James A. T. Rice wrote:

This seems to suggest that you are just picking ASns at random to inject into the paths, and that you don't have a set of ASs which you have the assignees permission to use.

In which case please keep AS8330, AS8550, and AS8943 out of your experiments too.

Using not yet allocated ASns out of RIPEs asn-blocks would have been more sensible, IMHO.

James, we are not picking ASes at random. The AS-set announcements are part of new techniques we are developing for ISPs who wish to discover how their prefixes are seen by the rest of the Internet. We believe this will come to be a useful tool for operators. However, since this is still work in progress, and in scientific research there is no room for second place, I can't really reveal any more than that at the moment. I would like to point out, though, that our research group does have a proven track record in the field network discovery (examples available on request), and has created software useful to the operator community such as BGPlay [1][2]. That said, if you want us to exclude those ASes from our AS-sets, then we will do so. Regards, Lorenzo [1] http://www.ris.ripe.net/bgplay/ [2] http://bgplay.routeviews.org/bgplay/