Hedge 220: The Cost of the Cloud

Cloud services are all the rage right now, but are they worth it? There are many aspects to the question, and the answer is almost always going to be “it depends.” Do you really need to spin up capacity more quickly than you can buy hardware and get it running? Do you really need to be able to spin capacity down without leaving any hardware behind? Is cloud really the best use of your team’s time and talent?

David Heinemeier Hansson joins Tom and Russ to talk about the economics and uses of cloud, and why his company has moved away from public cloud services.

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Hedge 219: Are We There Yet?

We’ve been talking about many of the same things in networking since the late 1980s–autonomous, self-driving, autonomic, etc.–and yet … those things all still seem like some sort of Jetson’s cartoon episode. Why aren’t we there yet? Are these even the right goals?

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On the ‘net: Networking Models

I’m writing a series on network models over at Packet Pushers; links to the first three are below.

Looking back at my career in network engineering, beyond some basic concepts and naming conventions, I cannot remember using the OSI model once. I have used the concept of layering, but never the OSI model specifically.

First, models are not sacrosanct. A model is just a tool. If the model you are using is not working for you, feel free to modify it. I find simpler yet extensible models far more effective than complex models for channeling my thoughts. In the past I have tried building huge models that “put everything in one place,” but they do not work for me.

How does a host differ from a middlebox? Hosts are designed to run applications that create and consume packets rather than quickly forwarding traffic through the network. The primary difference is that the source and destination are not two different ports on the same device but rather a virtual interface representing an application and a physical interface.

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Highway 9 Networks recently emerged from stealth mode with $25 million in seed funding and a vision to provide enterprise companies with SaaS-based private mobile networks that would eliminate gaps in coverage by incorporating cellular technology.

Hackers’ advantage: One of the biggest security weaknesses in U.S. digital networks and infrastructure is out-of-date, no-longer-supported technology.

Threat actors have been observed leveraging the QEMU open-source hardware emulator as tunneling software during a cyber attack targeting an unnamed “large company” to connect to their infrastructure.

There are some weighty ironies here. The AI “safety” experts had raised alarm about “implicit bias” in AI, only for Google to release an almost parodically racist chatbot.

Yet another DNS vulnerability has been exposed. The language of the press release revealing the vulnerability is certainly dramatic, with “devasting consequences” and the threat to “completely disable large parts of the worldwide Internet.”

It’s a good rule of nostril that if your litigation department is a source of revenue, your business model stinks.

In his January 12 SpaceX update, Elon Musk said the biggest goal for Starlink from a technical standpoint is to get the mean latency below 20 ms.

In a recent press release, John Deere Continue reading

Hedge 218: Longer than /24’s

Most providers will only accept a /24 or shorter IPv4 route because routers have always had limited amounts of forwarding table space. In fact, many hardware and software IPv4 forwarding implementations are optimized for a /24 or shorter prefix length. Justin Wilson joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss why the DFZ might need to be expanded to longer prefix lengths, and the tradeoffs involved in doing so.

 
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AI Assistants

I have written elsewhere about the danger of AI assistants leading to mediocrity. Humans tend to rely on authority figures rather strongly (see Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram as one example), and we often treat “the computer” as an authority figure.

The problem is, of course, Large Language Models—and AI of all kinds—are mostly pattern-matching machines or Chinese Rooms. A pattern-matching machine can be pretty effective at many interesting things, but it will always be, in essence, a summary of “what a lot of people think.” If you choose the right people to summarize, you might get close to the truth. Finding the right people to summarize, however, is beyond the powers of a pattern-matching machine.

Just because many “experts” say the same thing does not mean the thing is true, valid, or useful.

AI assistants can make people more productive, at least in terms of sheer output. Someone using an AI assistant will write more words per minute than someone who is not. Someone using an AI assistant will write more code daily than someone who is not.

But is it just more, or is it better?

Measuring the mediocratic effect of using AI systems, even as Continue reading

Weekend Reads 031524

Of all the problems with electric cars, perhaps the least expected was the revelation that some home charging points provide a potential point of weakness for malign foreign powers to interfere with our National Grid.

More than 8,000 domains and 13,000 subdomains belonging to legitimate brands and institutions have been hijacked as part of a sophisticated distribution architecture for spam proliferation and click monetization.

MWC Qualcomm is going big on AI at MWC, where it’s showing off a 7 billion parameter large language model running on an Android phone, along with an online hub to help mobile devs blend models into their apps, and AI infused into its latest 5G modem and Wi-Fi 7 silicon.

In the first week of January, the pharmaceutical giant Merck quietly settled its years-long lawsuit over whether or not its property and casualty insurers would cover a $700 million claim filed after the devastating NotPetya cyberattack in 2017.

Law enforcement agencies shut down xDedic, a cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) marketplace specifically providing web servers to cybercriminals, back in 2019.

Use of the Rust programming language has been on the rise but is only expected to continue to gather steam as more security-focused organizations call for Rust developers Continue reading

Hedge 217: Doug Madory and BGP Security Incidents

We hear a lot about BGP security incidents–but what is really going on? How often do these happen, and how much damage do they do? Doug Madory, who monitors these things for Kentik, joins Russ White and Tom Ammon to talk about BGP security in the wild.

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Hedge 216: Automation Success Stories

One thing we often hear about automation is that its hard because there are so many different interfaces. On this episode of the Hedge, Daniel Teycheney joins Ethan Banks and Russ White to discuss how they started from a simple idea and ended up building an automation system that does cross vendor boundaries within a larger discussion about automation and APIs.

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Weekend Reads 040124

Exclusive Dell’s “return to office” mandate has left employees confused about which offices they can use and the future of their jobs – and concerned the initiative is a stealth layoff program that will disproportionately harm women at the IT giant.

FDC Pat Gelsinger wants to make Intel the world’s second largest chip manufacturer by 2030, and that means serving businesses the x86 giant has traditionally seen as competitors.

Intel revealed a new road map at its Intel Foundry Services (IFS) Direct event that will take the company into 2027. Itﾒs an extension of the road map Intel laid out nearly three years ago, shortly after Intelﾒs CEO Pat Gelsinger took the reins of the company.

It is not known who pilfered the information nor their motives, but this leak provides a first-of-its-kind look at the internal operations of a state-affiliated hacking contractor.

Apple has announced a new post-quantum cryptographic protocol called PQ3 that it said will be integrated into iMessage to secure the messaging platform against future attacks arising from the threat of a practical quantum computer.

Juniper Networks, currently in the process of being acquired by HPE, has been accused of violating US securities laws in a shareholder Continue reading

Hedge 215: Old Engineering Quotes

Reading people from the past can sometimes show us where today’s blind spots are–but sometimes we can just find the blind spots of the people who lived then. In this episode of the Hedge, Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ finish going through a selection of quotes from an engineering book published in 1911. This time, we find there are some things to agree with, but also some to disagree with.

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The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that laws requiring crippled encryption and extensive data retention violate the European Convention on Human Rights – a decision that may derail European data surveillance legislation known as Chat Control.

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) says that “better than 80% of all electronic system failures that are attributed to power anomalies are actually the result of electrical wiring or grounding errors or are generated by other loads within the customer’s facility.”

With research making considerable progress in designing quantum computers, it is time to consider the scenario that usable quantum computing will become a reality in the future. In this post, we discuss the testbed that we are setting up to empirically evaluate the impact of quantum-safe cryptography algorithms on DNSSEC.

Late last year, Congress extended Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and, in doing so, secured the nation’s warrantless surveillance powers until April 2024. With that month fast approaching, House Republicans have unveiled a new package to reauthorize those same powers, within limits.

Google has announced that it’s open-sourcing Magika, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool to identify file types, to help defenders accurately detect binary Continue reading

Hedge 214: Hardware Offloading

Network operators increasingly rely on generic hosts, rather than specialized routers (appliances) to forward traffic. Much of the performance on hosts relies on offloading packets switching and processing to specialized hardware on the network interface card. In this episode of the Hedge, Krzysztof Wróbel and Maciej Rabęda join Russ and Tom to talk about hardware offloading.

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You can find out more about hardware offloading here.

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This year, I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside some of the highest- performing individuals in our profession. I’ve taken that opportunity to observe their work, look for patterns, and to try to identify the attributes that contribute to their success, not only as technologists but as humans.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s dream of establishing a network of chip factories to fuel the growth of AI may be much, much wilder than feared.

Advanced persistent threat (APT) groups are more dangerous than your run-of-the-mill cybercriminals. They, after all, trail their sights not only on financial gain but loftier targets such as wreaking havoc on entire nations.

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the role of the Domain Name System (DNS) in directing where your applications connect to, and where content comes from.

As you awoke one morning from uneasy dreams you found yourself transformed in your bed into a software engineer. A calamity that I find all too familiar.

Whether you want to land a new job or make your contributions count, effective communication goes a long way.

At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bit about the resolution to “stay human” in Continue reading

Hedge 213: Batfish with Ratul Mahajan

Network configuration analysis has always been the domain of commercial-grade software. Batfish changes all that with an open source, community-supported tool that can find errors and guarantees the correctness of planned or current network configurations. Ratul Mahajan joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to talk about this new tool, its capabilities, and the importance of network configuration analysis.
 

 
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You can find out more about Batfish at the project home page, and in this paper by Ratul.

Weekend Reads 020924

Artificial intelligence and the chips that fuel its evolution have given rise to a new arms race between the US and China.

Alongside concerning recent security news, there has been a media-wide rise of references to ‘credential stuffing’. This is a term that doesn’t convey very much, but as it’s the accepted term inside the infosec community, it’s probably here to stay.

In October, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed a set of rules that if implemented would transform how financial institutions handle personal data about their customers.

In a far cry from the early 2000s, most U.S. adults today say they use the internet (95%), have a smartphone (90%) or subscribe to high-speed internet at home (80%), according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted May 19 to Sept. 5, 2023.

Cloudflare was a victim of the wide-ranging Okta supply-chain campaign last fall, with a data breach impacting its Atlassian Bitbucket, Confluence, and Jira platforms beginning on Thanksgiving Day.

Honeypots are usually used as an intrusion detection tool. Many security researchers, including Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTS), deploy honeypots, to learn about tools, tactics, and the attacker’s infrastructure.

AWS could rake in between $400 million and Continue reading

Hedge 212: Shift Left? w/Chris Romeo

How many times have you heard you should “shift left” in the last few years? What does “shift left” even mean? Even if it had meaning once, does it still have any meaning today? Should we abandon the concept, or just the term? Listen in as Chris Romeo joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to talk about the origin, meaning, and modern uselessness of the term “shift left.”
 

 
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On Writing Complexity

I’ve been on a bit of a writer’s break after finishing the CCST book, but it’s time to rekindle my “thousand words a day” habit. As always, one part of this is thinking about how I write—is there anything I need to change? Tools, perhaps, or style?

What about the grade level complexity of my writing? I’ve never really paid attention to this, but I’m working on contributing to a site regularly that does. So maybe I should.

I tend to write to the tenth or eleventh-grade level, even when writing “popular material,” like blog posts. The recommended level is around the eighth-grade level. Is this something I need to change?

It seems the average person considers anything above the eighth-grade reading level “too hard” to read, so they give up. Every reading level calculation I’ve looked at essentially uses word and sentence length as proxies for complexity. Long words and sentences intimidate people.

On the other hand, measuring the reading grade level can seem futile. There are plenty of complex concepts described by one- and two-syllable words. Short sentences can still have lots of meaning.

Further, the reading grade level does not tell you if the sentence makes sense. Continue reading

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Everybody likes good news, especially at the beginning of the corporate year, and we are happy to report that TSMC’s revenues in the fourth quarter ended in December 2023 were only down 1.5 percent year on year to $19.62 billion, and were up 13.6 sequentially from the third quarter

HP CEO Enrique Lores admitted this week that the company’s long-term objective is “to make printing a subscription” when he was questioned about the company’s approach to third-party replacement ink suppliers.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has proposed creating a new top-level domain (TLD) and never allowing it to be delegated in the global domain name system (DNS) root.

What is cool about DNS over HTTPS is that, well, it uses HTTPS. Because HTTP clients are plentiful and well understood by many developers, it should make for a pretty simple implementation.

However, VPN is no longer good enough to secure remote work. For instance, VPN gives remote employees full network access to corporate resources when they login.

Universally, every person that I put the question to dismissed FWA wireless as a temporary technology with no real long-term legs.

Apple launched the original 128 kB Continue reading

Hedge 211: Learning About Learning

How much have you thought about the way you learn–or how to effectively teach beginners? There is a surprising amount of research into how humans learn, and how best to create material to teach them. In this roundtable episode, Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ discuss a recent paper from the Communications of the ACM, 10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning.

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