Russ

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Worth Reading 051826


We’ve all been in that meeting where someone pulls up a chart and says, “Our AI product boosted conversion by 15%.” Everyone nods. Nobody dares to ask: “What if conversions had risen anyway?”

 


The proposed repair is Running-Code Primacy: the number-resource layer should be interpreted only by reference to the minimum technical function running networks require—uniqueness, interoperability, proof of control, routing-adjacent security, and locally verifiable state.

 


You already know IPv6 is overdue. You’ve known for years. You’ve probably sat in a meeting where you laid out the case — address exhaustion, rising costs, growth constraints — and watched leadership nod politely before approving the budget for another batch of leased IPv4 addresses.

 


A key question was whether this reflected a breakthrough specific to one model, or part of a broader trend. Results from an early checkpoint of GPT-5.5 suggest the latter: a second model, from a different developer, now reaches a similar level of performance on our cyber evaluations.

 


The most mature U.S. small modular nuclear reactor vendor — NuScale Power — and a politically connected firm planning to build perhaps the largest reactor project in the U.S. to power an Continue reading

Worth Reading 051526


Given the trend of using generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude for software development, many companies have decided that developers must use GenAI to succeed. I strongly disagree.

 


Here, through a series of randomized controlled trials on human-AI interactions (N = 1,222), we provide causal evidence for two key consequences of AI assistance: reduced persistence and impairment of unassisted performance. Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up.

 


Last month, market research company, Gartner, said that AI companies need close to “$2 trillion per year in revenue by 2029”, token consumption of between 50,000 and 100,000 times its current rate by 2030, and “a 10% profit margin per token.” With huge losses and small revenues, it is not likely that AI companies will achieve these goals on time.

 


He said that about 20% of all network traffic today, about 80 exabytes, comes from machine-to-machine traffic, and that alone is big news. Nokia is betting its future growth will come from meeting this growing demand.

 


For Continue reading

Worth Reading 051226


The screenshot feature has cultivated a wide range of impactful academic research across computing and social scientific fields.

 


When Motorola unveiled its Iridium global satellite-based mobile telephony service in the late 1990’s everything augured well for a revolution in the satellite communications market, only it didn’t happen.

 


While the software industry has made genuine strides over the past few decades to deliver products securely, the furious pace of AI adoption is putting that progress at risk.

 


The analytic company IDC says the U.S. economy will be generating 394 trillion zettabytes of data annually by 2028 (a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes).

 


Enterprise strategists need to worry about securing their environments against AI-powered attacks.

Worth Reading 050926


These milestones highlight the significance RPKI has gained over the past decade. Starting off as an experimental technology, it has become a central component of the Internet, affecting a large percentage of its networks.

 


More than 9.7 million third-party businesses sell goods on Amazon, and Amazon makes a lot of money charging those third parties to sell on its platform—$117.7 billion in 2022, representing 23% of Amazon’s total revenues.

 


For much of the history of computing, it was reasonably safe to assume that a machine was doing what you told it to do (and what its creators promised it would do), because its operations were local.

 


There is always the case that the unexpected happens, and X.509 certificates are no exception. There are circumstances where the certificate should be marked as unusable immediately, which is before the notAfter expiration time.

 


Our investigation uncovers two sophisticated telecom surveillance campaigns and, for the first time, links real-world attack traffic to mobile operator signalling infrastructure.

Hedge 304: Deep Dive into a Network Master’s Program

If you’ve ever been curious about what an advanced degree in network engineering looks like, you’ll want to join us for this episode of the Hedge. Levi Perigo from the University of Colorado at Boulder joins Tom and Russ to talk through what earning a Master’s in Networking involves and what kinds of things you would learn.
 

 
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Worth Reading 050626


DDoS mitigation often relies on BGP for “scrubbing”, but how this appears in routing data is not well understood. We analyse five major providers to distinguish between always-on and on-demand protection.

 


This column argues that without AI, adequate privacy has become simply out of reach. This is not because AI is benign; it most definitely is not. Rather, the modern digital ecosystem has evolved to a point where no human, unaided, can understand, monitor, or manage the complexity of today’s data practices.

 


Conventional memory schemes follow the Pareto Principle, in which approximately maintaining 20% hot data can meet 80% of requests. L

 


Google has just forked its Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, designs for these two workloads, the very first time in more than a decade that TPU systems of the same generation were truly architecturally distinct from each other.

 


Fake domains are not a new problem. What’s now changing is the scale and how easily attackers can blend into your domain ecosystem with lookalikes, inactive registrations, and domains set up purely for email.

Worth Reading 050426


What can we learn about QUIC deployments just by listening to unsolicited QUIC traffic? This question becomes specifically exciting since QUIC aims for enhanced privacy by obfuscating metadata.

 


Securing AI means securing all the AI layers and throughout the lifecycle: data, model, and applications, in training and in inference.

 


According to a Reuters report, Meta is installing tracking software on its employees’ work computers. The tool, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will log mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes. It will also take occasional screenshots of employees’ screens.

 


Despite its usage, the behaviour of BGP-based scrubbers is not well understood, such as whether scrubbers are always on-path or activated on-demand.

 


The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has officially endorsed passkeys as the default authentication standard, marking the first time the agency has told consumers to move away from passwords entirely.

Worth Reading 042926


Many BGP route leaks reported by automated detection systems are actually brief, low-impact artifacts of normal BGP convergence.

 


Long round‑trip times have serious consequences for protocols like TCP, which rely on a steady stream of acknowledgements (ACKs) to manage sending rates, estimate delay, and trigger retransmissions.

 


As datacenter networks evolve toward ultra-high-speed links, the energy footprint of host-side packet processing grows increasingly significant.

 


The old perception of satellite internet as slow, expensive, and marginal is increasingly outdated. Today’s market includes multiple orbital models, each with distinct technical and operational characteristics.

 


What can we learn about QUIC deployments just by listening to unsolicited QUIC traffic? This question becomes specifically exciting since QUIC aims to enhance privacy by obfuscating metadata.

Worth Reading 042226


In late 2024, the federal government’s cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft’s biggest cloud computing offerings.

 


This report explores the evolution and current state of neuro- symbolic artificial intelligence, an approach that integrates neural network capabilities with symbolic reasoning.

 


The Linux 7.0 kernel is now out, and it’s one of the most impactful releases in years for networking professionals.

 


The human-speed defense of small business is being obliterated by the machine-speed offense of AI-driven cybercrime. Today, what large companies treat as a manageable risk is a terminal expense for small enterprises, with 60% of small enterprises shutting down within six months of a major attack.

 


The original frustration was familiar. You build on one provider, they change pricing, deprecate an API, or just aren’t the right tool anymore, and migrating is brutal.

Hedge 302: Communications in Biological Systems

What does biology have to do with computer networks? Much more than you might think. Communications systems, after all, need to solve the same problems–and they often use the same kinds of tools. In this episode of the Hedge, Emily Reeves and Joe Deweese join Russ and Tom to talk about a recent paper comparing computer communications to biological communications.
 

 
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Worth Reading 041326


Tech leaders hoping AI might help save money and improve efficiency in IT infrastructure should know that only 28 percent of use cases fully succeed and offer return on investment (ROI).

 


The best strategy in the world won’t succeed if a team falters operationally. But what is operational excellence, and what does it take to acquire it

 


Industry analysts are using the word convergence as shorthand for competition that bundles cell service with broadband. Convergence is the newest strategy that replaces the traditional bundling strategy of selling a package of broadband, cable TV, and voice.

 


Leaving aside my discovery that YouTube videos on the Naturalistic Fallacy are branded by female cleavage (???), we move on to the two problems embedded in statements I hear by articulation and by implication in the public discourse: “We must cultivate trust in AI,” and “AI acquiescence is inevitable.”

 


Most engineers don’t think about securing TCP itself. We rely on the applications riding on top of the network. When you run routing protocols or long-lived control sessions across untrusted or shared infrastructure, TCP becomes part of your attack surface whether you planned for it or not.

Worth Reading 040626


Stanford researchers are warning that using AI chatbots for personal advice could backfire. The problem isn’t just accuracy, it’s how these systems respond when you’re dealing with complicated, real-world conflicts.

 


During the APNIC Routing Security Special Interest Group (SIG) session at APRICOT 2026 / APNIC 61, APNIC and LACNIC presented a case study of a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijack that combined a technical attack with social engineering.

 


It is widely believed that all BGP routers within an Autonomous System (AS) must be connected in a full iBGP mesh, or, when this becomes impractical, that route reflectors or confederations must be used. However, a full mesh is not always necessary, and in some scenarios it may even be undesirable.

 


The skies are quickly filling with communications satellites. Following is a short list of the many ventures that have or will soon be launching large numbers of broadband satellites.

 


In early demos, the system looked impressive. It could summarize logs, explain configuration issues, and suggest possible fixes. Instead of digging through internal docs, the answers were coming back in seconds. For a while, it really felt like this system was going to work as expected.

Worth Reading 040426


What appears as double extraction at the operator level becomes something larger and more serious at the level of the state. It becomes sovereignty inversion.

 


Major memory makers have already sold all the kit they can make this year, creating shortages and price increases.

 


It’s fading from our collective memory, but almost thirty years ago the global IT industry was gripped by Y2K fever.

 


What do you get when you combine Big Tech, a Bill Clinton fixer, Davos, the architect of the Hunter Biden laptop disinfo, and “Artificial Intelligence”? The biggest heist in world history.

 


Stop blaming the GPUs! Your AI feels slow because data is getting stuck in traffic. Fix the “supply chain” to keep those tokens flowing.

Worth Reading 032826


This document provides DNS deployment guidelines to secure the DNS protocol and infrastructure, mitigate misuse or misconfiguration, and provide an additional layer of network security as part of a zero trust and/or defense-in-depth security risk management approach.

 


However, eBPF has not seen similarly widespread adoption in other types of networked applications, such as web servers and databases. In this blog post, we argue that this gap stems from limitations in the current eBPF architecture — specifically, the kernel runtime, APIs, and compiler toolchain.

 


Time and again, I see people begging for companies with deep pockets to fund open source projects. I mean, after all, they’ve made billions from this code. You’d think they could support the code’s creators and maintainers. It would be only fair, right?

 


The weird, rare, surprising patterns that make data rich slowly get smoothed out when an AI model trains on outputs from a previous model.

 


In the previous note, the claim was not that the registry layer merely imposes visible fees or administrative inconvenience. The claim was more precise. The first extraction occurs when a scarce, transferable, revenue-enabling resource is kept institutionally discounted through non-asset rhetoric, conditional recognition, and friction around Continue reading

Worth Reading 032526


For organizations in telecommunications, financial services, healthcare, and public infrastructure, the driver for running inference at the edge is not to reduce milliseconds. It is because the data cannot legally leave the building, the country, or the jurisdiction.

 


Internet number resources are not political property. They are operator-held assets embedded in functioning networks.

 


Just over half of U.S. teens say they have used chatbots for help with schoolwork, and 12% say they’ve gotten emotional support. More teens think AI will be positive for them than negative

 


You’ll use AI and like it too – if you work for PwC. Paul Griggs, US chief executive of the global professional services giant, has made clear there is no room at the corporation for AI skeptics.

 


For some time, I have been looking after a routing analysis report called the “CIDR Report”. Here I’d like to explain the reasons for this report, and what is in the report and share some thoughts as to its usefulness today to the Internet routing community.

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