Hedge 205: OId Engineering Quotes

For this month’s roundtable, Eyvonne, Tom, and I return to Addresses to Engineering Students by Harrington and Waddell. This book, published in 1912, is a “product of its time,” and hence deserves some trigger warnings. But it is also interesting to see how advice given to engineering students over 100 years ago holds up for today. Have engineering challenges, and the engineering life, changed all that much? What kinds of advice stand the test of time, what kinds do not?

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Upcoming Pearson Class: Modern Network Troubleshooting

On the 26th of January, I’ll be teaching a webinar over at Safari Books Online (subscription service) called Modern Network Troubleshooting. From the blurb:

The first section of this class considers the nature of resilience, and how design tradeoffs result in different levels of resilience. The class then moves into a theoretical understanding of failures, how network resilience is measured, and how the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) relates to human and machine-driven factors. One of these factors is the unintended consequences arising from abstractions, covered in the next section of the class.
The class then moves into troubleshooting proper, examining the half-split formal troubleshooting method and how it can be combined with more intuitive methods. This section also examines how network models can be used to guide the troubleshooting process. The class then covers two examples of troubleshooting reachability problems in a small network, and considers using ChaptGPT and other LLMs in the troubleshooting process. A third, more complex example is then covered in a data center fabric.

Register here.

Weekend Reads 120223

Yet despite the constant accretion of new tools to solve new problems, the most common root cause of serious cybersecurity incidents remains failed processes.

The House of Representatives’ failure to spike a federal “kill switch” mandate means that outside of a political miracle, all new vehicles from 2026 onward will be required to incorporate “advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology.”

Gone are the days when a car was a dumb machine you turned on and drove from A to B. Today it’s a smartphone on wheels, and your data is possibly being taken for a ride.

APT29, believed to be an espionage group from Russia, became known for launching targeted attacks against organizations in Ukraine.

Mozilla has slapped its “Privacy Not Included” labels on several products from Google, Amazon and Microsoft – just in time for Christmas shopping.

Despite more than a decade of reminding, prodding, and downright nagging, a surprising number of developers still can’t bring themselves to keep their code free of credentials that provide the keys to their kingdoms to anyone who takes the time to look for them.

Special report Web advert blockers and other Chrome extensions will stop working by June 2024 unless Continue reading

Hedge 204: Terry Slattery on Network Automation

Terry Slattery joins Tom and Russ to continue the conversation on network automation—and why networks are not as automated as they should be. This is part one of a two-part series; the first part of this conversation was posted as episode 203.

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Weekend Reads 111923

Bad queries tend to propagate to the root zone due to the hierarchical nature of DNS, so studying traffic at a root server can provide key insights into overall network usage.

This blog covers an interesting case of suspected abuse in a gTLD registry between February and April 2023.

YouTube wants its pound of flesh. Disable your ad blocker or pay for Premium, warns a new message being shown to an unsuspecting test audience, with the barely hidden subtext of “you freeloading scum.”

The shift towards chiplet architecture is inevitable for almost all high-end CPUs/GPUs, accelerators, and networking silicon vendors. It is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’.

The Global Coalition on Telecommunications (GCOT) purports to be about synching up how the five countries approach telecoms. The scope of corporation includes information sharing, joint R&D, funding alignment, the development of standards, skills, supply chain diversification, security, and 6G, so says the release.

Securing mainframes remains top of mind, with 61% of mainframe and IT professionals ranking security as the top problem they are facing, according to BMC’s annual survey of mainframe users for 2023.

Gartner has raised the specter of departments outside of tech running their own IT Continue reading

Hedge 203: Terry Slattery on Network Automation

Terry Slattery joins Tom and Russ to continue the conversation on network automation—and why networks are not as automated as they should be. This is part one of a two-part series; the second part will be published in two weeks as Hedge episode 204.

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Hedge 202: Internet Governance with George Michaelson

How is the Internet governed? Who sets the rules for the Internet, civil society, and government control? How much input should techies have, and how much should government control things? These are questions we don’t often ask, and yet are crucial to building and operating networks connected to the global Internet. George Michaelson joins Toms and Russ to talk about Internet governance—including contrary views of where things should be versus where they are.

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On the ‘net: Two on AI

I occasionally write over at Mind Matters on topics “other than technical.” Here are my two latest posts over there.

But what if you could steal something just as valuable as the contents of a lady’s handbag without anyone suspecting it and without impacting your user’s trust? What if you could take private information about millions of people, across the world, using that information to create what Shoshana Zuboff calls “behavioral surplus?” What if you could use that information to discover — and shape — people’s preferences without them even realizing it is happening? What if you could sell your user’s attention to the highest bidder?

While it seems evident that content created by a user prompt should not be copyrightable by the user, what about the designer and operator of the AI system? It might seem reasonable to infer the humans who create a system that, in turn, creates new “works” should be able to copyright those works.

On the ‘net: Model Based Thinking

Running a little late on cross posting stuff from Packet Pushers … but I suppose better late than never.

Model-based thinking can help engineers understand protocols and networks at a fundamental level. My previous post on network models focused on the Four Things model, an alternative to the OSI model for understanding network transport. I’ll continue with the Four Things, this time with a focus on routing.

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With security, the battle between good and evil is always a swinging pendulum. Traditionally, the shrewdness of the attack has depended on the skill of the attacker and the sophistication of the arsenal.

While cyberattacks on websites receive much attention, there are often unaddressed risks that can lead to businesses facing lawsuits and privacy violations even in the absence of hacking incidents.

A new login technique is becoming available in 2023: the passkey. The passkey promises to solve phishing and prevent password reuse.

Security researchers have discovered what they believe may be a government attempt to covertly wiretap an instant messaging service in Germany — an attempt that was blown because the potential intercepting authorities failed to reissue a TLS certificate.

Artists suing generative artificial intelligence art generators have hit a stumbling block in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit over the uncompensated and unauthorized use of billions of images downloaded from the internet to train AI systems, with a federal judge’s dismissal of most claims.

Professional artists and photographers annoyed at generative AI firms using their work to train their technology may soon have an effective way to respond that doesn’t involve going to the courts.

Intel is shedding its silicon photonics transceiver module business as part of restructuring and cost-cutting measures, offloading it to manufacturing company Jabil.

Domain Name System (DNS) abuse stands has proven a constant in the internet threat landscape, posing risk to the overall digital trust.

SpaceX is equipping its new satellites with inter-satellite laser links (ISLLs). They now have over 8,000 optical terminals in orbit (3 per satellite) and they communicate at up to 100 Gbps.

Hedge 201: Roundtable

It’s time to gather round the hedge and discuss whatever Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ find interesting! In this episode we discuss business logic vulnerabilities, and how we often forget to think outside the box to understand the attack surfaces that matter. We also discuss upcoming network speed increases like Wi-Fi 7 and 800G Ethernet. Do we really need these speeds, or are we just getting caught up in a hype cycle?

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Weekend Reads 102723

Passkeys are appearing more and more in tech news, with support for them increasing. Since many administrators test out new technologies themselves first, we at CIS embarked on a short project to see what happened when an intern with our CTO team had the opportunity to implement passkeys.

Draft proposals setting a “remuneration obligation” for digital platforms started to pop up in the Brazilian congress after Australia adopted its own News Media Bargaining Code.

And can companies finally trust their data to cloud providers and actually trust that CC removes the need to worry about the cloud provider as a sub-processor with access to the data?

Google says it plans to prototype a technique to mask IP addresses via network proxies in future versions of its Chrome browser, a privacy protection similar to Apple’s iCloud Private Relay service for its Safari browser.

The cryptanalytic threat of quantum computing, particularly the “store data; decrypt later” approach, is drawing ever nearer. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. government is among those most alert to the danger.

A common critique of HTTP/3 and QUIC is that they primarily benefit the big players and companies (for example, Google and Meta), who often control one or even Continue reading

Hedge 200: Automation with Ethan Banks

We’ve been on a long streak of discussions about automation, why it works, why it isn’t working, and what the networking industry can do about it. For this episode, we’re joined by the indubitable Ethan Banks. If you don’t think there’s anything left to say, you’ve not yet listened to Ethan!

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Hedge 199: Automation with Carl Buchmann

Automation is a big topic–folks had a lot of feedback on our first couple of Hedge episodes on the topic. We return to automation in this episode of the Hedge with Carl Buchmann to discuss one effort at unifying automation with humble beginnings.

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Weekend Reads 102023

When we were not looking – and forcing ourselves to not look at any IT news because we have other things going on – that is the moment when Nvidia decides to put out a financial presentation that embeds a new product roadmap within it.

SiFive today launched a pair of RISC-V CPU cores aimed at high-performance and AI/ML applications.

LPO is short for Linear Pluggable Optics (or Linear-drive Pluggable Optics), it is a potential technology to satisfy the low power consumption and high bandwidth demand of data centers like CPO (Co-packaged Optics).

One colocation provider has come up with a unique solution: It’s building small nuclear power plants for itself.

That’s no longer the case, however, as its latest variant, encased in compromised OfficeNote installation packages (currently in beta mode), can cause damage to any macOS devices.

In an era where every click, tap or keystroke leaves a digital trail, Americans remain uneasy and uncertain about their personal data and feel they have little control over how it’s used.

An investigation from the Wall Street Journal identified a company called Near Intelligence that purchased data about individuals and their devices from brokers who usually sell to advertisers. The company Continue reading

Upcoming Class: How the Internet Really Works

Join me for How the Internet Really Works on the 27th! This four hour live webinar on Safari Books Online:

… de-mystifies the overall structure and “moving parts” of the global Internet. The class begins with a user connecting to a web site, and the process of translating the name of the service the user is seeking to a logical location (a server) where the service is actually located. From there, the path of the packets between the user and the server is traced, exposing each of the different kinds of providers that carry the packet along the way.

Register here.

Controversial Reads 101423

Imagine a future in which AIs automatically interpret—and enforce—laws.

Using the proposed “Web Environment Integrity” means websites can select on which devices (browsers) they wish to be displayed, and can refuse service to other devices. It binds client side software to a website, creating a silo’d app.

When Alexa wouldn’t respond to his commands, he called the Amazon help desk to see what the issue was. Evidently, the company locked him out because of his apparent racism: “I was told that the driver who had delivered my package reported receiving racist remarks from my ‘Ring doorbell’ (it’s actually a Eufy, but I’ll let it slide).” Later, without any explanation or apology, Amazon allowed Jackson access again.

According to Harari, “AI has all it needs in order to cocoon us in a Matrix-like world of illusions,” and, even more chillingly, “you don’t really need to implant chips in people’s brains in order to control them or to manipulate them.”

Yet given how most of the internet is currently structured, our online expression largely depends on a set of private companies ranging from our direct Internet service providers and platforms, to upstream ISPs (sometimes called Tier 2 and 3), all Continue reading

Weekend Reads 101323

Dereferencing null pointers is one of the most common software errors. It is so infamous that Tony Hoare called the invention of null pointers his billion-dollar mistake.

To detect DDoS attacks in a telecommunications network we need to see the traffic that traverses the network, and we have multiple protocols for that purpose.

A recent trend in cloud-native development is the use of multi-architecture infrastructures, which can run workloads on either x86 or Arm architectures.

On 28 Aug., the California Privacy Protection Agency released its initial draft regulations for cybersecurity audits and risk assessments.

The Sun is about to turn upside down – magnetically speaking, of course.

Telecoms giant Vodafone is backing more than one horse in the OpenRAN arena, confirming a collaboration with Arm on energy efficient silicon for 5G base stations and continuing to work with Intel on OpenRAN silicon.

However, DNSSEC can cause problems when combined with a widely used method for synchronising secondary DNS servers with their primaries, Incremental Zone Transfer (IXFR).

Antitrust cases like the FTC’s hinge on “threshold” issues, fundamental elements that must be proven for a case to proceed. Here, those issues are threefold: market definition, documentary evidence, and the validity of Continue reading

Hedge 198: Nephio with Wim Henderickx

Automation is a bit of theme recently on the Hedge. In this episode we’re joined by Wim Henderickx to talk about the Linux Foundation Nephio project, which adapts Kubernetes management into a cloud native network management platform. This new take on managing networks is definitely discovering.

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On the ‘net: Building Consensus in the IETF

You cannot simply post a draft to the IETF repository and expect “someone, somewhere,” to take action. No one is going to read your draft. No one is going to send you comments. No one is going to call for your document to progress forward through the process.