Russ

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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.

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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

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.

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Hedge 268: Will AI take our jobs?

One of the “great fears” advancing AI unlocks is that most of our jobs can, and will, be replaced by various forms of AI. Join us on this episode of the Hedge as Jonathan Mast at White Beard Strategies, Tom Ammon, and Russ White discuss whether we are likely to see a net loss, gain, or wash in jobs as companies deploy LLMS, and other potential up- and down-sides.
 

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Hedge 267: Can modularization solve people problems?

Solving technology problems often involves breaking a problem into multiple smaller problems, build interaction surfaces between the pieces, and glue the pieces back into a larger system. We also know every technology problem is actually a people problem–whether in the past, the present, or the future.

Given these two points, can we say something like: “If technology and people problems are interchangeable, we should be able to solve people problems the way we solve technology problems–via modularization?”

Join us as Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ discuss how this might–or might not–apply to the real world. The second trend we’re discussing on this episode of the Hedge is the apparent movement towards government telling data center operators to “bring your own power.”

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Weekend Reads 041125


Amazon was a major player in ICANN’s last top-level domain (TLD) expansion round, serving as a Registry Operator for over 50 TLDs based on over 70 strings for which they originally applied.


A recent influx of /16 IPv4 address blocks has sent ripples through the secondary market, triggering a notable decline in average sale prices for the largest address sizes.


It is best to appreciate the challenge. AI data centers are projected to consume approximately two to three percent of U.S. electrical consumption this year alone, with expectations of continued growth now a given.


Interestingly, a fiber cut to an undersea fiber doesn’t cause as much harm as most people imagine. This map that shows all of the current submarine cable routes. There are a huge amount of redundant routes to most of the world.


Is it actually possible to run a team without lying? Steven Gaffney, author of the book, “Just Be Honest”, joins Johna and John to talk about why being honest is harder than it sounds–and how (and why) to do it anyway.

Hedge 266: SR/MPLS

When most people think of segment routing (SR), they think of SRv6–using IPv6 addresses as segment IDs, and breaking the least significant /64 to create microsids for service differentiation. This is not, however, the only way to implement and deploy SR. The alternative is SR using MPLS labels, or SR/MPLS. Hemant Sharma joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss SR/MPLS, why operators might choose MPLS over IPv6 SIDs, and other topics related to SR/MPLS.

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You can find Hermant’s recent book on SR/MPLS here.

Hedge 265: Out of Band Networks

Out of band management networks were once more common than they are today. Should we go back to building out of band management networks? Should out of band management networks be virtual or physical? How can we sell out of band management networks to the folks paying the bills? Daryll Swer joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the importance of OOB management.

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Weekend Reads 032825


With global Route Origin Authorization (ROA) coverage surpassing 50% for both IPv4 and IPv6, implementing Route Origin Validation (ROV) has become increasingly critical for securing network operations


One of the mysteries for me in IP networks was the Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) process. I’ve seldom seen any problems with the MTU at all.


It is arguable, however, that Xsight Labs is trying to push programmability to the extreme, eventually allowing customers to use P4, Python, C/C++, Rust, Go, or what have you (maybe even NPL) to hack the data plane inside switches using its X1 and now X2 ASICs.


With phpIPAM, it became possible to establish a structured, easily searchable database. This structured data now serves as the network’s SoT — a reliable foundation for network automation.


On Wednesday, web infrastructure provider Cloudflare announced a new feature called “AI Labyrinth” that aims to combat unauthorized AI data scraping by serving fake AI-generated content to bots.

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Between 2021 and 2023, the IPv4 market was a roller coaster ride—prices shot up in 2021, peaked in 2022, and plummeted in 2023. Those who expected a recovery in 2024 were sadly disappointed.


Even though most people will probably agree that software documentation is important, the topic of how to do it best is quite underdiscussed. I want to rectify this by offering some suggestions on how to do it.


Using SimpleQA, the company’s in-house factuality benchmarking tool, OpenAI admitted in its release announcement that its new large language model (LLM) GPT-4.5 hallucinates — which is AI parlance for confidently spewing fabrications and presenting them as fact — 37 percent of the time.


Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser recently announced a coalition of 38 attorneys general and the Department of Justice have proposed a final package of remedies to end Google’s monopoly over internet search engines.


5.56 billion people are using the Internet at the start of 2025, up 136 million (2.5%) from a year earlier. This means more than two-thirds of the people on the planet are connecting to the web.


Happy Eyeballs can have some funny side effects. In a project, a connection to a Continue reading

Hedge 262: Stealthy BGP Attacks

Many providers count on detection in the global routing table to discover and counter BGP route hijacks. What if there were a kind of BGP hijack that cannot be detected using current mechanisms? Henry Birge-Lee joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss a kind of stealthy BGP attack that avoids normal detection, and how we can resolve these attacks.
 
To find out more, check this RIPE video.
 

 
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Weekend Reads 022825


Over time, experience—and sometimes hard lessons—have shown that security is more than just technology, processes, or a team of IT specialists. Without a strong corporate culture that prioritizes cybersecurity, even the best efforts can be overlooked or misunderstood.


Perhaps this is more important: Did you hear that many scientists are “sceptical”? Perhaps not; the headline wouldn’t sound as good.


ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) are very much like a magic act in that their confident responses to almost any query conceal the fact that they are not intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word.


The market for dielectric liquid required for immersion cooling is dominated by a small number of players that are aware of their market power.


Analysis AI models like OpenAI o1/o3, DeepSeek-R1, and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking can mimic human reasoning through a process called chain of thought.

Hedge 261: The NTIA, Spectrum, and Broadband

In the United States, the National Telecommunications and Infrastructure Administration manages spectrum and researches the current state of Internet connectivity for policy makers. Henning Schulzrinne joins Tom and Russ to discuss the role of the NTIA, spectrum management, and broadband management.
 
You can read the NTIA’s reports here.
 

 
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Weekend Reads 022125


It’s no wonder that techno-futurists trumpet a coming machine intelligence with such ease — they’ve lowered the standards so much to begin with.


While companies are going to extraordinary lengths to obtain valuable compute power to satisfy artificial intelligence’s (AI) growing appetite, a group of vendors have found a way to dip into the existing infrastructure for the extra shot of compute.


To ensure stability and security, every IXP enforces a set of rules — a code of conduct for its participants. These rules go beyond technical niceties; they are essential safeguards for the entire ecosystem.


The terms Digital Sovereignty or Souveraineté numérique have recently risen in prominence to describe the international rule of law as it applies to information and communication technologies.


In this second installment of Beyond Their Intended Scope, we analyze a recent BGP leak out of Brazil that briefly affected networks around the world.

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