Russ

Author Archives: Russ

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.

Worth Reading 022026


For decades, many believed SDCs were rare, almost mythical events. However, major hyperscale operators including Meta, Google and Alibaba have disclosed that roughly one in 1,000 CPUs in their fleets can produce silent corruptions under certain conditions.

 


The fundamental rules of creativity and ownership, established in law since the time of the printing press, are now collapsing under the weight of Generative AI.

 


As you and your spouse head off for a two-week Maui vacation, do you hand your 17-year-old boy a bottle of smooth whiskey and the keys to your spare Ferrari, bidding him “have fun while we’re gone”?

 


When Meta Platforms does a big AI system deal with Nvidia, that usually means that some other open hardware plan that the company had can’t meet an urgent need for compute.

 


This paper introduces Whisper Leak, a side-channel attack that infers user prompt topics from encrypted LLM traffic by analyzing packet size and timing patterns in streaming responses. Despite TLS encryption protecting content, these metadata patterns leak sufficient information to enable topic classification.

 

Worth Reading 021726


If I learned one thing at NANOG 96, it’s how to build an up-to-date state of the art AI data centre! As I now understand it, the process is quite simple.

 


New AI models usually create excitement among the true believers and this year hasn’t been an exception. OpenAI and Anthropic released GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 respectively on the same day, February 5. T

 


When my phone stopped working last month during the latest calamitous network outage to hit the US, I assumed it was that pesky Amazon cloud POP in North Virginia playing up again. After all, it was AWS’s VA data centre that triggered three (3) of the last big network failures in North America.

 


Starlink can sometimes shift data more quickly than is possible on terrestrial networks, and improves connectivity in remote areas. But the space broadband service also presents new technical and regulatory challenges, according to speakers who took to the stage on Tuesday at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) in Jakarta, Indonesia.

 


The Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure is infamous for facilitating reflective amplification attacks. Countermeasures such as server shielding, access control, Continue reading

Worth Reading 021326

https://blog.apnic.net/2026/02/06/from-roots-to-reach-network-resilience-in-natural-disasters/
When communication networks break down, people cannot report their condition, responders lose situational awareness, and entire communities risk slipping beyond the reach of coordinated assistance. Network failure does not merely accompany disaster — it reshapes the human consequences.

Nuclear is the Most Reliable Path to Affordable Electricity  


Amid this “worldwide” economic backdrop, nuclear energy presents an affordable alternative to unreliable electricity sources like wind and solar. Economically, it makes no sense to abandon working production methods until new ones can replace the existing and future demand. World citizens are facing this reality in higher electricity prices.

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-02/ipasn.html
There have been a number of services that allow a lookup of an IP address or Autonomous System Number (ASN) and return information about that IP number resource. The Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) each operate a database that records (among other data items) the number resource and the details of the entity that is described in the relevant number registration record.

The Challenge of Adding Fiber to Poles


On February 5, the FCC issued a Memorandum and Order related to a pole attachment dispute between Comcast and Appalachian Power Company (APCO).

https://blog.apnic.net/2026/02/10/the-current-state-of-rdap/
While whois remains Continue reading

Worth Reading 021226


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 Continue reading

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.
 

 
download

Worth Reading 012826


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

Worth Reading 010626


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

Worth Reading 122625


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

Worth Reading 121925


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.

Worth Reading 121725


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

1 2 3 … 166