Daily Meeting Report

Tuesday, 12 May

The first day of RIPE 80, our first ever virtual RIPE Meeting, kicked off with 1,745 attendees and over a thousand more registered by day’s end. Here are the highlights:

  • The meeting was opened by Hans Petter Holen, in his capacity as interim RIPE Chair, who welcomed attendees, thanking them for taking the time to come and try out a new kind of RIPE Meeting.
  • Presentations throughout the plenary sessions were well attended with over 1,000 participating on Zoom and more joining in via the RIPE 80 livestream.
  • In the final session, Hans Petter took to the virtual podium again to introduce himself as the new RIPE NCC Managing Director. After a short presentation of the RIPE NCC’s strategies, Hans Petter took questions and received numerous congratulations on his new position.

Wednesday, 13 May

The second day of the RIPE 80 started with 1,956 attendees registered and 1,294 unique viewers (764 via Zoom / 530 via the webstream). Wednesday was the first day of RIPE Working Group sessions – here are some highlights:

Address Policy WG

  • Nikolas Pediaditis gave an update on IPv4 since the RIPE NCC reached the end of its pool in November 2019. They are now making an average of five /24 allocations per day via a new waiting list. With 1,340 /24s available, there is currently no waiting period before LIRs can receive an allocation.
  • Nikolas also noted that LACNIC will be soon be entering the world of inter-RIR transfers (for IPv4 resources only).

Connect WG

  • Remco van Mook (as WG Chair) opened the session with some slides that brought us back to the old days of overhead projectors.
  • Will van Gulik shared an interesting court case involving the decision power on peering tarrifs being given to a regulator.
  • Benjamin Schilz and Raphael Maunier showed how to plan, ship and debug a POP remotely in the midst of COVID-19.
  • Remco van Mook asked an open question: how could people the industry make sure that the correct information and traffic statistics find their way to the public while COVID-19 was going on, and how to ensure journalists interpret this information correctly.

Cooperation WG

  • Europol’s Nicole van der Meulen presented a report on the agency’s efforts to fight e-crime. COVID-19 has increased and changed the nature of many attacks such as ransomware, DDoS, phishing, malicious domain name and child sexual exploitation.
  • RIPE NCC’s Marco Hogewoning cautioned about a proposal originally submitted to the ITU in September 2019 by Huawei called “New IP”. He warned that this is not so much a new technology, as much as an attempt to change the governance model of the Internet. He urged the audience to inform governments and policy makers close to them about these developments and to remind them of the importance of developing Internet standards in open discussions at the IETF.

RIPE NCC Services WG

  • The RIPE NCC Executive Board Chairman share the search process they had used to find a new Managing Director for the RIPE NCC.
  • Hans Petter Holen gave the RIPE NCC Update for the first time in his new role
  • The RIPE NCC Operational Update – key topics were sanctions, RPKI, and recognised IPv4 brokers

The day ended with the General Meeting for RIPE NCC members.

Stay tuned to what’s happening at RIPE 80 by following @RIPEMeeting on Twitter and using the #RIPE80 hashtag.

Thursday, 14 May

RIPE 80 ended with a whopping 2,002 attendees registered and 1,148 unique viewers (691 via Zoom / 457 via the webstream). Thursday was the second day for Working Group sessions and was followed by the RIPE Community Plenary, Closing Plenary and the Secret Working Group (but we can’t tell you anything about that).

Finally, we got together one last time (virtually) during a tasty RIPE dinner complete with live cooking, pub quiz and a RIPE meeting playlist to dance the evening away.

Anti-Abuse WG

Routing WG

  • Johannes Moos, DE-CIX, pitched an idea during a pre-recorded presentation about how to improve prefix filters using a “Never Via Route Filter” setting on PeeringDB.
  • Bex Cox also delivered a pre-recorded presentation about his research into measuring the extent of RPKI validation, discovering that the number of ASNs validating ROAs has jumped from 616 in August 2019 to 2,598 in May 2020.

IPv6 WG

  • Wilhelm Boeddinghaus gave a presentation titled “Why is it so Hard to Implement IPv6?” and use the fall of the Berlin wall as an analogy to push forward IPv6 after IPv4 run-out.

IoT WG

Open Source WG

  • The Open Source had a short meeting with only one presentation from Luca Deri presenting on the nDPI protocol.

Database WG

  •  Michael Kafka presented on PII Privacy Leak after discovering his private information (name, postal address) in the “descr” attributes of the inetnum object in the RIPE Database.

RIPEstat

  • The RIPEstat team hosted a parallel event during lunch break where they showed participants the platform’s new UI and asked for their feedback.

RIPE Community Plenary

Closing Plenary

  • Brian Nisbet, PC Vice Chair, announced that Peter Hessler and Wolfgang Tremmel were elected for another four-meeting term.
  • Menno shared the RIPE 80 Technical Report and discussed the RIPE NCC Technical Team’s main challenges to host the first virtual RIPE Meeting.
  • Hans Petter Holen closed the meetings with some stats and facts and was suddenly interrupted by the Chair of the Secret Meeting Group (but what happened there will remain a secret).

RIPE Dinner

  • Our colleague, Alastair Strachan, gave a brilliant cooking demonstration while continuously changing hats.
  • Quizmasters, Fergal Cunningham and Stephen Strowes hosted the RIPE Trivia Working Group where 100 participants raced to win the grand prize, a ticket to the next (physical) RIPE Meeting and RIPE dinner. Hats off to Cynthia Revström who finished first!

Thank you for participating to RIPE 80!

How was your first virtual RIPE Meeting? Share your feedback with us!