Worth Reading 070325

Ossification is still a major issue in today’s networking environment, and while it’s not a theme in the architecture of the transmission platform, we see it in the Internet Protocol itself, in our transport protocols, in our routing protocols, and in various applications.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is issuing this Public Service Announcement to warn the public about cyber criminals exploiting Internet of Things (IoT)1 devices connected to home networks to conduct criminal activity using the BADBOX 2.0 botnet2.

hile the architecture of the 900 series had no support for partitioning memory (requiring cooperation for multi-user activity), and many ran without any operating system at all, there was an optional NPL interface.

Most protocols do not have the equivalent of an X-Forwarded-For header. To solve this, HAProxy came up with the PROXY protocol, which is a Layer 4 protocol that allows a proxy server to communicate client information to a backend server.

If you built a proper technology strategy in the first place, driven by the business strategy, then no matter what is happening don’t ignore it, and don’t throw it out—update it and stick to it!

Best of the Hedge: Episode 1

Are you stressed? Everyone in IT seems to be continuously stressed–but what can we do about it? Sonia Cuff joins the Hedge to talk about stress.

download

From time to time we like to repost episodes of significance–this week we’re reposting episode 1.

Hedge 272: Are we addicted to the CLI?

Is the CLI the best way to configure, manage, and troubleshoot routers and other networking gear? Or should we move past the CLI towards automation and (possibly even) GUI-based tools? Mark Posser joins Russ and Tom to discuss on this episode of the Hedge.
 

 
download
 
For more reading on this topic, please check out this post by Chris Grundemann.

Worth Reading 062625

If you’ve worried that AI might take your job, deprive you of your livelihood, or maybe even replace your role in society, it probably feels good to see the latest AI tools fail spectacularly.

The Virginia Supreme Court issued a ruling against Cox Communications that should trouble anybody building a fiber network that must cross railroad tracks. The case involves a dispute brought by the Norfolk Southern Railroad that challenged a new right-of-way law related to railroads.

Julia Angwin’s opinion piece clutches at courtroom verdicts and minor regulatory wins like a child gripping a plastic sword in the middle of an actual war. Yes, there are lawsuits.

This makes a huge difference to the way ChatGPT works: it can now behave as if it has recall over prior conversations, meaning it will be continuously customized based on that previous history.

Traditionally, Cilium’s BGP implementation required users to explicitly specify peer IP addresses in BGP cluster configurations to establish BGP sessions with Top-of-Rack (ToR) switches. While this approach functions adequately in small environments, it becomes difficult to manage for large-scale deployments involving thousands of Kubernetes nodes distributed across numerous racks.

Worth Reading 062425

There has been a major change in the landscape of the internet over the past few years with the progressive introduction of the QUIC transport protocol. Here I’d like to look at where we are up to with the deployment of QUIC on the public Internet. But first, a review of the QUIC protocol.

The PCI Special Interest Group (PIC-SIG) just released official specs for PCIe 7.0, doubling the bandwidth again for high-performance kit such as network cards, while hinting that PCIe 8.0 may not achieve the same.

Our model training with adversarial data significantly enhanced our defenses against indirect prompt injection attacks in Gemini 2.5 models (technical details).

Apple has a new paper; it’s pretty devastating to LLMs, a powerful followup to one from many of the same authors last year.

Good intentions don’t always result in good outcomes. This is especially the case with recent suggestions regarding end-to-end-encryption adaptability requirements for number independent communication services.

Worth Reading 062325

asically, model collapse happens when the training data no longer matches real-world data, leading the new LLM to produce gibberish, in a 21st-century version of the classic computer aphorism “garbage in, garbage out.”

As AI workloads scale to thousands of accelerators, the interconnect fabric (also known as a scale-up fabric) for rack-scale systems is under intense scrutiny. Significant advancements are reshaping scale-up connectivity in 2025.

Standardized in 2021, QUIC is a UDP-based protocol designed to improve upon the TCP / TLS stack. While the QUIC protocol recommends pacing, and congestion control algorithms like BBR rely on it, the user-space nature of QUIC introduces unique challenges.

According the Google Cloud’s mini incident report, the issue occurred due to an invalid automated quota update to the API management system, which was distributed globally, causing external API requests to be rejected.

The specification details enhancements to Ethernet that improve low-latency transport in high-throughput networking deployments. It includes a modern Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) approach, direct memory access implementations, transport protocols, and congestion control mechanisms.

Hedge 271: AI and Creativity

AI chatbots and image creators are all the rage right now–we are using them for everything from coding to writing books to creating short movies. One question we do not ask often enough, though, is how this impact human creators. How will these tools shape creativity and thinking skills?

download

Worth Reading 061025

This report examines the growing global trend of Internet blocking and its impact on the stability, openness, and interoperability of the Internet. It details how governments and private actors are increasingly using network-level interventions—such as DNS blocking, IP address blocking, and protocol filtering—to control online content.

Broadcom began shipping its answer to Nvidia’s upcoming Quantum-X and Spectrum-X switches on Tuesday: the Tomahawk 6. The chip doubles the bandwidth of its predecessor and comes in both standard and co-packaged optics flavors.

Artificial intelligence, once hailed as the great liberator of human productivity and ingenuity, is now moonlighting as a con artist, data thief, and spy.

The current craze for AI has helped drive a wave of datacenter building, but the industry has run into opposition from local communities in many areas, something it is understandably keen to address.

Low orbit space is growing increasingly crowded. Starlink has over 7,100 satellites in orbit and has plans to grow to 30,000. Project Kuiper has plans for a constellation of 3,232 satellites.

Worth Reading 060925

The story of computing and communications over the past eighty years has been a story of quite astounding improvements in the capability, cost and efficiency of computers and communications.

In recent discussions, it became clear that additional information could be helpful, breaking down what a user or administrator needs to understand about TLS implementation and configuration options to better assess points of potential exposure.

The use of pseudo-random processes to generate secret quantities can result in pseudo-security. A sophisticated attacker may find it easier to reproduce the environment that produced the secret quantities and to search the resulting small set of possibilities than to locate the quantities in the whole of the potential number space.

We’ve all had the serendipity experience, even online — clicking through a chain of links, scanning Google search results, drifting between loosely connected ideas. But search engines and information retrieval systems aren’t designed to enhance serendipity.

Here I want to look at just one day of the operation of the Internet’s BGP network by looking at the behaviour of a single BGP session. The day we’ll use for this study is the 8h May 2025, and the BGP vantage point used here is an unremarkable Continue reading

Hedge 270: Password Psychology

Password hygiene drives IT professionals crazy–people forget their passwords, will not change them often enough, and choose weak ones. But are IT folks immune to these problems? What is the psychology behind passwords, and how do we do better? Karl Buhl joins Tom and Russ to talk about passwords.
 

 
download

Worth Reading 060425

There is an interesting article from the Brookings Institute that documents four trends in infrastructure funding. The conclusions of the report surprised me and I suspect they will surprise others.

And when details do emerge, they usually involve a retraction. IBM laid off 8,000 workers in 2023, and then hired them back in May 2025. In 2024, a top headline for Klarna was “Klarna’s AI Assistant Is Doing The Job Of 700 Workers” but a year later it was “Klarna Reverses AI-Only Customer Support Strategy.”

I would like to look at the ways in which the operators of the number Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) have deployed this infrastructure in a way that maximises its available and performance and hardens it against potential service interruptions, or in other words, an examination of the resilience of the RPKI infrastructure.

OFC 2025 made one thing clear: The transition to Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) switches in data centres is inevitable, driven primarily by the power savings they offer.

I’d like to look at that spike in the total route count that occurred on the 1st May in further detail. Between 16:00 UTC on the 1st May and 18:00 UTC on the same day, Continue reading

Worth Reading 060325

Note to readers: I’m merging the worth reading and weekend reads into a “couple of times a week” worth reading. How often I post these depends on the number of articles I run across, but I’ll try to keep it to around five articles per post

I have been consistently skeptical of claims that LLMs are intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word. It is undeniably remarkable that LLMs can generate coherent conversations and articulate answers to almost any question.

For decades, Communist China’s spies, hackers and businessmen have feasted on the forced transfer of technology from vulnerable US corporate enterprises drawn to the vast Chinese market. Little has been accomplished to reduce this massive theft of intellectual property. US businesses seem to have resigned themselves to such unfair practices as the price of doing business in China.

His technical work and evangelism have improved the Internet, and I will give some examples of his contributions to the Internet community and users, but I am sad because he was a good person—idealistic, unselfish, open, and funny.

To build a data-driven story, we must use a basic narrative model. Various models exist in the literature, such as the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) Continue reading

Hedge 269: Web 3.0

Yes, we took an (unintentional) three-week break for medical reasons … but we’re back with a new episode.

What is Web 3.0, and how is it different from Web 2.0? What about XR, AI, and Quantum, and their relationship to Web 3.0? Jamie Schwartz joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to try to get to a solid definition of what Web 3.0 and how it impacts the future of the Internet.

download