Kathmandu

Writing this post from my hotel room in Kathmandu. I found that many of the servers appear to be DNS resolvers which is unusual.
Have a look at these weird DNS replies:

dig @anuragbhatia.com . ns +short
a.root-servers.net.
b.root-servers.net.
c.root-servers.net.
d.root-servers.net.
e.root-servers.net.
f.root-servers.net.
g.root-servers.net.
h.root-servers.net.
i.root-servers.net.
j.root-servers.net.
k.root-servers.net.
l.root-servers.net.
m.root-servers.net.

dig @google.com . ns +short
b.root-servers.net.
c.root-servers.net.
d.root-servers.net.
e.root-servers.net.
f.root-servers.net.
g.root-servers.net.
h.root-servers.net.
i.root-servers.net.
j.root-servers.net.
k.root-servers.net.
l.root-servers.net.
m.root-servers.net.
a.root-servers.net.

This seems unusual and is the result of basically port 53 DNS hijack. Let’s try to verify it using popular “whoami.akamai.net” query.

APNIC and RIPE NCC are doing a hackathon at APRICOT 2018. It just started today with some light interaction with various participating members yesterday. The theme of the hackathon is around IPv6. Many cool projects were suggested yesterday and teams started working today on certain shortlisted projects like:

1. A tool for ranking CDNs - A tool based on RIPE Atlas data to rank CDNs based on latency across different regions.
2. An IPv6 fun word game - Where anyone with a member account can suggest a word, and compete with other members who share more IPv6 addresses. It may include things like showcasing creative use of hexadecimal strings in an IPv6 address like Facebook popularly does face:b00c in their IPv6 pools.
3. IPv4 and IPv6 network security  - Study of attacks and overall security in IPv6. It would involve study and possibly a report on various attack vectors in the IPv6 domain.
4. A countrywide report on IPv6 deployment - I have yet to see how it is different from existing other reports.
5. IPv6 tunnel detection - Figuring out where tunnels used and figuring out the IPv4 address of those endpoints via a javascript plugin and possibly comparing IPv4 Vs IPv6 performance.

Let’s see how things go in next 12hrs. Super fun. Things should show up on Github in next few hours. :)

India has a slum problem as many of us know. Slums are a serious problem and there’s just no easy way to fix them. One cannot just push thousands and thousands of people out while at the same time quality of life in slums is terrible. One thing which happens a lot in India is the fact that Govt. does nothing when slums are getting established and once they are established situation gets out of control.