[atlas] Private Probes: What's the Point

Dear list,

Talking about how public and non-public probe participates in built-in and user-defined measurement, a possible scenario has come to my mind (maybe it’s not really relevant to what you are discussing right now). Here goes the case:

I host a probe and it is required to participate in a UDM involving sensitive destinations, say DNS measurement to ISIS’s site (could be interesting and useful in certain senses), which however might violet my local security policies. As a consequence, the big brother might knock at my door and  invite me for a coffee…or something more serious.

My question is, if that happens, am I really responsible for that and whether it is possible to avoid participating in certain risky measurements.

Possibly I wrong too much.

Best regards,
wenqin
 
> On 22 Oct 2015, at 16:35, Daniel Quinn <dquinn at ripe.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi James,
> 
> I just wanted to clarify a few points about how the probes work in response to your comment.
> 
> All RIPE Atlas probes, even those not marked “public”, are available to be used in both built-in and user-defined measurements *as sources*.
> 
> Many probes are not hosted on the open Internet, so they make for lousy targets. In most cases, they're hosted on internal networks, so they're often not “targetable” at all. More importantly, hosting a probe does not make your network (which already exists on the open Internet) any more or less likely to be the target of a measurement.
> 
> And in terms of outgoing traffic, the probe generates next to nothing (typically a few Kb/s, even when it’s being used for user-defined measurements).
> 
> You can learn more about this from the FAQs:
> https://atlas.ripe.net/about/faq/
> 
> Please let us know if you have any other questions.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Daniel Quinn
>