Internet Census 2012 Data Examined: Authentic, But Chaotic and Unethical 32
An anonymous reader writes "A team of researchers at the TU Berlin and RWTH Aachen presented an analysis of the Internet Census 2012 data set (here's the PDF) in the July edition of the ACM Sigcomm Computer Communication Review journal. After its release on March 17, 2013 by an anonymous author, the Internet Census data created an immediate media buzz, mainly due to its unethical data collection methodology that exploited default passwords to form the Carna botnet. The now published analysis suggests that the released data set is authentic and not faked, but also reveals a rather chaotic picture. The Census suffers from a number of methodological flaws and also lacks meta-data information, which renders the data unusable for many further analyses. As a result, the researchers have not been able to verify several claims that the anonymous author(s) made in the published Internet Census report. The researchers also point to similar but legal efforts measuring the Internet and remark that the illegally measured Internet Census 2012 is not only unethical but might have been overrated by the press."
Re: (Score:1)
Or maybe you could read the linked summary, and learn that it was not a survey of compromised machines, instead the compromised machines were used to do the actual survey.
But thanks for your uninformed and lazy comment.
Why not just get the metadata from the NSA? (Score:2)
They illegally and unconstitutionally collect it anyway, especially on Americans, and give a copy of the feed illegally and unconstitutionally to the CIA and GCHQ.
Among others.
Anagram near miss (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Try it in French: l'Authentic
Unethical (Score:3, Interesting)
Unethical? Whatever.
Having read the original "census", it was a cool hack and no harm was done, nothing more. I'm pretty sure he/they didn't go for vigorous scientific process when this was done.
"but might have been overrated by the press" (Score:1)
I wonder (Score:3)
Why is using idle machines of other people (he's used only machines whose load was under a certain threshold), more unethic than to torment and kill mice in the name of science? I don't think that, when used responsible, latter is unethic, but I wonder why do they put things above biological life?
Re: (Score:1)
but I wonder why do they put things above biological life?
Same reason why it is illegal to steal, even if it's only food, and you are really hungry. Understandable, sure. Forgivable, maybe. But still illegal.
Re: (Score:2)
What he did was illegal, and when he were found I'd have no problem of him being punished according to the law. But it is not unethic. Not when he uses default passwords, and creates no harm.
No, I'm not.
Biased, much ? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think that we shouldn't cover animal experimentation with flower words. I've no doubt animal experiments are OK, as you've said they mostly help the health of humans, but we should at least name what we do to the animals by what it is. How would you call it?
Of course, an internet census is not such an "ethical" goal as healing people, so my comparison might be a bit shaky from this perspective.
Cetrtainly not torture or torment (Score:2)
You simply have a warped view on lab experimentation which is not found in medical labs. Now you may have a point with *cosmetic* experimentation , but you won't find me defending those.
Re: (Score:2)
When you use a machine, it ceases to become idle. It incurs bandwidth and power costs. That's (one of) the unethical bits.
Re: (Score:2)
Why is using idle machines of other people (he's used only machines whose load was under a certain threshold), more unethic than to torment and kill mice in the name of science? I don't think that, when used responsible, latter is unethic, but I wonder why do they put things above biological life?
Well, because now we can cure even the most obscure diseases that afflict mice.
OS Fingerprints! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
"Apparently the researchers didn't analyze OS fingerprints at all."
Did you look into their paper? This is apparently not true. They focused on the ICMP data set but also looked into others, in particular the service probes that you mentioned. One of their validation sets is using that data set.
Okay, point taken about the service fingerprints, but I still see no mention for the OS fingerprints. If they looked at the data format that is there, they could get much more out of the set. (they'd also find more mess by the way as there was some weird bug that destroyed quite a few samples there)
Unfortunately, the data is partially fake (Score:1)
The methodology to verify the data used in the paper was to perform their own scans of networks that were known to have hosts, and then compare the results to the published 2012 internet census data. They got a high match rate. I evaluated the data slightly differently. I scanned network segments that I know to be empty, unused, or entirely behind firewalls. In these cases (for segments /24 and larger) there are still records in the internet census data. These records are completely made up. Try going
Results of the census (Score:2)
I assumed "Authentic, But Chaotic and Unethical" was the description of the Internet resulting from the census.