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Fast Following Fails

Fast following fails.

Whenever I hear a leader in a technology business say, “We’re going to fast follow because it’s the most profitable place to be,” I know I’m looking at a failed organization. I didn’t come to this conclusion by thinking about it. I came to this conclusion by observing it repeatedly.

After observing it, however, I wanted to understand why this particular strategy fails so consistently and spectacularly. Why? To understand my theory, we need to start in a somewhat different place than business—we need to start with the nature of goals and humans.

You can place goals into two buckets: first things and second things.

First things are foundational. If you are a technology company, the first thing is building a stable, resilient, and flexible platform (or foundation). The products you sell will only be as stable as your platform. The innovation you achieve will only be as consistent as your platform is.

Second things are goals you can only achieve once you’ve built the first things.

Here’s the hard truth no one wants to hear: Generating revenue is a second thing.

Humans become what they do.

We all want to believe we can become what we Continue reading

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We sketch out the enabling technologies for AI. They include search, reasoning, neural networks, natural language processing, signal processing and computer graphics, programming and conventional software engineering, human-computer interaction, communications, and specialized hardware that provides supercomputing power.


For decades, thanks to the low latency enabled by Remote Direct Memory Access, or RDMA, a method of allowing CPUs and then GPUs and finally other kinds of XPUs to directly access the main memory of each other without having to go through the entire network software stack, InfiniBand found a niche and was one of the reasons why Nvidia shelled out $6.9 billion to acquire Mellanox Technologies more than five years ago.


Shipments of tape storage media increased again in 2024, according to HPE, IBM, and Quantum – the three companies that back the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Format.


In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, discusses a day in the life of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Not an extraordinary day, not a special day, just a regular day.


Dumb phones represent the laziest possible solution to a complex behavioral problem. They’re the dietary equivalent of having your jaw wired shut.

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They call themselves Scattered Spider. They’re probably younger than your college freshman. They live in suburban bedrooms across America and Britain, and they’ve just brought industries to their knees.


The RPKI makes use of RSA signatures. These “traditional” digital signatures are expected to be vulnerable to attacks with powerful quantum computers. While no quantum computer currently exists that can break traditional cryptography, the development of quantum computers is progressing rapidly, and it is expected that they will be able to break RSA and other traditional cryptographic algorithms, be it in several years or several decades.


Analysing Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) SYN segments, the initial step in the TCP three-way handshake, can reveal patterns and anomalies in network traffic, providing insights into potential threats.


One way to establish if a QUIC connection is viable without paying a time penalty is for the server to signal the capability to use QUIC to the client in the first (TCP/TLS) connection, allowing the client to initiate a QUIC session on the second and subsequent connections.


These are not bugs but are inherent limitations of the technology. The same limitations make it unlikely that LLM machines will ever be capable of performing all human tasks Continue reading

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Is Your Wi-Fi Router Tracking Your Browsing? Here’s What 30,000 Words of Privacy Policies Revealed.


Browser Dating wants your search history — all of it. Your 3 a.m. Reddit rabbit holes, your medical anxieties, your peculiar curiosities about President Trump’s hair, and whether cats plot murder.


Now, people are rethinking the trade-off. Ubuntu has disabled some protections, resulting in 20% performance boost.


Each time you swipe a loyalty card, you’re not just saving on groceries—you’re feeding a powerful data machine known as retail media.


Over the last ten years, more than 600 million websites have been secured with free certificates from Let’s Encrypt. Here’s how it all began and why.

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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!

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.
 

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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