Someone asked a few weeks ago:

... the Trustees would presumably be completely free to give an update on the planned relationship with CAIDA (UCSD Network Telescope), and long-term sustainable plans for AmprGW?

The relationship between ARDC and UCSD's CAIDA research group remains as it was before Brian Kantor's death. There is a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between UCSD and ARDC that defines this relationship. The MoU was negotiated between Brian (for ARDC), and the UCSD management (for CAIDA). In particular, Brian wanted and succeeded to get this arrangement nailed down before he retired from being on staff at UCSD. The Network Telescope and the amateurs-to-Internet relay operate from the same network infrastructure in a lab at UCSD. Both parties gain from the arrangement. UCSD observes traffic sent to a large section of unused address space, and has created an analysis environment to facilitate its sharing of this data with vetted researchers. ARDC gets a well maintained, high speed interconnect between its users and the Internet.

Typical amateur tunneled traffic through AmprGW is well under a gigabit per second, averaging about 30-60 megabits/sec, with bursts 60-90Mbps. (This traffic occupies twice that bandwidth, since every packet that comes in, then goes back out through one of hundreds of tunnels; and vice verse.) Typical non-amateur, Telescope traffic, bursts to 800Mbps and averages between 500 and 600 megabits/sec.

There are currently no plans to change this arrangement. However, the main source of funding for the Telescope project expired this year, and it is not yet clear whether or how the data-sharing (i.e., the expensive) aspect of the project will continue.

On the plus side, the existing hardware and software that supports ARDC is all paid for, installed, and running; it would involve work to tear it down. From the ARDC side, Chris Smith, G1FEF, has full access to AmprGW from the UK, and continues to maintain it as Brian did, with intermittent "hands-on" help from a local CAIDA sysadmin. As BDale recently reminded us, Chris also maintains other ARDC infrastructure such as the Portal and the website, which run in virtual machines hosted in various data centers.

If UCSD and CAIDA ever decided to cancel the MoU, shut down the Telescope, and/or stop collaborating with ARDC, ARDC could move AmprGW to a virtual machine in a well connected data center anywhere in the world. Now that ARDC has more than nominal amounts of money, it can afford to pay for bandwidth and servers. AmprGW remains at UCSD today, partly because continuing that arrangement was simplest while scrambling to pick up the pieces after Brian died; and partly to honor the MoU, and Brian's history there, and to continue enabling Internet research worldwide, since CAIDA provides access to telescope data to vetted academic researchers.

There are 4 pages of explanation, signatures, etc in the MoU, which is a public record of the Regents of the University of California, accessible under the California Public Records Act. Here are the relevent bits:

This agreement is not intended to be legally binding, and instead is an aspirational document between the parties outlining responsibilities, and expectations of the parties.

UCSD SHALL:

o Operate network hardware and software to provide colocation services for the AMPRNet(TM) TCP/IP networks for Amateur Radio on UCSD infrastructure.

o Agree to safeguard the UCSD equipment and network resources using best practices for network management.

o Agree to use and comply with best practices for safeguarding data to mitigate privacy and security concems and to comply with legal requirements when using the data collected on AMPRnet's network for research critical to the Center for Applied Internet Analysis (CAIDA) research group located at the San Diego Super Computer Center.

COLLABORATOR SHALL:

o Agree to allow UCSD to collect, filter and curate data destined for the AMPRNet(TM) network for the purposes of network research and responsible data sharing with the network and security research communities.

COMMENCEMENT/EXPIRATION DATE. This agreement is executed as of the date of last signature and is effective through [July 31, 2023] at which time it will expire unless extended.

The U.S. federal research funding that supports the Telescope is:

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1730661

The proposal that NSF funded is this one:

https://www.caida.org/funding/stardust/

CAIDA's most recent slide deck about the Telescope is:

https://www.caida.org/publications/presentations/2019/stardust_dust/stardust...

The Principal Investigator of the Network Telescope is Alberto Dainotti alberto@caida.org. He intends to release a new web site and documentation for this project by the end of 2020. This will include a list of research enabled by the telescope (papers, data, analysis tools).

In the meantime, there is a preliminary Grafana dashboard that shows that the Network Telescope is seeing (in real time, or from the past).

https://explore.stardust.caida.org/d/ClIeIwOMk/stardust-public-protocols

(It's work in progress! BTW, it uses Keycloak for authentication, so people can now use github or globus credentials to log in).

Access to the Telescope data is controlled to preserve the privacy of the users all over the Internet whose (typically malware-contaminated) sites originated the packets. Researchers who use the data must sign a contract agreeing to maintain that privacy. Note that none of the data in this Network Telescope is the traffic of authorized amateur users. All that traffic is filtered out before it is recorded for researchers by the Telescope.

We are happy to take questions or feedback on this list or at the community meeting next week.

John Gilmore, W0GNU Board member and Secretary, ARDC