Measure all the Things! IMC Hackathon 2023

Arturo Filastò 2023-11-24

On 23rd October 2023, right before the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2023, we co-hosted an internet measurement hackathon in collaboration with the Internet Society (ISOC), M-Lab, Censored Planet and IODA.

In this post we would like to share some of the projects that were developed as part of the hackathon. It was great to see how much was accomplished in such a short period of time!

The day started with an introduction to the various datasets from OONI’s Arturo, Censored Planet’s Armin, IODA’s Zach, ISOC’s Amreesh and M-Lab’s Lai Yi. Following the brief presentations, the participants formed teams to work on some of the specific challenges that we had proposed or came up with new ones.

Participants were grouped into 3 teams each looking into a different topic.

In total, 4 projects came out of the hackathon:

We share more details below.

Using OONI data to investigate IPv6 connectivity

This team used OONI data to investigate differences and evolution in IPv6 connectivity worldwide. Specifically, they looked at IPv6 reachability data derived from OONI Web Connectivity measurements from the year 2021 and compared them to those from 2023.

By comparing data from these two time intervals, they first noticed that there was an increase in OONI measurements from 2021 compared to 2023.

They then went on to analyze how many AS networks seemed to support IPv6 broken down by country, as can be seen in the following two charts:

Number of ASes failing IPv6 measurements in 2021 and 2023

They noticed a decline in the number of Autonomous Systems (ASes) failing IPv6 tests between 2021 and 2023. This trend indicates improvements in IPv6 reliability and a reduction in connectivity issues.

Note: The hackathon participants were not aware of this, but the sample of data they used from 2021 was only partial (our bad for not communicating this adequately), so while the methodology is quite sound, the specific findings should be treated with a grain of salt.

Data triangulation to infer censorship or shutdown events

This team extracted signals for internet shutdowns by comparing multiple different datasets (including OONI), for which they used as a signal the absolute number of tests run in a particular country.

They started off by looking at the Internet Society Pulse Shutdown Tracker page to extract a list of relevant events and they then extracted relevant data from the other datasets (IODA, OONI, M-LAB).

In the figure below, we can see a 3-hour internet shutdown in Iraq in September 2023.

Visualization of a shutdown in Iraq on 28 September 2023 which lasted 3 hours.

Access to the internet was shut down for 3 hours and this could be observed mostly on OONI, IODA, and M-Lab.

Correlating alarms across multiple datasets

This team used data from NDT, OONI, Cloudflare Radar traffic, Cloudflare Speedtest, IODA, and the Google Transparency Report. Their aim was to uncover correlations between significant events as captured by these diverse platforms. They employed the SARIMA (Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) model to identify anomalies in data trends.

Using SARIMA for anomaly detection (TIM outage in Italy Feb 05, 2023)

The team visualized the TIM Sparkle outage using the Google Transparency report. More visualization can be found here.

Bonus: The Sound of Internet Shutdowns

Participating in a hackathon also means having some fun and exploring new ideas!

OONI’s Arturo developed a sonification project which transforms some of the features of the IODA dataset into some synthesized sounds. This way it’s possible to literally listen to an internet shutdown by pasting the link of an IODA chart of an event. You are then able to play it inside of your web browser.

Below is an example of how an internet shutdown in Iraq sounds like:

Code: https://github.com/hellais/the-sound-of-internet-shutdowns

Live site: https://shutdown-sound.vercel.app/

Conclusion

Overall, we were very impressed by the results the participants were able to produce in such a short amount of time. We hope they found the hackathon interesting, fun and that it offered them a way to be exposed to some new datasets that they may have not already been familiar with. We also hope that the hackathon will support participants’ future internet measurement research efforts!

We would like to thank all the participants for making this such a great event. We would also like to thank Google for arranging the conference room and lunch, Google Jigsaw for the hackathon prizes, and finally ISOC for the hackathon dinner.