[atlas] Possible software probe "farming" on AS47583

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 at ripe.net - which is the general 
support address for RIPE Atlas.

Regards,
Robert

> Cheers
> Ben
>