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Category Archives for "Russ White"

Weekend Reads 092824


Instead, Broadcom is now experimenting with co-packaging the optics directly into the GPUs themselves.


With K-12 schools back in session across the nation, millions of students are adjusting to a new learning environment — a cellphone-free classroom or, in some cases, a phone-free school day.


Being at the core of the Internet places the DNS under a lot of pressure. New forms of DNS abuse emerge each year, disputes over domain names persist, and all the while, the Internet just keeps getting bigger.


The censorship war has hit a flashpoint. Late last month, Brazil banned Elon Musk’s social media site, X, after Musk refused a government order to suppress seven dissident accounts.


This raises a question. If someone is situated in South America and wants to access youtu.be, is their performance going to be impacted (assuming he has to do the entire recursive lookup with no cache)?


ODA focuses on identifying macroscopic Internet outages, such as outages that affect a significant portion of the population within either a geographic region or an Autonomous System (AS).


For practitioners, this study provides a rich set of criteria that can be used for evaluating their projects, as well as strong evidence of Continue reading

Hedge 243: The Open Radio Area Network (RAN)

The cellular network world is similar enough to the IP networking world to feel familiar, but different enough to require learning new terms and ideas. Tom Nadeau joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss one element of this networking world, the RAN network, and the current move towards open source and white box disaggregated solutions.

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Weekend Reads 090724


A federal judge struck down a Biden administration rule on Tuesday that banned employers from using noncompete agreements, which would have affected the contracts of millions of Americans.


The Open Compute Project, the org best known for offering designs for hyperscale hardware, has rounded up AWS, Google, Meta, and Microsoft to help it test concrete.


Recent trends show that ransomware attacks continue to grow more advanced and persistent.


When you are designing applications that run across the scale of an entire datacenter and that are comprised of hundreds to thousands of microservices running on countless individual servers and that have to be called within a matter of microseconds to give the illusion of a monolithic application, building fully connected, high bi-section bandwidth Clos networks is a must


The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) just released three finalized standards for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) covering public key encapsulation and two forms of digital signatures. In progress since 2016, this achievement represents a major milestone towards standards development that will keep information on the Internet secure and confidential for many years to come.


Linearity is one of the greatest success stories in mathematics. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, “Unlike other parts of Continue reading

Weekend Reads 083024


Microsoft on Thursday disclosed four medium-severity security flaws in the open-source OpenVPN software that could be chained to achieve remote code execution (RCE) and local privilege escalation (LPE).


Cybersecurity researchers have discovered multiple critical flaws in Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings that, if successfully exploited, could result in serious consequences.


As many as 10 security flaws have been uncovered in Google’s Quick Share data transfer utility for Android and Windows that could be assembled to trigger remote code execution (RCE) chain on systems that have the software installed.


SiFive has announced the launch of its latest core for datacenters, the P870-D, and claims it has a leg up on Arm’s Neoverse N2 in density for AI.


Unstoppable Domains (UD), a provider of Web3 domain names and digital identities, has been officially accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).


CENTR, the association overseeing European country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registries, has announced the public release of its Domain Crawler Project code.


Remote SIM provisioning (RSP) for consumer devices is the protocol specified by the GSM Association for downloading SIM profiles into a secure element in a mobile device. The process is commonly known as eSIM, and it Continue reading

August Rule 11 Academy Update

I’ve been working on new material over at Rule 11 Academy. This month’s posts are:

  • BGP Route Reflector Lab
  • The Clos Fabric (history)
  • The Default Free Zone
  • Network Addresses
  • BGP Policy Entrance Selection (2)
  • Interview Rubric Sample
  • BGP Policy Entrance Select (1)
  • Interviewing Background

    • This brings us up to a total of 39 lessons. Each lesson should be about 15 minutes, so about 10 hours of material so far. The trial membership will take you through the end of the year. After the first of the year, the trial membership will last 2 months.

Weekend Reads 081624


Beware of Internet FORCES aiming to change your mind or direct your decisions! That acronym, coined by behavioral scientist Patrick Fagan, helps people know when they’re being “nudged.”


Enter your name into an internet search engine and the first few results will probably include detailed profiles of you compiled by “people-search” websites with names like Intelius, PeopleFinders, and Spokeo.


Following the July 19 outages caused by a bad update, the cybersecurity firm faces shareholder lawsuits and pressure to pay damages for at least one major customer, Delta Airlines. Will software liability follow?


Since 1998 — the last year Congress passed a major law to reform the tech industry and protect children in the virtual space — a lot has changed.


According to a damning report from 404 Media, backed with internal Slack chats, emails, and documents obtained by the outlet, Nvidia helped itself to “a human lifetime visual experience worth of training data per day,” Ming-Yu Liu, vice president of Research at Nvidia and a Cosmos project leader, admitted in a May email.


It has been an enduring fascination to see how we could use packet networking in the context of digital communications in space.


At a recent conference Continue reading

Weekend Reads 081024


Network observability tools provide information on the health and behavior of applications, offer insights into end-user experience, and detect anomalies that are indicative of security incidents.


Maestro is a general-purpose, horizontally scalable workflow orchestrator designed to manage large-scale workflows such as data pipelines and machine learning model training pipelines.


It might be time to get the pens and notebooks back out and shut off the keyboard for a while. Just pretend you’re back in the first grade and don’t have a minicomputer in your back pocket.


Intel has finally provided an update on instability issues on 13th-gen and 14th-gen CPUs. An update posted by Thomas Hannaford, Intel’s communications manager, pins the instability on an error in the microcode that requests incorrect voltage numbers, leading to instability in the processor.


Separation agreements Meta gave to employees during mass 2022 layoffs are illegal, a US judge has decided, and the reasoning could have implications far beyond Zuckercorp.


In 1940, thirteen percent of the U.S. population lived in suburbs. In 2010, it was half. An analysis by demographer Wendell Cox of population trends during the 2010s showed that 92 percent of all growth in major metropolitan areas was in the suburbs and Continue reading

Hedge 238: What Went Wrong? (Crowdstrike)

The massive failure resulting from a failed update to 8.5 million Windows hosts by Crowdstrike will live in Internet history for years to come. The failure will be studied by engineering teams and college classes to understand what went wrong and how we can stop this from happening in the future. Derick Winkworth (@cloudtoad), Eyvonne Sharp, Tom Ammon, and Russ White hang out at the hedge to talk about what happened and lessons learned from a network engineering perspective.
 

 
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Crowdstrike released a detailed description of the problematic update here.

The Hedge 237: What’s Wrong with Vendors?

Looking at changes in the market in the last ten years, it certainly seems like vendors work less toward innovation and more towards locking customers in to revenue streams. Chris Emerick, Dave Taht, and Russ White decided it’s time to talk about. What’s wrong with vendors? And since everything can’t be wrong with vendors, where are they doing the right thing?
 

 
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Worth Reading 072624


Recent events involving CrowdStrike’s Falcon security software have underscored a critical lesson across the industry: the importance of having a robust, secure release process.


My analysis of the event has a lot of similarities with my reflections on the Optus outage last year, the incident underscores the critical issue of resilience in IT infrastructure, particularly in systems that lack diversity.


But recovery is just the beginning. What’s sure to follow is a barrage of regulatory oversight, hard feelings among the IT community, and a tough reminder that even a small slip-up in a software update can have catastrophic global consequences.


Over the years, there has been a lot of discussion on if VLAN 1 in Cisco switches is special or not. Does it have any characteristics that other VLANs donﾒt?


Are you considering the switch from network engineer to cloud engineer? This post wo’t teach you everything needed to become a cloud expert, but hopefully, it will create a level of comfort and familiarity such that you can start your journey to the cloud from here.


The creation of voluntary standards is an idea that may seem easier than imposing regulations. But devising voluntary standards presents unique challenges, different from Continue reading

Weekend Reads 071924


On the other hand, these same minimal overheads imply that DNS over UDP cannot perform prompt detection of packet loss and cannot efficiently defend itself against various approaches to tampering with the DNS, such as source address spoofing, payload alteration and third-party packet injection. Perhaps most importantly, the way UDP handles large payloads is a problem.


User interface (UI) design is currently experiencing a transition from traditional graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to systems designed to recognize a personﾒs gestures and movements.


The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), along with two other international consumer protection networks, announced on Thursday the results of a study into the use of “dark patterns” — or manipulative design techniques — that can put users’ privacy at risk or push them to buy products or services or take other actions they otherwise wouldn’t have.


One of the most concerning aspects of social media is that much of its influence evades our notice. We don’t realize that we’re being influenced, or shaped to think a certain way, or view the world through a specific lens.


Chinese automobile conglomerate Geely has made significant strides since I last wrote about their Geesat LEO constellation for mobile vehicle connectivity.


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The Hedge 235: Copyrights and Centralization

Join us as Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ hang out for another roundtable. We start the show talking about Tom’s plant (is it real or … ??). What does copyright have to do with Internet Service Providers? Should the two topics be related at all? What can the IETF do about Internet centralization?

Thanks for listening—and please reach out if you have a topic you’d like to hear about, or a guest you’d like to hear.

 

 

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Weekend Reads 071224


The gang’s time from initial access to draining data out of a Veeam server is shockingly fast; after which the attackers went on to deploy actual ransomware in less than a day.


A critical security issue has been disclosed in the Exim mail transfer agent that could enable threat actors to deliver malicious attachments to target users’ inboxes.


The new fireball is the arrival of AI, its widespread acceptance and adoption, and the view that it is now a competitive imperative.


As a follow-up to the post yesterday on native VLANs, there was a question on what would happen to 802.1Q-tagged frames traversing an unmanaged switch.


State-controlled media on Tuesday covered the proceedings of the third China IPv6 Innovation and Development Conference, at which officials revealed that as of May 2024 the Middle Kingdom was home to 794 million users of the protocol, and that 64.56 percent of mobile traffic – plus 21.21 percent of fixed network traffic – is carried on networks that employ it.


In fact, since 2017, Google’s environmental reports show that the company’s electricity use, CO2 emissions, and carbon intensity have soared.


Using DevSecOps helps ensure the right level of security throughout both Continue reading

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