[mat-wg] Proposing more public RIPE Atlas data and clarifying the current situation

On Thu, Jan 09, 2014 at 04:22:48PM +0100,
 Vesna Manojlovic <BECHA at ripe.net> wrote 
 a message of 71 lines which said:

> There has been some lively discussion about our proposal to make the
> probe and measurement data public for new and existing users
> starting at a future date.

I personally support the proposal (to make measurements public by
default). I believe that the Atlas network is built for the public
good and probe hosters would probably feel better if all the
measurements performed were public. If some people want to do private
measurements, they should use private systems.

I understand the issue raised by Gilles Massen and Peter Koch (knowing
that Acme corporation pings something.acme.com means there is a
problem which may be an useful info for Acme's competitors) but I
don't believe that intelligence agencies and private eyes will
actually poll the Atlas database to see if there are interesting
measurements going on, they have certainly better things to do.

I have nothing against variants such as "only Atlas sponsors may
request private measurements" [disclaimer: my employer is a sponsor]
or "private measurements will become automatically public after N
days" but, since one goal of the new proposal is to simplify the code,
I wonder if they are worth the extra complexity.

PS: is there a way to query the list of measurements with criteria
such as "find me all the measurements involving something.acme.com and
made in december 2013?" I don't think so. Such a search engine would
be very useful for long-term analysis. On the other hand, it would
increase the fears of spying.