Alberto Dainotti

And the government for years has worked also on making sure that they could have a certain degree of control on how the traffic flows and through which systems, which intermediate nodes, which links.

Yeah.

So Iranian networks announced the fact that they are reachable and will say, well, if you want to talk to these certain sets of IP addresses, just talk to me and I'll take care of delivering the traffic.

That doesn't mean that the traffic will be delivered.

The other one is also very simple.

It's active probing.

We basically constantly ping networks all over the world.

And the third one is basically a form of network traffic pollution that constantly exists on the internet.

And we learn to cleanse this noise and use it as a liveness signal that is coming from different countries, different regions, and different network operators.

So we call it telescope traffic because it's captured through a research infrastructure that, by analogy with astronomy, has been called network telescopes.

That's a really tough question.

I guess that's what we are trying to understand and study.

The signal jamming that we were referring to earlier is an example of how... The signal jamming of Starlink.

Yeah, for example, Starlink.

It's an example of how even this type of connectivity can be within reach of governments.

It's really...

Something that is evolving and under our noses and we're all trying to understand how things will keep evolving.

The internet is relatively opaque, especially the internet infrastructure.

And so there is a scientific aspect in trying to understand internet connectivity better and especially trying to understand when connectivity fails in general.

Not only when governments order shutdowns, but also when large fractions of population experience outages for other reasons, like power outages.