APNIC Labs
labs.apnic.net · Company blog · on HN since 2011
The research arm of APNIC, the Asia-Pacific internet registry, publishing measurements of DNS, IPv6 adoption, routing and internet privacy.
What HN saysHN links it for data on routing tables, route leaks, DNS resolver behavior and IPv6; commenters cite it as a source and note its DNS privacy data-handling pledge.
19HN people shared it
9linked it in comments
10stories submitted
27story points
1 year agolast shared
2011people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1APNIC Labs Enters into a DNS Research Agreement with Cloudflare4 people · 3 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 2Literally IPv62 people · 15 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
- 3DNS Resolver Centrality1 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 4Tracking users' IPv6 capability using Google Analytics1 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · 1 comments on HN
- 5But That’s Impossible Crazy middleware breaking ipv61 people · 2 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 6DNS4EU1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 7Literally IPv61 people · 1 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 8IP Fragmentation1 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 9Post 4791 people · first shared 2018
- 102004 07 27 multi6 arch.pdf1 people · first shared 2022
- 11Apnic labs enters into a research agreement with cloudflare1 people · first shared 2025
- 12Post 5201 people · first shared 2021
- 13Post 6551 people · first shared 2018
- 14Post 1391 people · first shared 2015
- 15The ipv6 transition1 people · first shared 2025
What HN people wrote when they linked it
buro9 · 2015-06-12
I am no expert.
But a route leak forces traffic to take a different path, and this potentially results in a pipe being inundated with a significant volume of traffic that cannot be handled by ISPs along that route (or simply a dead-end).
i.e. imagine an ISP in Rio suddenly declaring that they are the best route to reach the networks that contain facebook.com and google.com ... that ISP will DDoS itself or one of their downstream partners. An ISP may not even notice this, but their peers and partners probably will.
A couple of years ago a BGP route leak took out the entire internet for a few hours for people in Australia. They're fairly common unfortunately, but tend to have limited impact and are resolved quite quickly.
More info: https://labs.apnic.net/?p=139
latchkey · 2022-09-10
https://blog.cloudflare.com/dns-resolver-1-1-1-1/
https://labs.apnic.net/?p=1127
Interestingly, we are now 4 years into this 5 year experiment.
betterunix2 · 2021-08-15
A few years old but here you go:
https://www.retevia.net/fast/
In some cases, yes, the routing table size will impact performance; for example if the FIB is too big to fit in TCAM:
https://labs.apnic.net/?p=520
Note that this particular incident was caused by deaggregation of routes announced by Verizon, and that had the routes been properly aggregated it could have been avoided (though normal routing table growth would have eventually caused the problem anyway).
neojima · 2018-06-27
https://labs.apnic.net/?p=479
https://labs.apnic.net/?p=655
From what I've gleaned, the use of Google ads catches the use case of people who don't actively use Google -- based on the delta in metrics between Google's stats and APNIC's, I would suspect that Google isn't quite as popular globally as you think it is (but their ad platform is!).
ENOTTY · 2018-04-02
An excellent find!
> We will be destroying all “raw” DNS data as soon as we have performed statistical analysis on the data flow. We will not be compiling any form of profiles of activity that could be used to identify individuals, and we will ensure that any retained processed data is sufficiently generic that it will not be susceptible to efforts to reconstruct individual profiles. Furthermore, the access to the primary data feed will be strictly limited to the researchers in APNIC Labs, and we will naturally abide by APNIC’s non-disclosure policies.
So it's a 5 year research program, with options to extend it as a research program. To me, that means they intend to keep DNS data for up to 5 years (or longer) before performing statistical analysis and processing on it. Here is APNIC Labs's privacy policy http://labs.apnic.net/privacy.shtml and APNIC's privacy policy https://www.apnic.net/about-apnic/corporate-documents/documents/corpor…
So much for "privacy-first".
xuande · 2018-04-01
Found this: https://labs.apnic.net/?p=1127
notpushkin · 2025-06-13
1.1.1.1 was initially a joint research project between Cloudflare and APNIC: https://labs.apnic.net/index.php/2018/04/01/apnic-labs-enters-into-a-r…
dxld · 2025-02-17
Good news: it's 20 years, not 100, at the most :-)
https://labs.apnic.net/index.php/2024/10/19/the-ipv6-transition/
fulafel · 2022-05-14
In internet design circles these themes are known as multihoming and the locator/id split problem. See eg https://labs.apnic.net/presentations/store/2004-07-27-multi6-arch.pdf
Also IETF's envisioned post-TCP transport protocol (SCTP) supports multihoming natively but has failed to take off.