at least ?? maybe there should be some discussion or something to move it a bit forward. Plus my opinion is that the most important thing that we should actually discuss in this panel is how to increase liquidity. How to manage so that the transfers will increase if that is what actually is needed.
And transparency as well.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Thank you. Okay. I'll just address that, the question about why you are not here and you opened it up so it gives me the right to answer that.
I felt ?? I thought I explained it but I'll tell everybody again. There are a number of brokers also in the audience. There is no way I can put 15 chairs here, that wouldn't be useful for the sake of the community, and the reason we limited it to these guys, again, these are guys all made proposals for RIPE 66 for Dublin, and you did not. So that is where we had to draw the line, we had to draw a line, and we draw that line there. If you are ?? if you have further concerns about our decision as the PC, yeah, feel free, please contact us and we'll talk about it. Thank you. Now, I think Jan was ?? no, you were the next one.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: From IP broker. I don't want to discuss about the problems of why brokers, competitions things like that. I think the post important question for everybody in this room is something that would clarify with the, show a trend with, would give everybody a prediction about how everything is going to evolve in this market and I would like to ask Andrea first, how is he seeing the balance between buyers and sellers? Which RIPE ?? from the RIPE point of view, which are the most, the requesters or the sellers?
ANDREA CIMA: What we, as RIPE NCC, see, is, when a request for a transfer ??
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I mean, the requests which are on the listing service, for example.
ANDREA CIMA: If we look at the listing service, just to repeat the listing service is a tool that the RIPE NCC has created for members, for members that have a surplus of IP addresses to meet members that have a need for IPv4 addresses. If we look at ?? I had a look at the listing service this morning and if you look at the amount of IPv4 addresses being offered on it, it was I think about 250,000. While if you look at the number of IP addresses requested, we go, it's about a /8, so, you see that there was a large difference, even though I have to say that, out of all the address space requested, there was a /9 and a few /10s, which are very large blocks.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: So they are affecting the results generally you see much more demand than supply?
ANDREA CIMA: On the listing service, apparently it seems that there is more demand than supply.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Currently, it should be like that. Now, I would like to ask the brokers what are they seeing from the other side of the barricade? So, what are you seeing from the actual market?
PETER THIMMESCH: We actually go out and reach out to the early registration holders so we don't have sellers so much coming to us as we go to find them. So we have like millions of numbers in inventory, we have buyers coming to us, but it's no longer a technical argument, it's now a business argument, and a financial argument and so now what happens is the process is elongated. It is, let's just be frank here ?? it's no longer in this room. So, what you're asking is, is yes, are there buyers in the market? Yes, there is. But are they being cautious and taking their time to look? Absolutely. So, I'm not sure. If you look at the listing services, the statistics are there, I think it's 16?and?a?half million numbers requested in, like, 2,000 being offered for sale, but that's not the only listing service.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Yes, but this is, I wanted to point out that this might not be relevant, so the people that are waiting to close a transaction even buyers or sellers are looking only at the listing service and they expect that demand is very high and the price should go up. So...
SANDRA BROWN: Can I answer the question? As my competitor, I choose not to give you an answer. If you are my buyer, I can find IPs for you, if you are a seller I could sell your IPs for you. In terms market pricing, the price has been fairly flat in the RIPE region for the past year. I haven't seen an increase or a decrease really. Does that help?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: So this is ??
FILIZ YILMAZ: Sorry, I'm the moderator. Please, if you have further questions, have the ?? we have to ?? we have other people too, so let Louis also, if you want to ask something, Louis, something, Geoff, you want to say something on this?
GEOFF HUSTON: I'll say something quickly. The whole reason why there is, I suppose, so much speculation about what is happening and why, is that there is so much uncertainty about where we are going. There is a range of narrows and you can assign your own probability to each of them. Scenario A: Somehow we make IPv4 last forever and this whole v6 thing sputters and dies. It's a scenario.
2. We keep ongoing with transition in fits and starts but we basically keep it keep it going. It could last ten years, which would be amazing, but it could.
3. The core of the Internet that has funds does a v6 transition very, very quickly. That's an interesting scenario, because if that happens, the umbra has the problem because this they want to speak to the core it's in 6. So they have to now, because they didn't have money to do 6 have to somehow do NAT translation to say get into 6 and all of a sudden rather than one Internet, there is this kind of forcing function. That's a highly likely scenario.
The fourth scenario, we make v6 work in the next year or two and all the rest of it is irrelevant. Pick your outcome because no one here is in charge. There is no plan. It's just the interplay of a whole bunch of agendas, which is called a market.
FILIZ YILMAZ: What I want to suggest is, let's take the other questions and if there is time we'll come back to you again. Thanks for understanding. Jan.
JAN ZORZ: Speaking for myself without any hats. Sandra mentioned that there are enterprises and people that have the PI space and don't want to pay any more and can't transfer the space. We have a very elegant solution. They return it back to the RIPE NCC. Right. That's what people would do. And my question is: when this brokers' companies started up, I still don't understand if you created the companies to be a broker and this is your primary business or, you are just helping your existing customers to get the IP space, the IP resources as your side business and what is the sustainability of this business? How long you think you can run a company based on this sort of business?
PETER THIMMESCH: All right, I'll trying to answer this quickly. You asked a great question. We were founded in 2009 specifically for this to develop a market. We believe sustainability is at least another decade. There are hundreds of millions of fallow numbers in RIPE NCC maintained, there is about 60 plus million early registration numbers were unused. So if you are looking at the length of the market, you have to convert to that. So, I think you are asking an interesting question but I don't know if it really matters to what we do, but yes, we do look at this as a long term ?? sorry, I know there is a lot of picks people here, but we look at this transition plain as having at least legs for at least a decade.
LOUIS STERCHI: We are in the Internet names business as well and so, this is something that by itself is, you know, would sort of, I understand your you know concern there. I think it's probably ?? it's a service that will be around, in my opinion, for maybe a little bit less than what Peter things, maybe five to seven years. I think there's been some great signs in the last year for IPv6, but I think over this five to seven year period, there are clients that need ?? that will need help navigate what they should do and how they should do it, so that's generally how we think about it.
SANDRA BROWN: We were founded two?and?a?half years ago and our sole purpose is to trade IPv4 addresses, and I expect to be doing this for at least ten years.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Tore?
TORE ANDERSON: With regard to earlier discussion about the supply versus demand and the numbers on the listing sites. There is actually, you know, public data on allocations being made and I have looked into that and if you can say the year before we actually ran out up until September 2013, if you take that as a baseline of the demand in the region and assume that if it has not gone down, it has stayed the same at least, and compare that to the amount of transfers being registered and published on the NCC web page, it seems that the amount of transfers, both when you look at the number of addresses and the number of blocks, or transfers, is somewhere between 3 and 4 percent of the demand. And that's not a lot, I think. So, it would appear that the remaining 96 percent of the operators in the region are getting their v4 fix somewhere else. Is it Cisco and Juniper and the CGM providers are doing it, or are they doing what they can to find unused space in their allocations, what are your perspectives on this? And do you think this is likely to change or is this an indication of the market basically not being well touted to be before?
GEOFF HUSTON: I'll take a quick technical answer. CGNs truly are prodigious. But it's a bit more than that and it's not just a glib statement. When we started doing data over mobiles, the original GSM model, the original model was actually that those handsets and those operators were working in the private address space and they were gatewaying back into the larger Internet. So they never actually started from a non?NATed model. And as we see now, the huge amount of expansion and revenue in our Internet is actually in our pockets. That everyone now sees this wireless Internet and the battle for spectrum as the issue and it's a very big expanding area but it's expanding on CGNs and they are getting, as you well know, very sophisticated, they are getting up into five topple models that can make an amazing amount of use out of single addresses. So that business and that sector never really had it any other way and a lot of that growth and if you take out handset replacement and look at raw subscriber growth S growth being fuelled by the CGN market? Yes. So yes, that's had a very big impact on our industry, no matter what.
The 4G systems are coming out in two flavours. Some operators, and I will mention Horizon, for example, have gone straight down the v6 models, fantastic. Other operators, and I will mention one in my home country, Australia, the 4G network is v4 only running on NAT 10. Some operators seem to have got it right, others seem to be still struggling with the concepts.
LOUIS STERCHI: On ?? it is very interesting that 4 percent, 96 percent, Tore. In addition to what Geoff said, I think some of the psychology that goes behind that is that the folks who are, you know, on the listing service for demand who know that they have an issue, a lot of times their voice isn't being heard maybe sort of where the decisions are being made. This is a line item in the expenses of the company's P&L that previously wasn't really accounted for, whereas companies have been paying for servers and whatnot for the last 25 years. When people go to their managers and say "I want to buy a couple of hundred thousand euros worth of IPv4, it sort of is a new foreign concept to some of the more, I guess, business ?? the cheap financial offices etc.. and so, in a world where people are really worried about, I think technology spend in the enterprise isn't necessarily growing. It's moving more and more towards a subscription base which is putting pressure on top lines for technology companies. They are really concerned about cost and so every incremental spend is really, you know, really looked at closely. And so I think, you know, they are not going to go down the path of spending something that they think might not be entirely necessary, especially after sort of the spectrum debacle that occurred here about 12 or 13 years ago.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Thank you. Sandra, please keep it very short and, before that, the mics are closed now. After Sandra, I'll take [Eric] and then ??
SANDRA BROWN: There is three things that we have seen. First is some CGN. Secondly, we have seen a lot of out?of?region acquisition of IPs. And thirdly, we know there's been a lot of IP stockpiling prior to the runout, and what we're seeing now, a year after the runout in the RIPE region, two years after the runout in APNIC, we're seeing acceleration of request.
PETER THIMMESCH: I'll be quickly. Everyone should know.
TORE ANDERSON: Re a please correct me if I'm wrong, he mentioned it earlier, what you see in the statistics are only transfers that are covered by RIPE policy explicitly. So the transfers you see in the statistics do not account for early registrations that may be transferred outside of policy.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Okay. This is going to ?? I know, the eyes are going strong there so before we go any further and we don't have time on this, Eric.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Eric: Similar to what Peter is saying, LIR merges are not ?? LIRs mergers are not listed there and the early registration is not listed on the transfer overview on the website. But I have a question for Andrea. Based on the recent activities with the hijacking, are there any changes in current policies that people can expect with LIR mergers or different things in dealing with the NCC that we can see, like more auditing or those kind of things. Can you explain a bit about more changes in operational procedures and what the NCC is doing currently.
ANDREA CIMA: Yes. As I'm just to give some numbers about the mergers and acquisitions that you have just mentioned, it's about 30 per quarter, so just that could be useful information.
With regards to the hijacking, I do, at the moment, not see, because of these changes in policy but changes in the way the RIPE NCC operates from a procedural perspective. We are working, as I said, tomorrow, Andrew will give us a bit more details about it, we are working on strengthening our processes. After seeing how those organisations actually operate. But it is very important that we keep a balance between asking for more documentation, more proof of holdership and additional documentation and ensuring that we do not, let's say, become a nuisance for the legitimate organisations contacting us. So we have to be sure that we find a good balance there.
The other point that I wanted to make here is the quality of the data, of the registration data is key. In the cases that we have seen where resources have been hijacked, quite often the registration data was not current. It was not updated for a long time. And for this reason, we have also reviewed our former auditing process to be able to make it more lightweight but to be able to contact more organisations, so a larger number of LIRs to help them keeping their resources, their resource registration data accurate. So that is one of the most important things that we are looking at.
FILIZ YILMAZ: Okay. Thank you. Guys, thanks a lot. We are stretching our time here and actually we have moved into the time allotted for the lightning talks, so I want to thank you here and I want to close the panel. I'm sure there are some thoughts sparked here or there will be follow?ups, and thank you for joining the panel and thanks you guys for keeping an attention. I felt like there was people ?? there were people listening. Good. Okay.
(Applause)
JAN ZORZ: So, we continue with the lightning talks. I think we run a bit over time, so we will be shortening them. We are five minutes over time, and the first one is Geoff Huston, he will talk about the Facebook and great firewall of China and I suggest we go six minutes and three minutes of discussion, is this okay?
GEOFF HUSTON: Yeah. Six minutes... you know who I am.
How do you get to Facebook? Well, it's pretty easy. The first thing you do is use the DNS. There is an example of me using the DNS. You dig for facebook.com and you get back an answer. All of your machines do it because that's the way you get to Facebook.
However, if you are in China, that's not quite the way you get to Facebook. Because in China things are amazingly different. There is a few ones that that even now I just cannot understand. "Beware of the missing foot". I haven't seen it yet, but if you see the missing foot, please let me know and I'm not sure what to do with the fruit, but I'm sure that's wrong.
However, when you do this digging in the DNS, deep, deep, deep inside China, you get back a weird answer. Because everywhere else in the world it's 69.171.29.25. In China, it's 1.1.1.1. I don't know how. But, you know, let's just take this at face value and let's find who is and do WHOIS requests on both of this. Outside I do WHOIS on that 69 address and inside China I do WHOIS. Outside it's Facebook. This is cool. Inside China that 1.1.1., that's me. My address. It's my address. I'm not Facebook, by the way. Nothing to do with it.
So let's just forget about that other address and let's focus on that 1.1.1.1., because this is getting personal now. Is this just some local thing in their blackholing my addresses. Or is this something else? Let's just take this thing now and just focus on 1.1.1.1 and use the power of traceroute. So, I trace?route it from inside China and outside China, and you know, it's kind of weird. They both go up to 65.210.126.78. So either the Chinese are incredibly clever, or this is just Government work. Sort of good enough but kind of rough around the edges. But that's weird. This is 1.1.1.1 this is every Wi?Fi point on the planet. What is going on now? Well, you know, I do a WHOIS, and, amazingly, it's Google. Your conspiracy theorist might go, what the hell is Google doing about this and why is Google routing 1.1.1.1? And that's a fine question, because I did it. That's the letter of authority, 2nd May, 2013, and yes, we're doing research together. We're looking at dark traffic. Traffic being sent to 1.1.1.1. And we're collecting every packet, every packet.
And that's a lot of packets, that's a huge amount of packets. And you know what that green bit is? That's incoming TCP connections to 1.1.1.1 port 80. So this is getting really, really weird, because at this point, I'm kind of wondering, you know, who exactly is watching who about this whole Facebook in China? Because as far as I can see, you know, all these folk who are trying to get there come off to Google and we all have a good time watching it and you go that's right weird enough but sometimes the Chinese actually go a bit further and when I ask m.routeservers.net, which I think is the one owned by the RIPE NCC, they give me something even better that when the instruction was just map it to ones, someone misunderstood, and for this, people, Facebook really is everywhere.
Thank you.
JAN ZORZ: Thank you, Geoff. We have time for questions. We have five minutes left. You were pretty fast. Daniel.
DANIEL KARRENBERG: Just a comment the one run by the RIPE NCC is K?root. The thing to remember is Karrenberg. The one with M is [Morai].
GEOFF HUSTON: Cool, he is all ones.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Geoff ?? Jen, Google ?? I am surprised you covered only v4 part of this story.
JAN ZORZ: Okay, next speaker is Brian, and he will talk about imprecise monitoring network tools.
BRIAN NISBET: Hello. I will make sure, because I am a good PC member, I will check my time. Imprecise network monitoring tools. Some of you may have heard this talk before, this is a talk as much to kind of raise awareness of something that I have been looking at as also trying to get some feedback on whether other people are doing this, and how they may be doing it. And what we can learn from each other.
So, caveats: imprecise. This is a very important word. Secondly, information source at best. Possibly tertiary. People on the Internet are very, very often wrong. This should be remembered. And do not go home and turn off your [Nagio Sychinga] cacti, etc., etc.. Neither me nor my employer will be held responsible indicator your inability to monitor your network after that point.
This is an imprecise tool. And, of course, because XKCD got there before me and everybody, this cartoon sums up my entire talk. I could sit down at this point but I'm going to keep on talking for just a few more minutes. This is also an imprecise tool. It's even more precise and less useful than the first imprecise tool but it has its reasons to do it.
When I ?? I am sure some of you is supposed to come on with some very boring animation. Anyway, the big question is, I come from NREN world, and most of you people are fumbling in the greasy till as commercial operators, so we have very little money, especially if you are in Ireland, although, of course, thank you all for your dollars, euros, pounds in May, that helped the economy massively and our budget at the moment is nowhere near as bad because of RIPE 66. Anyway, commercial operators have dedicated social media customer service teams, NRENs don't, we are lucky if we have a customer service team in anyway, shape or form but the big thing I'm talking about is is there any expectation to look at Twitter to see what's coming through on Twitter, to see about people talking about your service being all of or about a link going down or an area having a problem and then inform engineering. That's the big link. Does ?? we know customer service from nine to five will quite often look at Twitter and possibly Facebook, but will your engineering teams hear about any of this?
Some of the used cases that we have, some of the things we have been doing this for is, is dollar VLE down for everyone or just me? There are many virtual learning environments in the world. We had problems with a couple of them during the year, and what we were trying to tell was, was it our networks routing to that location? Or was this a problem at that location? I have no customer relationship with this VLE. My clients do. I have no customer relationship with some of the people who route between here and there. So, trying to find out this information, I know that Irish students are complaining about it, but our UK students also complaining about; it may be that points to being a routing problem, in not Amsterdam at all, because I wouldn't be talking about anyone specific. Has the campus lost power. If someone is tweeting about the lights being out, then it's a power problem. If someone is complaining about Internet access, they go into Facebook, or Geoff we are now going to call it, so you can tell there if it's power connectivity. Has the local computer services department not told you something that they have told everybody else? Most of the computer services department in Ireland now have Twitter accounts, so I follow them all and I can see if they are talking about something they just haven't bothered ?? sorry, that would be terrible to say, my clients would not have bothered to do something ?? that they may not have remembered to inform my knock. So again, useful source of information. Again, all human information ?? no, that's not true ?? all Internet connected human information flows through Twitter at this point in time. There is lots of great stuff that doesn't, but basically, all the stuff that I'm interested in, does.
Commercial operators. Something that you may find useful. Routing issues so somewhere that didn't Google or Amazon or a big obvious provider. Some edge case situation that ?? an AS, you may not send huge amounts of traffic to. Increased latency, which may be difficult to spot on occasion but consumers will spot it very, very quickly. Of course, this all assumes that you have a big enough client base who will suddenly start tweeting about it.
Unintended consequences of a change, because we know we are perfect engineers and we never make mistakes, but now and again, if you have done something and you don't realise all your systems are fine but your customers are having problems and they may well tweet about that as well.
Configuration hints because this is software, this is a tool. Define relevant efficient accounts. Follow them. This is primarily reactive searching. There is proactive stuff you can do but it really comes into its own when you start talking about reactive stuff. My wife works for a large cloud services provider, and she ?? we're in the first year of our marriage, we still listen to each other. So, she is listening to me talk about this and when they had a problem with authentication via another large cloud services provider, she went, I'll just look online, look on Twitter, see what people are reporting, reported back to their development team about the problems that customers were reporting in via Twitter and fed that back to the engineers. And they'll just search locally. Internet is a very, very big place.
Alarm filtering. Huge amount of noise. Students obviously my core user base complain an awful lot when they are suddenly stopped from studying because they sought down to search Wikipedia half an hour before they needed to get that paper in. So, when they suddenly can't access it, they will start talking a lot. And search terms are very difficult, especially on Twitter because you can't force people to use a hash tag, DCU, Dublin city university is also a football team in Washington DC in the states, it's also the DC universe, so even when something isn't going wrong in DCU there is a fair usage of that hash tag. If DCU loses compatibility as well as the same time someone is killing batman, I'm not sure what's going to happen that point.
So that was, it it really is to say hey, this is interesting stuff, the information is all out there. There are tools which I'm beginning to look at now which can do, which obviously can look at, you can put the searches in, getting that feed, I know that I was talking to Dave Friedman, he was saying I say engineering staff do get alerts from CS staff who get alerts from Twitter about potential outages on his network. The tools are out there. I would love to hear if you are using them, share experiences. But don't ignore this stuff, this is a huge treasure trove of information. I think your engineering teams will, after you put in some filtering thank you. That's me, I am happy to take questions now if we have a minute or two.
JAN ZORZ: We have two minutes for questions ??
BRIAN NISBET: Or you can just tweet or e?mail or bar or whatever...
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Niall O'Reilly, as the only representative of one of your customers in the room, I missed something you said.
BRIAN NISBET: That never happened. You were never here, someone get the flashy things.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: About your tools, what are you using?
BRIAN NISBET: At the moment, I'm not; I am using TweetDeck, I am putting in searches on a reactive basis because I haven't had the time to really sit down and put time into this. I'm aware of a number of tools which I need to investigate when I have five minutes.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: We implemented scanning in our ops team this year and results are good, but, being honest, winter search sucks, there is supposed to be alternative, so let's ??
BRIAN NISBET: What tool are you using?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Twitter search, built in search and right now we're using Yandex Blog Search for that purpose and it's much better coverage.
MARCO HOGEWONING: It works great and we are using Twitter to monitor or IPv6 only experiment, just one tiny little warning. Twitter does not do IPv6.
(Applause)
JAN ZORZ: So, our next speaker is Wout de Natris and he will talk about ACDC, an introduction to the advanced cyber defence centre.
WOUT DE NATRIS: My name is Wout de Natris, I am a private consultant but also hired to do outreach on ACDC. Unfortunately, I'm not going to present on a 14 stone woman from Australia, nor sing highway to hell for you, but what is the ACDC about?
It's a botnet finding EU project. It's funded basically 50% EU, the European Commission and 50% by the consortium members that are at this moment inside of this programme, building it as we speak.
What I would like to let you know is that there are two levels to ACDC which may be of interest to you and we'll try to make sure that you know what it's about before I'm finished.
The first one is going to be eight national support centres in eight European countries. They are pilots. They are built like the bot?free, the bot?fi initiative in Germany, the way it works is that when there is an affected IP addresses noted the ISP gets notified, the ISP notifies its end user and they go to a website instead of calling the ISP support centre, so they go to a website where they can download free tools to disinfect the device.
It was done to save a lot of cost inside of the ISP. It works very well because the support centre is actually there, then funded by the Government, is hardly cold at all, is less than 1.5 percent of all the notifications, so that's taking some worries away.
There is going to be copied in seven countries. I won't mention them at this moment. But the second point is that that's probably a little bit more interesting also is that there is going to be a central data clearing house. The idea is to bring as much data available into one spot in the world in Germany and try to get analysed data on that which would actually not only disinfect the computers and the devices but also perhaps look what is behind it and perhaps drive the threat back, because command and control service are identified cases could be given to law enforcements, IP addresses that are noticed to the ISPs, etc., etc..
So, in other words, it's not just disinfecting and disinfecting again, but also trying to go to the heart of the matter. And what would like to know is that we're not here to sell ACDC. There is not a product to sell. It's a project you can participate in and what we need to find out is why it's of interest to you? What's in there for you? And that is what I would like to discuss with you later today as I will explain in a moment. But what could it do for you perhaps? It could be good for yourself, for your company, for your institution but also the security of your company. It could be for the security of your customer. About a safer Internet. If we just look beyond ourselves, maybe the Internet will get a bit safer also when we learn how to fight bots better. And perhaps even in the bit longer term it will be of better economic value because the problem isn't going down.
So basically what I'm doing here is extending the invitation to basically anybody who is willing to prepare to participate in a EU?wide sharing of data to fight botnets together. It then says EU here but it doesn't mean that when you are outside of the EU you can't participate or copy what we're doing. In fact, the first letter of intent was sent to us yesterday from the first non?EU interested party that wants to participate. It's from Switzerland, so, in other words, there is a possibility also for non?EU entities to participate with us.
What is it that you could do today? If you think well this is an interesting thing to participate in, we're building it now as I said, and if you focus to the end of the project, let's say it's at the table there, you tell me in August 2015 but this is a product that doesn't do anything for me, then if you would have told me today what it actually does need to be for you, it could be built into the project, so when it's finished and the money is gone and spent in August 2015, it's a product that would actually work for you. So it's not something that is defined into stone at this moment, or set into concrete, it's something that is adaptable to the wishes of a different sort of entities that want to participate.
How do you participate? Basically you can indicate your interest by signing a letter of intent. This letter says nothing more than you are interested in receiving information from ACDC on the project. You stay tuned to ACDC to get information, but also you are invited to bring your own data into it and from there, try to change the project as you think that's good for you.
Going to set up a bilateral outreach so it means you will be contacted, you will actually be involved in the project. And we are going to run five experiments in the coming two years which you can actually parts parity in. More of this will be explained on Thursday in the antiabuse Working Group where we will go into in depth in the technical stuff of it, if you are interested in that please come to see that also.
So, bilateral outreach meeting, what would it mean? We would like you to bring us to your environment, not just that we can't perhaps think of everything, we'd like to be invited to come and present. So make sure that we know who you are, we know what your community wants and to work together in understanding your needs and your contributions to this anti?botnet programme.
In half an hour time there is a birds of a feat err meeting here next door where I would hike to invite to you discuss this, to see what the value of ACDC could be to the RIPE community, to discuss the challenges, to listen to what your solution to say these challenges may be so that this project may actually be something which is of interest to you guys and I can't say that enough, so please join me in the BoF, let me hear what you think is important when you fight botnet and from there see if it's of interest.
There are two angles to this story. One is of course as an individual organisation, this project could be of interest to you. And of course, if that case, please give me your business card and I'll make sure you are on the list of outreach as soon as two or three months time from now there is something to reach out on product wise. The other one is how can the RIPE NCC and the RIPE community actually help us to get this project better known? Because only in numbers we will be able to be successful, because if we build something like I said over there, and it's something that nobody is participating in, it would be just a waste of money and time and nobody will actually use this product. So in order to use it, we'd like to have you on board as soon as possible.
I think that that concludes my presentation. So thank you very much for your attention and I hope to see you in half an hour in the room next door, and on Thursday in the Anti?Abuse Working Group where you get an in?depth technical presentation of the ACDC. Thank you.
JAN ZORZ: :
BRIAN NISBET: Just looking at the programme and the printed programme in the Plenary, I think that the BoF is supposed to be in here, because the workshop, the RIPE stats workshop is next door, so the BoF, the ACDC BoF is in here.
JAN ZORZ: I actually have a question. Do you have a website?
WOUT DE NATRIS: Yes.
JAN ZORZ: Because you did not put any address and if you search for ACDC or go to ACDC dotcom, you find something completely different.
WOUT DE NATRIS: Yes, it's here, my screen turned dark and now it's back, I thought where did it go? It's here. The website is not on there but it's www.botfree.eu. So the screen went dark so I thought that was it...
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Lee Howard. I have a query. My query is, did AAAA dub?dub?dub.botfree.eu plus short?
WOUT DE NATRIS: Okay... can you explain?
JAN ZORZ: You don't have IPv6?enabled website?
WOUT DE NATRIS: I haven't got a clue. Ask Tore on Thursday.
JAN ZORZ: Any more questions? So ??
FILIZ YILMAZ: It's just a house?keeping issue. About the social tonight, we are asked to tell you that the social, there will be buses for it and they will be picking you up from 19:45 to 20:15; in other words, a quarter to eight and a quarter past eight, be up in front to get on a bus. Okay. If you want to attend the social.
JAN ZORZ: So, for today we are done. Thank you for participating, and have a great social. Thank you.
