A Brand New Look at the Best of RIPE Labs

Today we're proud to announce the launch of new RIPE Labs! We're very happy with the redesign and hope our readers will agree that the new layout is a big improvement on the old. Content is now much easier to search and explore, readers have more freedom to respond and interact with authors and articles, and everything is altogether easier on the eye.

Rather than go through all the changes one by one, I thought this might be a nice opportunity to look back at some of the great contributions our authors have made to RIPE Labs over the past year or so. That way, we all get a fresh look at some recent favourites in their new setting while also getting a refresher on all the good things RIPE Labs has to offer. Take a look, and if you haven't got time to read them all now, remember to bookmark articles so you can come back to them later.

Transforming Information Security to Secure Business

Lots of our articles focus on topics that are of particular interest to network operators - things like DNS, routing, RPKI and IPv6. Security is one area where we really strive to bring our readers content that's useful to them. For instance, in an ongoing series of articles, CTO for the Center for Internet Security (CIS), Kathleen Moriarty, continues to explore a variety of important developments in information security. Go dive in to the first article of the series.

The Lockdown Effect - Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Internet Traffic

Articles in the Measurements and Statistics category explore all sorts of work being done to measure and monitor the state of the Internet. In the midst of COVID-19, we published a range of articles measuring the impact the pandemic has had on the Internet. One of the most popular of these is this article written by Oliver Gasser and colleagues that looked at the effects lockdown has been having on various characteristics of Internet traffic across different vantage points.

BGP Zombies

Promoting research is at the heart of so much of what we do at RIPE Labs. We work to bring you useful coverage of projects aimed at gaining a better understanding of the state of the Internet. One piece that stands out as a personal favourite is Romaine Fontugne and Emile Aben's article on BGP zombies. If you haven't heard of BGP zombies before, I'd definitely recommend you read more about them here.

Our First Glance at the Belarus Outages

Whenever possible, we do our best to bring our readers useful and timely information about outages, shutdowns, attacks and other widescale events that impact the state of the Internet. Last August, when the Internet in Belarus went down during the elections, we were able to draw on RIPE Atlas and RIPEstat to put together an article presenting a helpful early analysis of the event.

The Internet Health Report

RIPE Labs features a wealth of content looking at tools, services and prototypes all designed to assist network operators, developers and end users. As well as our Tools section, where we showcase specific tools and prototypes being developed by the RIPE NCC, our Hackathons section covers hackathons and the projects that come out of them. We also point readers to all sorts of other tools and services out there so they can go try them out for themselves. In this particular article, the author looks at the Internet Health Report, a project partly funded by the RIPE NCC community projects fund.

Do We Need a New IP?

Matters of Internet governance are vital to much of the work that goes on at the RIPE NCC, and many of our colleagues have valuable things to say about the policies and proposals that shape the Internet. A great example of this that we know many of our readers found particularly insightful was Marco Hogewoning's 2020 article looking at New IP.

You’ve Got the Power: Sustainable Procurement and the RIPE Community

Speaking of the future of the Internet, sustainability is a topic we've covered a lot over the past couple of years and hope to have much more to say about in the years to come. Michael Oghia has published a number of excellent articles on this front including this article where he investigates how individual decisions about buying hardware and sourcing services can have a real impact on making the Internet more sustainable.

The RIPE Chair Team Reports - March 2021

RIPE Labs is, in many ways, a blog for the RIPE community. To that end, we like to keep our readers updated on community activities and events. Our regular series of RIPE Chair Team reports from Mirjam and Niall is a must read for anyone wanting to keep up to speed on all matters RIPE.

This is just a sample of some of the 1,300+ articles we currently have available on RIPE Labs. I could go on - I hate to leave out such popular classics as What’s the Deal with IPv6 Link-Local Addresses?, Vesna Manojlovic's RIPE Community Resilience series, and BGP Meets Cat - but there are still a couple of other matters to cover.

Feel free to keep looking around, search for new articles, browse author profiles, explore new categories, comment, like, share, and so on. And while you're here, in order to keep up with new content we release on RIPE Labs every week, why not consider subscribing in order to receive updates from time to time on all the interesting new articles we're releasing.

Contributing to RIPE Labs

When you come to make a contribution to RIPE Labs, the following icons up at the top right are where you get started.

Once you start to create a new article, or go through to manage your RIPE Labs profile, you'll see we've made the move to the wagtail CMS. While this may take a little getting used to for those of you who are used to the old system, we trust our authors will find the new approach quite straightforward.

For more information, our Contributing to RIPE Labs page contains everything you need to know, including instructions for creating articles and profiles, content guidelines, and some useful notes on our preferred style. If you run into any issues at all, we're always here to help at labs@ripe.net.

Feedback

This is all still very new and there will no doubt be small changes and last tweaks to be made over the rest of the week to get everything running just as we want it. That said, any thoughts, feedback or expressions of approval are very much welcome. Feel free to leave your comments below or contact us by email at labs@ripe.net.

In the coming months, we'll be introducing new features to make still further improvements, so if you have any ideas of anything you'd like to see, don't hesitate to get in touch.