Worth Reading: Shameless Guesses, Not Hallucinations

In a recent article, Scott Alexander made an interesting point: What AI produces are not hallucinations but shameless guesses (also known as bullshit) because the training process rewards the correct answers but does not penalize the incorrect ones. After all, having an AI model say, “I don’t know that” is not good for business, is it?

On a tangential note, calling those blunders hallucinations was a marketing masterstroke. Not being a native English speaker, I might be missing some nuances, but I feel like hallucinations might be something you’re not responsible for (some of the time), whereas we all know who’s responsible for bullshit and shameless guesses – and responsibility is something the AI companies are clearly trying to stay as far away from as possible.

On another tangential note, if you’re not following Scott Alexander’s blog substack, you’re missing out.

How we built Organizations to help enterprises manage Cloudflare at scale

Cloudflare was designed to be simple to use for even the smallest customers, but it’s also critical that it scales to meet the needs of the largest enterprises. While smaller customers might work solo or in a small team, enterprises often have thousands of users making use of Cloudflare’s developer, security, and networking capabilities. This scale can add complexity, as these users represent multiple teams and job functions. 

Enterprise customers often use multiple Cloudflare Accounts to segment their teams (allowing more autonomy and separation of roles), but this can cause a new set of problems for the administrators by fragmenting their controls.

That’s why today, we’re launching our new Organizations feature in beta — to provide a cohesive place for administrators to manage users, configurations, and view analytics across many Cloudflare Accounts. 

Principle of least privilege

The principle of least privilege is one of the driving factors behind enterprises using multiple accounts. While Cloudflare’s role-based access control (RBAC) system now offers fine-grained permissions for many resources, it can be cumbersome to enumerate all the resources one by one. Instead, we see enterprises use multiple accounts, so each team’s resources are managed by that team alone. This allows organic Continue reading

NB569: Adding Drones to Your DR Plan; Collision Avoidance (Orbital, not Wi-Fi)

Take a Network Break! We start with a critical vulnerability in Cisco’s Integrated Management Controller. In the news, Verizon settles patent litigation over IoT antenna technology, Cato Networks lets customers purchase individual services within its SASE offering, and Azure adds private application gateways that don’t require a public IP address. Thousands of F5 Big-IP instances... Read more »

HN821: Boring Network Design Is Good

Ethan Banks sits down with Ryan Hamel at the 96th North American Network Operators’ Group (NANOG96). Ryan, a network automation developer for the Zayo Group, talks about why boring network design is actually a good thing. He and Ethan explore why simplicity and standardization are key to long-term success. They also emphasize the importance of... Read more »

Technology Short Take 193

Welcome to Technology Short Take #193! I know it has only been a couple weeks since the last Tech Short Take, but I am guessing that readers won’t really mind another one. Here is my latest collection of articles and posts about data center-related technologies. Enjoy!

Networking

Servers/Hardware

  • RIP Mac Pro. I had a “classic Mac Pro” (2012 era) for a long time, and I loved that system. (I even ran Linux on it for a while.) It is a shame to see it go.
  • I mentioned on social media (Mastodon/Bluesky) that I recently purchased all the hardware for a new PC build. It’ll be part PC/part home server, as I look to expand the type and scope of services that I self-host. Don’t be surprised if a few articles emerge out of this.

Security

Monumen Operasi Lintas Laut Jawa-Bali: Simbol Kepahlawanan dan Strategi Militer

Sejarah Monumen Operasi Lintas Laut Jawa-Bali

Monumen Operasi Lintas Laut Jawa-Bali dibangun untuk mengabadikan perjuangan TNI dalam memindahkan pasukan melalui laut pada masa awal kemerdekaan. Operasi ini memiliki peran strategis dalam memperkuat pertahanan Indonesia dan mempertahankan kedaulatan wilayah. Selain itu, monumen ini menjadi simbol keteguhan, keberanian, dan inovasi militer.

Selain itu, monumen ini juga mengajarkan generasi muda tentang pentingnya strategi, kerja sama, dan keberanian dalam menghadapi tantangan. Dengan begitu, monumen tidak hanya sebagai benda sejarah, tetapi juga sebagai media edukasi.

Monumen ini terletak di surabaya, Jawa Timur, dekat pelabuhan strategis yang menjadi titik awal operasi. Lokasi ini dipilih karena memiliki nilai historis tinggi dan mudah diakses publik.

Desain dan Struktur Monumen

Monumen ini dirancang dengan arsitektur yang unik, memadukan unsur modern dan tradisional. Struktur utamanya terdiri dari patung perwira TNI, kapal laut, dan relief sejarah operasi. Setiap elemen memiliki makna simbolis, yang menggambarkan kepahlawanan, strategi, dan pengorbanan prajurit.

Selain itu, monumen memiliki taman dan area edukasi yang memungkinkan pengunjung belajar sejarah sambil menikmati suasana. Taman ini Continue reading

Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure: Surga Hiburan di Jantung Moskow

Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure, yang dikenal luas sebagai Taman Gorky, merupakan salah satu destinasi utama bagi warga Moskow maupun wisatawan internasional. Taman ini tidak hanya menawarkan hiburan dan rekreasi, tetapi juga menjadi simbol kebudayaan modern Rusia. Setiap tahun, ribuan pengunjung datang untuk menikmati alam, olahraga, dan acara seni yang diselenggarakan di taman yang luas ini.

Sejarah dan Perkembangan Taman Gorky

Taman ini didirikan pada tahun 1928, sebagai bagian dari upaya pemerintah Soviet untuk menyediakan ruang publik yang nyaman bagi rakyat. Awalnya, taman ini lebih sederhana, dengan jalur pejalan kaki dan area hijau. Namun, seiring waktu, Taman Gorky berkembang pesat menjadi ikon modernitas.

Pada tahun 2011, taman ini mengalami renovasi besar-besaran, yang mencakup penataan ulang jalan setapak, area olahraga, dan fasilitas anak-anak. Transformasi ini menjadikannya taman kota paling modern di Moskow, yang memadukan tradisi dan inovasi. Selain itu, taman ini juga memfasilitasi festival musik, pameran seni, dan acara komunitas yang rutin diadakan setiap musim.

Fasilitas Unggulan Taman Gorky

Taman Gorky menawarkan berbagai fasilitas hiburan dan olahraga Continue reading

IPB197: SLAAC and the End of DHCP?

Today our hosts discuss the essential role of Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) in successfully deploying an IPv6-mostly network. SLAAC is required to assign a unique IPv6 address to the Customer-side Translator (CLAT), which allows devices to operate on IPv6. However, enterprise operators might prefer using DHCPv6 for network tracking and accountability, potentially trapping them in... Read more »

N4N052: Multicast Part 2

Lenny Giuliano, Sr. Distinguished Systems Engineer at HPE Juniper Networks, joins Holly and Ethan for another round of multicast. Part two helps fill in details not covered in episode 50. They cover how multicast traffic also affects Ethernet frame addressing, and the key differences between IPv4 and IPv6 multicast. They also explain new hybrid multicast... Read more »

How to Stub LLMs for AI Agent Security Testing and Governance

Note: The core architecture for this pattern was introduced by Isaac Hawley from Tigera.

If you are building an AI agent that relies on tool calling, complex routing, or the Model Context Protocol (MCP), you’re not just building a chatbot anymore. You are building an autonomous system with access to your internal APIs.

With that power comes a massive security and governance headache, and AI agent security testing is where most teams hit a wall. How do you definitively prove that your agent’s identity and access management (IAM) actually works?

The scale of the problem is hard to overstate. Microsoft’s telemetry shows that 80% of Fortune 500 companies now run active AI agents, yet only 47% have implemented specific AI security controls. Most teams are deploying agents faster than they can test them.

If an agent is hijacked via prompt injection, or simply hallucinates a destructive action, does your governance layer stop it? Testing this usually forces engineers into a frustrating trade-off:

  1. Use the real API (Gemini, OpenAI): Real models are heavily RLHF’d to be safe and polite. It is incredibly difficult (and non-deterministic) to intentionally force a real model to “go rogue” and consistently output malicious tool Continue reading

Why we’re rethinking cache for the AI era

Cloudflare data shows that 32% of traffic across our network originates from automated traffic. This includes search engine crawlers, uptime checkers, ad networks — and more recently, AI assistants looking to the web to add relevant data to their knowledge bases as they generate responses with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Unlike typical human behavior, AI agents, crawlers, and scrapers’ automated behavior may appear aggressive to the server responding to the requests. 

For instance, AI bots frequently issue high-volume requests, often in parallel. Rather than focusing on popular pages, they may access rarely visited or loosely related content across a site, often in sequential, complete scans of the websites. For example, an AI assistant generating a response may fetch images, documentation, and knowledge articles across dozens of unrelated sources.

Although Cloudflare already makes it easy to control and limit automated access to your content, many sites may want to serve AI traffic. For instance, an application developer may want to guarantee that their developer documentation is up-to-date in foundational AI models, an e-commerce site may want to ensure that product descriptions are part of LLM search results, or publishers may want to get paid for their content through mechanisms such Continue reading