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Category Archives for "Russ White"

Hedge 294: Resource Constrained Environments


 
The future of network design and architecture is–based on current trends–is going to be working with and around resource constraints. How would resource constraints impact the way we design and manage networks? Mike Bushong joins Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ to ponder network engineering in a resource constrained world.
 

 
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People often invest in companies not because they think the companies will succeed, but because they think others will invest. Thus, they try to invest before the others do, hoping there will be a greater fool who will pay more than they did.


More than half of CEOs report seeing neither increased revenue nor decreased costs from AI, despite massive investments in the technology, according to a PwC survey of 4,454 business leaders.


DNSSEC promised to secure DNS with cryptographic proof, yet messy rollouts, outages, and hype backlash ruined its reputation.


If you start the query process with an IP address, or an AS Number then you can find details about the current holder of that number resource, including its organisation name. But the reverse query is far more challenging in this database query framework.


Earlier this month, OpenAI introduced a new health focused space within ChatGPT, pitching it as a safer way for users to ask questions about sensitive topics like medical data, illnesses, and fitness.


Let’s start with hosting, and the key point here is that resource pools to host AI agents are not the answer. There are multiple reasons for this, but the main one is that Continue reading

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In case you haven’t been paying attention, wireless vendors are busy working towards the introduction of 6G starting around 2030.


The oxygen of publicity this year has mostly been consumed by our two-lettered friend, AI. There’s no reason to think this will change in 2026.


COBOL turned 66 this year and is still in use today. Major retail and commercial banks continue to run core account processing, ATM networks, credit card clearing, and batch end-of-day settlement. On top of that, many payment networks, stock exchanges, and clearinghouses rely on COBOL for high‑volume, high‑reliability batch and online transaction processing on mainframes.


This summer, AI chip startup Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of $6.9 billion. Just three months later, Nvidia celebrated the holidays by dropping nearly three times that to license its technology and squirrel away its talent.


LinkedIn job scams have become a borderless epidemic, preying on the hopes of desperate job seekers and costing victims across the globe anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $25,000.


Yet according to data from Google, the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), and Cloudflare, less than half of all netizens use IPv6 today. To understand why, know that IPv6 also Continue reading

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ASPA is now available in the RIPE NCC RPKI Dashboard, adding a way to express and validate your upstream relationships on top of ROA-based origin validation. Building on its introduction at RIPE 91, this article explains what ASPA does, why it matters, and how to start thinking about deployment.


AI bots made their presence felt this year, accounting for 4.2 percent of HTML request traffic as they trawl the web for content to be used in training models.


Multimodal tasks were the weakest area across the board, with accuracy often below 50%. This matters because these tasks involve reading charts, diagrams, or images, where a chatbot could confidently misread a sales graph or pull the wrong number from a document, leading to mistakes that are easy to miss but hard to undo.


Or, for that matter, where am I? Let’s look at location on the Internet, and how the Internet “knows” where I am.


It’s not science fiction. When a solar storm hits Earth, it can have real-world consequences, and satellite networks like Starlink are on the front lines.


Two months ago, I wrote about the competition concerns with the GenAI infrastructure boom. One of my provocative claims was Continue reading

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In my earlier article on Technitium and Wazuh, I described DNS as both a behavioral signal and an enforcement point. DNS queries appear early in the attack chain, often long before C2 traffic stabilizes.


Cloudflare’s network suffered a brief but widespread outage Friday, after an update to its Web Application Firewall to mitigate a vulnerability in React Server Components went wrong.


You’d think that by now, networks were well enough understood that people would stop making assumptions that we have known, almost since the dawn of networking, to be untrue. Yet as users, developers, and network administrators, we still seem curiously unable to let go of long-held beliefs.


As well as the Mac clones, there were PC-style PowerPC machines – and a version of classic MacOS for them has just been rediscovered, enabling previously unimagined combinations.


Have you ever experienced that moment of panic when you can’t recall a familiar phone number or navigate without a map app? This growing reliance on external memory—known as the “Google Effect”—is a real-world example of how we’ve outsourced core cognitive functions to our devices.

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Tensor processing units (TPUs) are specially designed AI accelerators. They are a type of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), or chips designed for specific tasks. For TPUs, that task is running and optimizing AI and machine learning (ML) workflows, including training and inference.


Civil unrest can often cloud measurement data. Some measurement systems, including ours, make relatively sweeping assumptions about the stability of both end user and network service behaviours, and assume that the changes that occur from day-to-day are minor.


Identifying active IPv6 addresses is challenging. Various methods emerged to master the measurement challenge in this huge address space, including hitlists, new probing techniques, and AI-generated target lists. In this paper, we apply active Subnet-Router anycast (SRA) probing, a commonly unused method to explore the IPv6 address space.


Several months ago, I arrived at the office at 8:45 a.m., sat at my desk, and was about to start my day. The only problem was that I, for the life of me, could not remember my password. This is a bit laughable because for the past year, I had typed that exact password almost daily, sometimes from muscle memory.


Vaibhav Kakkar once tested a therapy chatbot to help with Continue reading

Computer Network Design Complexity and Tradeoffs Training

I’m teaching a “one off” special event class over on O’Reilly’s platform (via Pearson) this coming Friday, the 5th of December. From the Description:

Join networking engineer and infrastructure expert Russ White for this exclusive, one-time event exploring the critical role of tradeoffs in network design. We’ll begin by unpacking how complexity shapes the decisions architects and designers must make, and how tradeoffs are often an unavoidable part of navigating that complexity. Through real-world examples, you’ll learn how different network design choices impact overall system complexity, and how to approach these decisions with greater clarity and confidence. We’ll wrap up with an in-depth discussion of unintended consequences—how they arise, how to anticipate them, and how they relate to designing in complex, adaptive environments.

As always, if you register for the course you can watch later.

Register here.

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An Autonomous System (AS) can protect itself against DDoS attacks by rerouting incoming DDoS traffic through a ‘DDoS scrubber’, a process that is typically implemented using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). While BGP-based scrubbing is a useful service, its adoption on the global Internet is unknown.


Until recently, many professionals, including many doctors, thought they needed to become more machine-like to keep their jobs. Such worry contributed to the specialization trend of the last century.


In an era of growing cyber threats, traditional defensive measures can be insufficient in the face of sophisticated or novel tactics. As a result, the question of whether private or public entities should engage in active defense or offensive “hack back” tactics has taken on greater urgency.


In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston explores the complex landscape of undersea cables.


By 1990 it was clear that IP had a problem. It was still a tiny Internet at the time, but the growth patterns were exponential, doubling in size every 12 months. We were stressing out the pool of Class B IPv4 addresses and in the absence of any corrective measures this address pool would be fully depleted in 1994.

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If you’re using IP address truncation thinking it makes data “anonymous” or “non-personal,” you’re creating a false sense of security.


With distressingly typical Silicon Valley fake-it-till-you make-it bravado, LLM creators have been telling investors that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is just around the corner (or has already been achieved!). The problem the promoters blithely ignore is that LLMs do not know how the words they input and output relate to the real world.


Many organizations rushing to cut staff in the name of AI efficiency are expected to quietly rehire those roles – often “offshore or at lower salary.”


While Silicon Valley is investing tens of billions of dollars chasing the artificial general intelligence dream, academic computing research in the U.S. is facing a severe drought.


There are two competing forces in IT, and they are at play during the GenAI era as much as they have ever been during prior eras in the datacenter.

Hedge 288: Loneliness

Sometimes we just like to talk about “life issues” as they relate to network engineering and technology career fields. Loneliness seems to especially plague network engineering and other “small” IT fields, where communities are small, change is rapid, and stress is high. Loneliness expert Lucy Rose joins Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ to discuss loneliness.

Check out the Cost of Loneliness here.

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SpaceX has surpassed 10,000 satellite launches in its Starlink programme, following the deployment of 56 additional units on Sunday. The milestone highlights the rapid expansion of satellite-based broadband infrastructure and its increasing role in global connectivity.


While x86 has been dominant for decades, a new migration project at Google represents a significant shift to more mixed architectures.


The proliferation of data centers needed to support AI development, along with myriad announcements to onshore manufacturing supply chains, are leading to surging energy demand.


Ex-CISA head Jen Easterly claims AI could spell the end of the cybersecurity industry, as the sloppy software and vulnerabilities that criminals rely on will be tracked down faster than ever.


But is the AI being used for this actually intelligent or just very, very good at faking it? This is not a new question. American philosopher John Searle came up with the Chinese Room, aka the “Chinese Box” argument, all the way back in 1980. He argued that while a computer could eventually simulate understanding – i.e. it could pass the Turing Test – that doesn’t mean it’s intelligent.

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