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Category Archives for "Russ White"

Worth Reading 110726


The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is usually presented as a protocol upgrade. In a lab, that’s roughly true. You enable the address family, you advertise a prefix, you ping something, you move on.

 


Most of us have never heard of longtermism, the view that we should consider the interests of those who will live in the far future more than those of current humans.

 


In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston reflects on the economic consequences of the surge in artificial intelligence (AI) investment and the associated data centre build-out.

 


The Public Suffix List (PSL) is a security liability limping along as a vestigial artifact from a bygone age. Downstream consumers such as browsers, certificate authorities and RFC7489 DMARC receivers, to name a few, all read from this nearly 20-year-old text file for calculating domain boundaries.

 


No matter how much money anyone throws at it, the GenAI boom can only continue to grow as fast as datacenters are built and powered up to accept machinery.

Hedge 324: NOSTR

Social media services have largely become a marketplace designed to capture and hold your attention, rather than places where people share information and talk to one another. A large part of this is because they are hosted on large-scale platforms that must be paid for by large, centralized companies. NOSTR is taking a different direction, creating a protocol and system that can be hosted by anyone, anywhere, to build a social network. Wouter Constant joins Tom and Russ to explain what NOSTR is, and how it’s different.
 
You can learn more about NOSTR here.
 

 
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Worth Reading 101926


Could the growing deployment of RPKI become a threat to routing stability? To answer that question, we analysed more than 11 years of RPKI and BGP data, measuring how much routing activity can be associated with RPKI-related changes.

 


The LoRa Alliance recently reported that there are 150 million global devices connected by LoRa technology. LoRa is shorthand for Long Range and is a radio technology that sends small bits of data over long distances using little battery power.

 


Today, powerful, widely available AI tools allow users to easily generate or alter photorealistic images to a degree that was difficult to imagine just a few years ago.

 


In 2025, Edgebeam Wireless was formed to take advantage of the unused spectrum of TV stations. The business is a partnership between the E.W. Scripps Company, Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group, and Sinclair.

 


Get ready for new gTLDs like .prompt, .dns, and even brands like .tiktok. Among the most sought-after names is .agent, which drew 13 applicants.

Worth Reading 101226


However, “Free” is often a misleading market signal, in that there are very real costs to the service operator that need to be covered, but “Free” provides the illusion that the technology behind the service is provided at a cost that is sufficiently small that it can be met by some other form of indirect subsidy.

 


We know how AI works. We just don’t have any readily accessible account in the surface-level terms that we would like.

 


This time, Duane discusses the history of DNS root Key Signing Key (KSK) rollovers, the process of replacing the top-level KSK used to secure the DNS root zone.

 


The global memory shortage that has driven up the cost of servers, storage and PCs through 2026 will get worse in 2027 and 2028, according to memory maker Micron Technology.

 


I opened a pull request (PR) one day that changed an integer column to a big integer and updated a transformation. All of the tests passed. They should not have.

Worth Reading 100226


IPv6’s vast address space makes scanning particularly challenging. IPv6 scanners must first discover in-use IPv6 addresses they can target and scan.

 


In this article, I follow the shift from backbone to delivery edge, looking at how content and cloud platforms are taking on roles once associated mainly with traditional CDNs, what public measurements can and cannot show, and what Google and Meta deployments inside one access network reveal about the changing role of operators.

 


Working from home is still one of the most important uses of broadband, particularly in rural communities.

 


A MikroTik router in a honeypot network of mine was recently compromised. The intruders set up a fairly elaborate persistence and remote-access scheme, but they never disconnected my admin session I was logged in with.

 


As AI agents transition from simple coding assistants to end-to-end engineers, the profession is shifting from writing syntax to auditing complex systems.

Hedge 321: Sockets

There are many “unsung technologies” in the Internet. While we often think of TCP/IP, various models, Ethernet, and DNS, we don’t often think about the lowly socket interface. What is the history of the socket, and why is it important in the world of the Internet? George Michaelson joins Colin Doyle and Russ White to discuss the history and importance of sockets.
 

 

Worth Reading 092026


We will be as unknowledgeable about what machines know about us as they are about what we know about them.

 


This post analyzes the technical details of the BGP hijack against Softaculous Ltd, the company behind the Softaculous auto-installer and the Virtualizor VM management platform.

 


In this episode of PING, we speak with Willem Toorop from NLnet Labs and Ilyas Rahimi, who recently completed a Master’s in Security and Network Engineering at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). They discuss their research into the effects of local root serving.

 


One effective form of attack on the Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure, including the root servers, is the so-called ‘random name attack’.

 


The original purpose of a telephone number was to identify a specific customer. When telephones first came into use, they could only be used to call people in the immediate area who could be connected by the local neighborhood operator.

Hedge 319: Using AI

AI is everywhere. While there are many questions about whether AI is a bubble, the ethics of AI, and the cultural impact of AI, in this episode of the Hedge Mike Bushong joins Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ to talk about how network engineers can use AI. Are some use cases better than others? Are there pitfalls network engineers should avoid? Listen in and find out.
 

 
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Recognizing that AI is a bubble requires one to apply the right test to the right companies and that requires one to understand the fundamental nature of the bubble in question.

 


Based on the insights from those articles, we now shift attention to which parts of the Internet Route Registry (IRR) landscape can – or cannot – be replaced safely with information from the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) system.

 


While many faults manifest as crashes or exceptions, others are far more subtle to identify. Silent data corruptions (SDCs), also known as silent data errors or silent errors, are violations of data integrity that occur without immediate, observable, and explicit indications.

 


Aligning intended learning outcomes, assessments, and teaching practices with the realities of AI-assisted programming.

 


AI is transforming the role of the junior developer. But as routine tasks become increasingly automated, how will the next generation of software engineers master the craft of maintaining complex systems?

Worth Reading 090926


Information is not meaningful simply because it exists or because it is improbable. It becomes meaningful only if there exists a system that can interpret it and use it to perform a function.

 


At first glance, asking whether Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) make the Internet faster may seem almost provocative at a peering forum. Surely the answer is simply ‘yes’?

 


If you’re dealing with industrial protocols, you’ll certainly have seen Modbus packets in your network. But what are these packets used for, and what data do they contain?

 


Yet I have become increasingly concerned that, in the case of IPv6, we are evaluating the technology almost entirely from the perspective of what it allows networks to do, while giving insufficient attention to what it may allow network operators, corporations and governments to do to their users and if the benefits outweigh the risks.

 


The future of fast food was supposed to look something like this: walk into a restaurant, place an order, and watch a robot assemble your pizza with machine-like precision.

Worth Reading 090126


The central question is therefore not whether AI should be regulated. It should. The question is what happens when regulation itself becomes a bottleneck to technological progress.

 


Does AI increase or reduce technical debt? Join Johna Johnson and John Burke as they discuss how to make strategy in environments in which AI fuels untrammeled growth in enterprise complexity–but also points the way to automated optimization (and concomitant technical debt reduction).

 


Red Hat published a benchmark analysis on June 15, 2026, that puts numbers behind a question occupying many IT departments.

 


Recent industry momentum behind open AI models reflects a growing recognition that openness is essential for accelerating innovation, broadening participation, and strengthening the global AI ecosystem.

 


In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston and I discuss how the DNS behaves during a ‘cold start’, when a resolver’s cache contains no data from previous queries.

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The term “content delivery network” reflects the technology’s original value proposition.

 


Sam Altman released ChatGPT for free in late 2022. Many users fell in love both with it and Altman’s argument that artificial general intelligence could be achieved through scaling. T

 


If you work around data centers and high-density builds, you have probably heard the term “Multi-Core Fiber” thrown around.

 


Ask yourself these questions, assuming you have a serious medical condition and your doctors are going to be using GenAI to scan your images and test results to discover the breadth and depth of your condition and to recommend treatment.

 


Maybe adoption is low not because people don’t believe DNSSEC is useful, but because turning it on and keeping it on is still genuinely harder than it should be.

Hedge 316: AI Governance

Deploying AI for AI Ops, or even just for general use in your network, is very simple–but we often forget that these kinds of new technologies need to be governed. From privacy through cost, operators need to decide how to govern their AI deployments to control costs, ensure accuracy, measure productivity, and make certain these systems are being used effectively. Colin Cosgrove joins Russ and Tom to look at AI governance.
 

 
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Worth Reading 081526


I am not a security researcher, and I have never been to Georgia. Yet within a few hours, using AI tools and nothing but public records, I was able to reconstruct the order in which 1.5 million ballots were cast in Georgia’s May 2026 primary–98.9% of the in-person ballots.

 


In profession after profession, GenAI is beginning to perform many of the tasks that traditionally served as training grounds for newcomers.

 


What’s the manifestation of the fallacy in the current case? Thinking that a system that is great at a certain kind of math problem is great at all math, great at science or even quite possibly great at everything.

 


An agent running Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5 spent 34 hours trying to get a malware dropper merged into a real open-source project during a cyber evaluation by the UK’s AI Security Institute.

 


This week, DuckDuckGo is filing an amicus brief in the appeal of a federal court decision that Google unlawfully maintained a monopoly in the general search market in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

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