Russ

Author Archives: Russ

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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Worth Reading 091126


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.

Worth Reading 082926


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.

Worth Reading 081026


There is an interesting fight within the leadership of U.S. AI companies. It is between the supporters of open-source AI and those driven to oppose open-source AI.

 


A Chinese man accused by the communist authorities of having committed “economic crimes” figured that he could evade the long reach of the country’s police state by hiding out in plain view: in a stadium packed with 60,000 people listening to a pop concert.

 


The J2SW Prefix Advertisement Checker, my 3rd application in the network series, checks the exact prefix against live routing data and reports the origin ASN seen by RIPE RIS collectors.

 


A growing number of drivers are pushing back against increasingly tech-heavy vehicles, saying they prefer the simplicity of a

 


The IETF does not launch rockets, or design spacecraft, or even work on radio systems and spectrum assignment, but it has been engaged in the standardisation of communications protocols used to communicate with these spacecraft. Here’s a few topics that were presented at IETF 126.

Worth Reading 080826


Would you work differently if you knew every keystroke was being saved, every website logged, every idle minute counted against you?

 


Everything I read about the AI industry leads me to think there will be an AI crash.

 


I designed this to help with different BGP communities and configuring them on your routers.

 


It’s commonly believed that when selecting between a number of routes for the same address prefix, a BGP speaker will select the route with the shortest AS Path.

 


There is an interesting fight within the leadership of U.S. AI companies. It is between the supporters of open-source AI and those driven to oppose open-source AI.

Hedge 315: Engineering Psychology

We often talk about “human infrastructure” in network engineering–but what does this mean, and how do we help engineers “produce” while helping them to flourish as individuals? Catherine Hicks joins Tom and Russ to discuss the psychology of software engineering, and how the lessons learned apply to network engineering.

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You can find Catherine’s new book on the psychology of software engineering here.
If you would like to follow Catherine’s writing in this area, including the impact of AI on work, you can find her blog here.
You can connect with Catherine on LinkedIn.

Worth Reading 080126


The honest target is goodput, meaning requests per second that actually met your latency targets. Count anything else and you are counting cold plates.

 


I find it strange that as a software industry, we put in so much effort to make our systems efficient to design, build, and scale with DevOps practices, cloud native architectures, event-driven functions, optimized databases and storage, and resource-sipping Lean IT — then we threw it all out the window when Big AI came along.

 


If there is one universal law in internet infrastructure, it is that no good intention goes unpunished by the practical realities of legacy software maintenance.

 


This Article updates and expands on 2012 research on encryption and globalization, analyzing what the authors call “Round 3” of the Going Dark Debate: the current controversies over end-to-end encryption (E2EE).

 


Using our unique position on the Internet, we took an investigative look at one of the well-known mandatory attributes in BGP, the ORIGIN attribute.

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Today’s Internet runs on a vast infrastructure of replicated data, and the difference between order and chaos lies in maintaining consistency through synchronization across the many distributed points where that data is published.

 


IPv6-only networks often still depend on IPv4 subnets and ARP. This article introduces an IETF proposal to eliminate both.

 


Traditional software engineering approaches reliability as a binary state of uptime and downtime. Modern ML pipelines render this paradigm obsolete.

 


Yet while the radios and protocols largely reuse terrestrial 5G designs, one small but crucial component has been left behind: The control plane timers that quietly govern how registration, mobility, and session procedures behave under real-world conditions.

 


Apparently, nearly all of them have reached the same conclusion. I don’t merely need AI occasionally. I need it waiting inside every search bar, messaging app, music player, and document reader I already use.

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