Russ

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Worth Reading 042926


Many BGP route leaks reported by automated detection systems are actually brief, low-impact artifacts of normal BGP convergence.

 


Long round‑trip times have serious consequences for protocols like TCP, which rely on a steady stream of acknowledgements (ACKs) to manage sending rates, estimate delay, and trigger retransmissions.

 


As datacenter networks evolve toward ultra-high-speed links, the energy footprint of host-side packet processing grows increasingly significant.

 


The old perception of satellite internet as slow, expensive, and marginal is increasingly outdated. Today’s market includes multiple orbital models, each with distinct technical and operational characteristics.

 


What can we learn about QUIC deployments just by listening to unsolicited QUIC traffic? This question becomes specifically exciting since QUIC aims to enhance privacy by obfuscating metadata.

Worth Reading 042226


In late 2024, the federal government’s cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft’s biggest cloud computing offerings.

 


This report explores the evolution and current state of neuro- symbolic artificial intelligence, an approach that integrates neural network capabilities with symbolic reasoning.

 


The Linux 7.0 kernel is now out, and it’s one of the most impactful releases in years for networking professionals.

 


The human-speed defense of small business is being obliterated by the machine-speed offense of AI-driven cybercrime. Today, what large companies treat as a manageable risk is a terminal expense for small enterprises, with 60% of small enterprises shutting down within six months of a major attack.

 


The original frustration was familiar. You build on one provider, they change pricing, deprecate an API, or just aren’t the right tool anymore, and migrating is brutal.

Hedge 302: Communications in Biological Systems

What does biology have to do with computer networks? Much more than you might think. Communications systems, after all, need to solve the same problems–and they often use the same kinds of tools. In this episode of the Hedge, Emily Reeves and Joe Deweese join Russ and Tom to talk about a recent paper comparing computer communications to biological communications.
 

 
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Worth Reading 041326


Tech leaders hoping AI might help save money and improve efficiency in IT infrastructure should know that only 28 percent of use cases fully succeed and offer return on investment (ROI).

 


The best strategy in the world won’t succeed if a team falters operationally. But what is operational excellence, and what does it take to acquire it

 


Industry analysts are using the word convergence as shorthand for competition that bundles cell service with broadband. Convergence is the newest strategy that replaces the traditional bundling strategy of selling a package of broadband, cable TV, and voice.

 


Leaving aside my discovery that YouTube videos on the Naturalistic Fallacy are branded by female cleavage (???), we move on to the two problems embedded in statements I hear by articulation and by implication in the public discourse: “We must cultivate trust in AI,” and “AI acquiescence is inevitable.”

 


Most engineers don’t think about securing TCP itself. We rely on the applications riding on top of the network. When you run routing protocols or long-lived control sessions across untrusted or shared infrastructure, TCP becomes part of your attack surface whether you planned for it or not.

Worth Reading 040626


Stanford researchers are warning that using AI chatbots for personal advice could backfire. The problem isn’t just accuracy, it’s how these systems respond when you’re dealing with complicated, real-world conflicts.

 


During the APNIC Routing Security Special Interest Group (SIG) session at APRICOT 2026 / APNIC 61, APNIC and LACNIC presented a case study of a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijack that combined a technical attack with social engineering.

 


It is widely believed that all BGP routers within an Autonomous System (AS) must be connected in a full iBGP mesh, or, when this becomes impractical, that route reflectors or confederations must be used. However, a full mesh is not always necessary, and in some scenarios it may even be undesirable.

 


The skies are quickly filling with communications satellites. Following is a short list of the many ventures that have or will soon be launching large numbers of broadband satellites.

 


In early demos, the system looked impressive. It could summarize logs, explain configuration issues, and suggest possible fixes. Instead of digging through internal docs, the answers were coming back in seconds. For a while, it really felt like this system was going to work as expected.

Worth Reading 040426


What appears as double extraction at the operator level becomes something larger and more serious at the level of the state. It becomes sovereignty inversion.

 


Major memory makers have already sold all the kit they can make this year, creating shortages and price increases.

 


It’s fading from our collective memory, but almost thirty years ago the global IT industry was gripped by Y2K fever.

 


What do you get when you combine Big Tech, a Bill Clinton fixer, Davos, the architect of the Hunter Biden laptop disinfo, and “Artificial Intelligence”? The biggest heist in world history.

 


Stop blaming the GPUs! Your AI feels slow because data is getting stuck in traffic. Fix the “supply chain” to keep those tokens flowing.

Worth Reading 032826


This document provides DNS deployment guidelines to secure the DNS protocol and infrastructure, mitigate misuse or misconfiguration, and provide an additional layer of network security as part of a zero trust and/or defense-in-depth security risk management approach.

 


However, eBPF has not seen similarly widespread adoption in other types of networked applications, such as web servers and databases. In this blog post, we argue that this gap stems from limitations in the current eBPF architecture — specifically, the kernel runtime, APIs, and compiler toolchain.

 


Time and again, I see people begging for companies with deep pockets to fund open source projects. I mean, after all, they’ve made billions from this code. You’d think they could support the code’s creators and maintainers. It would be only fair, right?

 


The weird, rare, surprising patterns that make data rich slowly get smoothed out when an AI model trains on outputs from a previous model.

 


In the previous note, the claim was not that the registry layer merely imposes visible fees or administrative inconvenience. The claim was more precise. The first extraction occurs when a scarce, transferable, revenue-enabling resource is kept institutionally discounted through non-asset rhetoric, conditional recognition, and friction around Continue reading

Worth Reading 032526


For organizations in telecommunications, financial services, healthcare, and public infrastructure, the driver for running inference at the edge is not to reduce milliseconds. It is because the data cannot legally leave the building, the country, or the jurisdiction.

 


Internet number resources are not political property. They are operator-held assets embedded in functioning networks.

 


Just over half of U.S. teens say they have used chatbots for help with schoolwork, and 12% say they’ve gotten emotional support. More teens think AI will be positive for them than negative

 


You’ll use AI and like it too – if you work for PwC. Paul Griggs, US chief executive of the global professional services giant, has made clear there is no room at the corporation for AI skeptics.

 


For some time, I have been looking after a routing analysis report called the “CIDR Report”. Here I’d like to explain the reasons for this report, and what is in the report and share some thoughts as to its usefulness today to the Internet routing community.

Worth Reading 032326


The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), a machine that profoundly reshaped computing, marked its 80th anniversary on 15 February 2026. ENIAC was a technological leap that laid the foundation for the modern computing revolution and eventually transformed nearly every aspect of society.

 


During the APNIC Routing Security SIG session, held at APRICOT 2026 in Jakarta, the community heard about six applications of Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) to the problem of secure Internet routing.

 


There is no doubt that automation offers benefits such as speed, accuracy, reliability, and efficiency, and goes far beyond simple configuration management tasks, including resource provisioning. However, it may not be a good fit for every infrastructure environment. One must evaluate and compare the pros and cons before adopting automation.

 


Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are a privacy nightmare, with footage of naked people, sensitive information, and violent acts captured and seen by Meta’s AI and an army of employees.

 


MOSAIC ditches lasers for cheap MicroLEDs and medical imaging fiber, cuts cabling energy by up to 50%, and already fits in a standard transceiver after a proof-of-concept with MediaTek.

Worth Reading 031526


As malicious domains continue to pose a threat across the Internet, security professionals are left to consider the measures that can effectively defend their organizations from these threats.

 


Right now, a growing chorus is treating India’s “lock and suspend” approach as a success story and a model for the world.

 


On the last day of December 2016 there was a brief hiccup as the world’s clocks adjusted their time according to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard by adding an extra second to the last minute of the 31st of December.

 


For the past decade, Docker has provided a robust solution for building, shipping, and sharing applications. But behind its simple “build and run” workflow lie many years of complex technical challenges.

 


AI assistants that produce drawings and other output that looks like evidence reduce questioning without increasing correctness.

Worth Reading 031026


Credential misuse, AI tools, and security blind spots help attackers move through breached networks faster than ever, CrowdStrike finds.

 


In theory, the design of IPv6 was such that the upper-level end-to-end transport protocols, namely TCP and UDP need not be aware of the IP layer protocol being used. We should be able to use IPv4 and IPv6 interchangeably in the DNS right?

 


Weshow that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator.

 


By virtue of its $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox Technologies completed in early 2020, Nvidia became a seller of optical transceivers for Ethernet and InfiniBand, but seven years before that deal was done, Mellanox had acquired optical technology suppliers Kotura and IPtronics to become a supplier of these components itself, correctly perceiving how important optics would be for the future.

 


The Network Management session at APRICOT 2026 brought together four presenters to share practical, data‑driven insights into how operators can better understand and optimize their networks.

Hedge 298: The 6G Hype Begins

It’s 2026, and it’s time for a new cellular telephone hype cycle: 6G! Doug Dawson from CCG joins Russ and Tom to talk about why 5G is really 4.5G, the proposed changes for 6G, and the challenges higher frequency ranges and bandwidths face in the real world.
 
It’s definitely worth following Doug’s daily post about the telecom and wireless worlds over at Pots and Pans.
 

 
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Worth Reading 022626


The current debate on the existence of an “AI bubble” centers on a single question: is the current high level of investment into AI data centers a massive misallocation of capital or the key to future economic growth?

 


The more I have thought about it, the more convinced I am that the very technological advancements that make my life easier — the most recent being artificial intelligence — actually contribute to a busier, more overwhelming life.

 


Using hot water to cool supercomputers? Nvidia and others are doing it. It’s liquid cooling minus the water chillers.

 


New research shows that these claims aren’t true in all cases, particularly when account recovery is in place or password managers are set to share vaults or organize users into groups.

 


Every employer knows to conduct background checks. However, conducting background checks on IT professionals requires an extra layer of verification, given the privileged access they typically have to IT systems and tools.

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