Worth Reading: Paying for the bleeding edge

It is a good thing they still want to offload responsibility to IBM, Intel, and a few others, because it is only through such vendors that there is any hope that technologies will be advanced for the bleeding edge and eventually become the leading edge for enterprises. Which is, after all, the real point of having the technology in the first place. It is for everyone to advance, not just for the upper echelon of computing in each country. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @The Next Platform

Worth Reading: BGP DFZ Security

If a certificate is published with an incorrect set of number resources then there is the possibility that its subordinate certificates cannot be validated, which, as we’ve noted has implications for the reachability of services on the Internet through the connection to the routing system. Thus, certificate issuance is not without its potential legal liabilities, and it is not unusual for certificate authorities to limit their liabilities. —Geoff Huston @CircleID

Problems and Solutions

Worth Reading: Cleaning up ROAs

As of 14 September 2018, there are more than 6,700 INVALID prefix-origin pairs (IPv4 + IPv6). But how many prefixes would actually become unreachable in a ROV environment? —Nusenu @APNIC

Worth Reading: 3 out of 4 employees are a security risk

Some 75% of respondents today pose a moderate or severe risk to their company’s data, according to MediaPRO’s third annual State of Privacy and Security Awareness Report, and 85% of finance workers show some lack of data security and privacy knowledge. —Steve Zurier @Dark Reading

Reaction: The Importance of Open APIs

Over at CIMI, Tom Nolle Considers whether the open API is a revolution, or a cynical trap. The line of argument primarily relates to accessing functions in a Virtual Network Function (VNF), which is then related to Network Function Virtualization (NFV). The broader point is made in this line:

One important truth about an API is that it effectively imposes a structure on the software on either side of it. If you design APIs to join two functional blocks in a diagram of an application, it’s likely that the API will impose those blocks on the designer.

This is true—if you design the API first, it will necessarily impose information flow between the different system components, and even determine, at least to some degree, the structure of the software modules on either side of the API. For instance, if you decide to deploy a single network appliance vendor, then your flow of building packet filters will be similar across all devices. However, if you add a second vendor into the mix, you might find the way packet filters are described and deployed are completely different, requiring a per-device module that moves from intent to implementation.

While this problem will always Continue reading

Worth Reading: Software Efficiency

Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. Everybody just seems to be ok with it. People are often even proud about how much inefficient it is, as in “why should we worry, computers are fast enough.”

Street Curve

Worth Reading: DNS Flag Day

Starting from 1 February 2019, the organizations behind open source DNS software implementations are going to deploy changes to their code that could break your domains. That day has been labelled DNS Flag day. —Sebastian Castro @APNIC

Worth Reading: Lifecycle Automation

What is driving change in this situation is that transport networks are incorporating features that enable them to be reconfigurable under programmatic control, at both the packet and optical layers. This provides the opportunity to speed up service delivery and streamline network operations via innovative software controlling this infrastructure. —Jonathan Homa @lighttalk

Worth Reading: Reconsidering Culture Fit

If you’re hiring for culture fit, you’re doing it wrong. To build, scale, and sustain your workforce to meet the demands of Industry 4.0, you’ll need to take four crucial actions when seeking external talent or building internal teams. —Jen Kelchner @opensource.com

The Diminishing Returns of Strong Passwords

Worth Reading: New Lambda MSA Specs

Today, 100GE traffic is typically deployed in networks with QSFP28 modules, which utilize a 4x 25Gb/s electrical interface with host ports. That interface makes it very convenient to directly drive 4 wavelengths multiplexed together on to a single fiber. —Ray Nering @SP360

Worth Reading: Visualizing the IPv6 Address Space

The space-filling Hilbert Curve works well when visualizing the IPv4 address space; allowing users to plot the entire address space and yield a usable image. But in IPv6, the address space is simply too large and too sparsely used to get anything useful out of such a plot. —Luuk Hendriks @APNIC

History of Networking: QUIC

Worth Reading: Third Party Problems

With the rise of next-generation technologies, companies have access to more data than ever and more opportunities to act on that data. To manage this massive influx of information, they’re extending their partner network to new third-party vendors. And although doing so is helping in ameliorating the data-volume challenge, it’s also presenting new security obstacles. —Kevin Alexandra @datacenterjournal.com

Worth Reading: Intel’s 9th Generation Chips

Intel’s 9th Gen Core processors are here, and, as expected, they’re simply a refresh of the last generation of chips, with the same 14nm process the company’s been using since 2014. —Chaim Gartenberg @theverge

BGP and Suboptimal Route Reflection

One of the crucial points in understanding the operation of BGP is the reliance on the AS path to ensure all routes are loop-free. Within a single AS, however, there is no AS path. How, then, can you ensure the path through an AS is loop-free? The original plan was to fully mesh all the BGP speakers in the AS (a full mesh of iBGP speakers)—but building and maintaining a full mesh of iBGP speakers is difficult, so other solutions were quickly designed. The first of these as the BGP Confederation, which allows a set of autonomous systems to look like a single AS from the outside. This solution, however, is also cumbersome, so… the RR was invented.

The basic operation of an RR is fairy simple; as new attribute, the cluster list, is added to a route as is passes from client to server. The cluster list contains as list of the clusters the route has passed through, identified by the identifier of the route reflector that “heads” the cluster. If a Continue reading

Worth Reading: Next Steps for Edge Computing

Edge computing has gradually climbed the hype curve over the last couple of years, and it now stands at the center of why we do new things and launch new technologies. Why is it so important, what does it mean, where is the money behind the movement, and what does it mean to you? These are all good questions, and there is no simple answer to any of them. —Ildiko Vancsa @opensource.com

Columns and Pews