[mat-wg] Unauthenticated user access to RIPE Atlas

Hi,

I cannot speak for HE but both RIPE Atlas and RIS have a commercial use 
policy. What you want to do may fall firmly in that. IANAL but 
"commercial use" may not be a black or white thing though...

More broadly speaking, we are aware that both services (and perhaps 
more) have what we can call "aggregators" as their users - entities who 
have clients/users/customers whose questions are answered (partly) by 
consulting Atlas or RIS or more. This could be for commercial or 
non-commercial reasons. In these cases on the service end we don't 
really know who the real users are and why are their questions asked. 
Having a lot of users behind a single service doesn't necessarily help 
here as this, at a minimum, skews our statistics and understanding who 
and why is using the service - because the real users can "hide" behind 
an aggregator.

Perhaps there's a dialog to be had about how to improve here. With 
RIPE87 rapidly approaching, there may even be a face to face venue for 
this soon! :-)

Regards,
Robert


On 2023-10-10 11:58, Ben Cartwright-Cox via mat-wg wrote:
> Hello everybody!
> 
> I was wondering around what are the rules and views on “open user
> access” to RIPE Atlas ( as in non-authenticated users being able to
> make RIPE atlas measurements)
> 
> I ask because as of this morning I noticed that hurricane electric’s
> bgp.he.net tool is now allowing users to make right atlas measurements
> without any authentication to RIPE Atlas,  this was surprising to me
> as when I asked a NCC staff member at the last meeting in Berlin about
> doing something similar to this I was explicitly told that this would
> not be desired.
> 
> I cannot remember who told me this ( and I don't have an easy way of
> finding out again )  but assuming this is allowed I will happily copy
> this for bgp.tools
> 
> But I'd like to check with Atlas people before doing such a thing.
>