Hello, On 2024-02-05 16:11, Ben Cartwright-Cox via ripe-atlas wrote:
Hi everybody,
While doing some measurement work earlier this weekend I discovered that there are a large amount of probes on AS47583 that look like they are being set up to farm credits. With a suspiciously high amount of purely software probes on the same IP prefix and sequential IPv6 addresses.
... Thank you for the report. We are looking at ways to limit this in a way that doesn't hurt benevolent users (e.g. ones coming from behind the same CGN) and that is not a whack-a-mole exercise.
Now while I myself don't particularly care about credit farming on RIPE Atlas (After all RIPE Atlas credit is kind of like Monopoly money), I do care about things becoming biased towards these software probes.
For example, when I had selected for a selection of probes in Brazil I ended up with several of these software probes giving me the exact same results. this is not very useful and this has the potential to bias academic measurements, had I not looked at the probe list results this would not have been immediately obvious.
One crude short-term solution to this is to exclude software probes (system-sw). A longer term -- nicer -- one is the "probe similarity" idea, where you can (will be able to) ask for dissimilar probes. Unfortunately that's not something we have yet...
Is there an immediate way to report these probes other than this mailing list? I don't know of one and so I'm here :)
You can always send mail to atlas@ripe.net - which is the general support address for RIPE Atlas. Regards, Robert
Cheers Ben