A unanimous Supreme Court reversed a $1 billion dollar jury award against a broadband provider in its March 2026 ruling in Cox Communications v. Sony Music.

Differential privacy (DP) data synthesizers are increasingly proposed to afford public release of sensitive information, offering theoretical guarantees for privacy (and, in some cases, utility), but limited empirical evidence of utility in practical settings.

LLMs are relentless data miners that train on unimaginably large text databases, looking for multi-dimensional statistical relationships among small chunks of text called tokens.

Regulatory filings and new business models suggest hyperscalers are shifting from simply building AI capacity to managing the enormous financial risks that come with it.

olicymakers are casting more and more problems as issues of cybersecurity. So reframed, wildly different policy issues, from misinformation, to child social media safety laws, to antitrust regulations, to alleged journalist misconduct, to anti-sex trafficking statutes become what this Article calls “cybersecuritized.

A better, more nuanced understanding of tasks in recommender systems can help minimize user costs across the entire recommendation process.

The current estimate of the world’s population is 8.264 billion people, so the share price of SpaceX is currently at a phenomenal USD $261 per head.

The analysis from space monitoring firm LeoLabs, provided to Breaking Defense, found that from January 2021 to January 2025 China has abandoned 51 spent rocket bodies in LEO above 650 kilometers (about 404 miles) in altitude, more than doubling the number for the previous five years to bring the total to 96.

A big problem, Pauzauskie said, revolves around reproducibility. So far, labs haven’t been able to show that they can consistently cool semiconductors.

This article recounts the evolution of modern computing systems to provide an analysis of security risks and their evolution, with a past and present look at key cyber-defense innovations as well as a perspective on future cybersecurity hard problems.

It’s no longer just about your IP address or the specific endpoint you think you’re connecting to, it’s about your location and which intermediary services can most effectively handle your request.

Earlier this month, a German court ruled that Google is liable for its AI search summaries. Rejecting defenses like “users can check for themselves,” and that they generally know “that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted,” the court held that the AI’s summaries are reflections of the company and “above all an expression of Google’s business activities.”

The distribution of Content Delivery Networks (CDN), cloud and content provider capacity across Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) provides a fascinating lens into the physical infrastructure of the Internet and public peering.

The memory market – by which we mean dynamic main memory as well as flash persistent memory – has been utterly and perhaps forever changed by the GenAI boom.

These days you could be excused by suspecting that the world has gone AI-mad, and if you were at the NANOG meeting your suspicions would’ve only been confirmed!

As the development of data centers in the U.S. faces intense criticism from local communities and legal action, project supporters are claiming “foreign influence” could be fueling the fire.

In this bingecast installment of the Mind Matters News podcast, host Robert J. Marks welcomes economics professor and author Gary Smith to discuss the hype around artificial intelligence and its impact on the market.

In the DNS name resolution space queries are free. To what extent do we see over-querying on the part of recursive resolvers in the DNS?

Over the past year, the Ethernet community has examined 400Gbps‑per‑lane signaling from many angles: AI network use cases, modulation options, channel limitations, and technology feasibility. Those discussions have been necessary, but they now need to converge into decisions that allow the industry to move forward.

For most of the internet era, distribution was scarce and content was abundant. Platforms that controlled distribution captured the majority of value.

In this post, I discuss our recent work that models and analyses the resilience of authoritative DNS infrastructure that supports individual domain names on the Internet.

The RIPE NCC made its all-powerful single sign-on tokens available to over 1000 third parties. From a single link click, any logged-in RIPE NCC user would leak their session token.

Identifying active IPv6 addresses is a challenging task, but it’s also an important one. As researchers and network operators, it helps us understand the current deployment, identify weak spots that need strengthening, and detect vulnerable devices for disclosure.

The fundamental bubble barometer is that speculators buy an asset because they expect the price to keep rising, not because they want the income generated by the asset. Indeed, most speculators don’t plan on holding the asset long enough receive any income.

Recently, there has been a surge in progress in quantum computing that has shortened the hypothetical timeline on which quantum computers can ‘break’ traditional public-key cryptography that uses the RSA scheme.

When business volume and market capitalization cross a critical threshold, vertically integrating infrastructure ceases to be merely a cost-cutting financial tactic; it becomes an existential imperative for computational resilience and commercial survival.

It looks like industry mergers and acquisition activity is in high gear lately.

Building multi-agent systems right now feels painfully identical to the early, chaotic days of the micro services gold rush.

The standard is called DNS-AID (Domain Name System for AI Discovery). Its premise is that the internet already solved the problem of finding things at scale forty years ago with DNS — and that the same infrastructure should handle AI agents.

Mythos is real. I know a big chunk of the industry thinks it’s a marketing stunt, and I get why. I get it. But I’ve seen the findings, and they’re bad.

In a paper published late in 2025, Østergaard and colleagues reported on their examination of almost 40 psychiatric referrals across Denmark that implicated AI chatbots in harmful interactions, including suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, and fostering delusions

Since its deployment in 2011, the adoption of RPKI by Internet Service Providers has shown continuous growth, a trend that persists to this day. As this growth continues it is important to measure its effect on BGP stability.

AI companies, AI influencers and famous professors have been making extraordinary claims for years about AI.

A robotic system that can produce a rubbery pancake is a true technical and logistic achievement, but why all this work to automate the production of mediocrity?

The greatest risk we face today isn’t that AI is becoming “too smart”; it’s that we are beginning to treat this technology as an infallible “oracle” rather than a capable, yet fundamentally fallible, “intern.”

A BBC journalist recently performed a silly experiment to prove a very serious point. In just 20 minutes, he manipulated ChatGPT and Google into telling the public he was a world-champion competitive hot dog eater.

Many (perhaps most) of the BGP route leaks reported on Cloudflare Radar (as with its predecessors) are what I term ‘ephemeral leaks‘, brief routing anomalies that exist only momentarily during convergence and have little to no operational impact.

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston and I discuss the Network Time Protocol (NTP). NTP is one of the oldest systems we rely on today.

The Gentlemen ransomware is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) threat that is distinguished by its ability to pair its strong per-file encryption with an aggressive self-propagation capability designed to enable broad network compromise.

LLMs can help tame the complexity at the root of many of today’s software security challenges.

The rising power demand of the data center industry almost appears like an industry running within the integrated grid but outside the usual paradigm of the traditional electric utility sector. Indeed, it should be treated as such.

Much has been said about the use of the DNS as a means both of tracking the online behaviour of individual users and as a means of online censorship and control. Almost every online transaction starts with a DNS query, and if one were able to assemble the complete set of DNS queries generated by an individual user it would be possible to assemble a relatively complete profile of their online activity.

Let’s say you wanted to make sure that your AI is secure. Can you just maximize the security and privacy benchmark and call it a day? Nope.

The internet is fragmenting. Not in the future. Now. At three different layers simultaneously.

In June, Microsoft Secure Boot certificates are set to expire for the first time ever.

The Technocratic State represents a new invisible risk of the 21st century, as it does not present itself as a conventional political authority. It appears as a technical solution that seems inevitable.

Author and journalist Michael Pollan characterizes our era as the “Second Copernican Shock,” a civilizational turning point where the boundary between human empathy and algorithmic calculation is increasingly blurred.

It’s always difficult for ISPs to fully understand how changes in the economy might impact them. Folks in the industry see the usual statistics on unemployment and inflation, but those don’t really tell much about the future as it relates to broadband adoption.

Companies rushing to adopt AI and LLMs without a clear strategy may be creating new risks.

Power failures are to blame for the most impactful data center outages, while network issues are the most frequent culprits for IT service disruptions, according to Uptime Institute’s latest analysis.

We’ve all been in that meeting where someone pulls up a chart and says, “Our AI product boosted conversion by 15%.” Everyone nods. Nobody dares to ask: “What if conversions had risen anyway?”

The proposed repair is Running-Code Primacy: the number-resource layer should be interpreted only by reference to the minimum technical function running networks require—uniqueness, interoperability, proof of control, routing-adjacent security, and locally verifiable state.

You already know IPv6 is overdue. You’ve known for years. You’ve probably sat in a meeting where you laid out the case — address exhaustion, rising costs, growth constraints — and watched leadership nod politely before approving the budget for another batch of leased IPv4 addresses.

A key question was whether this reflected a breakthrough specific to one model, or part of a broader trend. Results from an early checkpoint of GPT-5.5 suggest the latter: a second model, from a different developer, now reaches a similar level of performance on our cyber evaluations.

The most mature U.S. small modular nuclear reactor vendor — NuScale Power — and a politically connected firm planning to build perhaps the largest reactor project in the U.S. to power an enormous Texas data center — Fermi America — have both suffered recent, major, possibly existential blows.

Given the trend of using generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude for software development, many companies have decided that developers must use GenAI to succeed. I strongly disagree.

Here, through a series of randomized controlled trials on human-AI interactions (N = 1,222), we provide causal evidence for two key consequences of AI assistance: reduced persistence and impairment of unassisted performance. Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up.

Last month, market research company, Gartner, said that AI companies need close to “$2 trillion per year in revenue by 2029”, token consumption of between 50,000 and 100,000 times its current rate by 2030, and “a 10% profit margin per token.” With huge losses and small revenues, it is not likely that AI companies will achieve these goals on time.

He said that about 20% of all network traffic today, about 80 exabytes, comes from machine-to-machine traffic, and that alone is big news. Nokia is betting its future growth will come from meeting this growing demand.

For centuries, political power has repeatedly attempted to territorialize systems whose operational logic depended upon openness, circulation, and coordination beyond borders.

The screenshot feature has cultivated a wide range of impactful academic research across computing and social scientific fields.

When Motorola unveiled its Iridium global satellite-based mobile telephony service in the late 1990’s everything augured well for a revolution in the satellite communications market, only it didn’t happen.

While the software industry has made genuine strides over the past few decades to deliver products securely, the furious pace of AI adoption is putting that progress at risk.

The analytic company IDC says the U.S. economy will be generating 394 trillion zettabytes of data annually by 2028 (a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes).

Enterprise strategists need to worry about securing their environments against AI-powered attacks.

These milestones highlight the significance RPKI has gained over the past decade. Starting off as an experimental technology, it has become a central component of the Internet, affecting a large percentage of its networks.

More than 9.7 million third-party businesses sell goods on Amazon, and Amazon makes a lot of money charging those third parties to sell on its platform—$117.7 billion in 2022, representing 23% of Amazon’s total revenues.

For much of the history of computing, it was reasonably safe to assume that a machine was doing what you told it to do (and what its creators promised it would do), because its operations were local.

There is always the case that the unexpected happens, and X.509 certificates are no exception. There are circumstances where the certificate should be marked as unusable immediately, which is before the notAfter expiration time.

Our investigation uncovers two sophisticated telecom surveillance campaigns and, for the first time, links real-world attack traffic to mobile operator signalling infrastructure.

DDoS mitigation often relies on BGP for “scrubbing”, but how this appears in routing data is not well understood. We analyse five major providers to distinguish between always-on and on-demand protection.

This column argues that without AI, adequate privacy has become simply out of reach. This is not because AI is benign; it most definitely is not. Rather, the modern digital ecosystem has evolved to a point where no human, unaided, can understand, monitor, or manage the complexity of today’s data practices.

Conventional memory schemes follow the Pareto Principle, in which approximately maintaining 20% hot data can meet 80% of requests. L

Google has just forked its Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, designs for these two workloads, the very first time in more than a decade that TPU systems of the same generation were truly architecturally distinct from each other.

Fake domains are not a new problem. What’s now changing is the scale and how easily attackers can blend into your domain ecosystem with lookalikes, inactive registrations, and domains set up purely for email.

What can we learn about QUIC deployments just by listening to unsolicited QUIC traffic? This question becomes specifically exciting since QUIC aims for enhanced privacy by obfuscating metadata.

Securing AI means securing all the AI layers and throughout the lifecycle: data, model, and applications, in training and in inference.

According to a Reuters report, Meta is installing tracking software on its employees’ work computers. The tool, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will log mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes. It will also take occasional screenshots of employees’ screens.

Despite its usage, the behaviour of BGP-based scrubbers is not well understood, such as whether scrubbers are always on-path or activated on-demand.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has officially endorsed passkeys as the default authentication standard, marking the first time the agency has told consumers to move away from passwords entirely.

Many BGP route leaks reported by automated detection systems are actually brief, low-impact artifacts of normal BGP convergence.

Long round‑trip times have serious consequences for protocols like TCP, which rely on a steady stream of acknowledgements (ACKs) to manage sending rates, estimate delay, and trigger retransmissions.

As datacenter networks evolve toward ultra-high-speed links, the energy footprint of host-side packet processing grows increasingly significant.

The old perception of satellite internet as slow, expensive, and marginal is increasingly outdated. Today’s market includes multiple orbital models, each with distinct technical and operational characteristics.

What can we learn about QUIC deployments just by listening to unsolicited QUIC traffic? This question becomes specifically exciting since QUIC aims to enhance privacy by obfuscating metadata.

In late 2024, the federal government’s cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft’s biggest cloud computing offerings.

This report explores the evolution and current state of neuro- symbolic artificial intelligence, an approach that integrates neural network capabilities with symbolic reasoning.

The Linux 7.0 kernel is now out, and it’s one of the most impactful releases in years for networking professionals.

The human-speed defense of small business is being obliterated by the machine-speed offense of AI-driven cybercrime. Today, what large companies treat as a manageable risk is a terminal expense for small enterprises, with 60% of small enterprises shutting down within six months of a major attack.

The original frustration was familiar. You build on one provider, they change pricing, deprecate an API, or just aren’t the right tool anymore, and migrating is brutal.

Tech leaders hoping AI might help save money and improve efficiency in IT infrastructure should know that only 28 percent of use cases fully succeed and offer return on investment (ROI).

The best strategy in the world won’t succeed if a team falters operationally. But what is operational excellence, and what does it take to acquire it

Industry analysts are using the word convergence as shorthand for competition that bundles cell service with broadband. Convergence is the newest strategy that replaces the traditional bundling strategy of selling a package of broadband, cable TV, and voice.

Leaving aside my discovery that YouTube videos on the Naturalistic Fallacy are branded by female cleavage (???), we move on to the two problems embedded in statements I hear by articulation and by implication in the public discourse: “We must cultivate trust in AI,” and “AI acquiescence is inevitable.”

Most engineers don’t think about securing TCP itself. We rely on the applications riding on top of the network. When you run routing protocols or long-lived control sessions across untrusted or shared infrastructure, TCP becomes part of your attack surface whether you planned for it or not.

Stanford researchers are warning that using AI chatbots for personal advice could backfire. The problem isn’t just accuracy, it’s how these systems respond when you’re dealing with complicated, real-world conflicts.

During the APNIC Routing Security Special Interest Group (SIG) session at APRICOT 2026 / APNIC 61, APNIC and LACNIC presented a case study of a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijack that combined a technical attack with social engineering.

It is widely believed that all BGP routers within an Autonomous System (AS) must be connected in a full iBGP mesh, or, when this becomes impractical, that route reflectors or confederations must be used. However, a full mesh is not always necessary, and in some scenarios it may even be undesirable.

The skies are quickly filling with communications satellites. Following is a short list of the many ventures that have or will soon be launching large numbers of broadband satellites.

In early demos, the system looked impressive. It could summarize logs, explain configuration issues, and suggest possible fixes. Instead of digging through internal docs, the answers were coming back in seconds. For a while, it really felt like this system was going to work as expected.

What appears as double extraction at the operator level becomes something larger and more serious at the level of the state. It becomes sovereignty inversion.

Major memory makers have already sold all the kit they can make this year, creating shortages and price increases.

It’s fading from our collective memory, but almost thirty years ago the global IT industry was gripped by Y2K fever.

What do you get when you combine Big Tech, a Bill Clinton fixer, Davos, the architect of the Hunter Biden laptop disinfo, and “Artificial Intelligence”? The biggest heist in world history.

Stop blaming the GPUs! Your AI feels slow because data is getting stuck in traffic. Fix the “supply chain” to keep those tokens flowing.

This document provides DNS deployment guidelines to secure the DNS protocol and infrastructure, mitigate misuse or misconfiguration, and provide an additional layer of network security as part of a zero trust and/or defense-in-depth security risk management approach.

However, eBPF has not seen similarly widespread adoption in other types of networked applications, such as web servers and databases. In this blog post, we argue that this gap stems from limitations in the current eBPF architecture — specifically, the kernel runtime, APIs, and compiler toolchain.

Time and again, I see people begging for companies with deep pockets to fund open source projects. I mean, after all, they’ve made billions from this code. You’d think they could support the code’s creators and maintainers. It would be only fair, right?

The weird, rare, surprising patterns that make data rich slowly get smoothed out when an AI model trains on outputs from a previous model.

In the previous note, the claim was not that the registry layer merely imposes visible fees or administrative inconvenience. The claim was more precise. The first extraction occurs when a scarce, transferable, revenue-enabling resource is kept institutionally discounted through non-asset rhetoric, conditional recognition, and friction around transfer and use

For organizations in telecommunications, financial services, healthcare, and public infrastructure, the driver for running inference at the edge is not to reduce milliseconds. It is because the data cannot legally leave the building, the country, or the jurisdiction.

Internet number resources are not political property. They are operator-held assets embedded in functioning networks.

Just over half of U.S. teens say they have used chatbots for help with schoolwork, and 12% say they’ve gotten emotional support. More teens think AI will be positive for them than negative

You’ll use AI and like it too – if you work for PwC. Paul Griggs, US chief executive of the global professional services giant, has made clear there is no room at the corporation for AI skeptics.

For some time, I have been looking after a routing analysis report called the “CIDR Report”. Here I’d like to explain the reasons for this report, and what is in the report and share some thoughts as to its usefulness today to the Internet routing community.

The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), a machine that profoundly reshaped computing, marked its 80th anniversary on 15 February 2026. ENIAC was a technological leap that laid the foundation for the modern computing revolution and eventually transformed nearly every aspect of society.

During the APNIC Routing Security SIG session, held at APRICOT 2026 in Jakarta, the community heard about six applications of Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) to the problem of secure Internet routing.

There is no doubt that automation offers benefits such as speed, accuracy, reliability, and efficiency, and goes far beyond simple configuration management tasks, including resource provisioning. However, it may not be a good fit for every infrastructure environment. One must evaluate and compare the pros and cons before adopting automation.

Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are a privacy nightmare, with footage of naked people, sensitive information, and violent acts captured and seen by Meta’s AI and an army of employees.

MOSAIC ditches lasers for cheap MicroLEDs and medical imaging fiber, cuts cabling energy by up to 50%, and already fits in a standard transceiver after a proof-of-concept with MediaTek.

As malicious domains continue to pose a threat across the Internet, security professionals are left to consider the measures that can effectively defend their organizations from these threats.

Right now, a growing chorus is treating India’s “lock and suspend” approach as a success story and a model for the world.

On the last day of December 2016 there was a brief hiccup as the world’s clocks adjusted their time according to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard by adding an extra second to the last minute of the 31st of December.

For the past decade, Docker has provided a robust solution for building, shipping, and sharing applications. But behind its simple “build and run” workflow lie many years of complex technical challenges.

AI assistants that produce drawings and other output that looks like evidence reduce questioning without increasing correctness.

Credential misuse, AI tools, and security blind spots help attackers move through breached networks faster than ever, CrowdStrike finds.

In theory, the design of IPv6 was such that the upper-level end-to-end transport protocols, namely TCP and UDP need not be aware of the IP layer protocol being used. We should be able to use IPv4 and IPv6 interchangeably in the DNS right?

Weshow that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator.

By virtue of its $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox Technologies completed in early 2020, Nvidia became a seller of optical transceivers for Ethernet and InfiniBand, but seven years before that deal was done, Mellanox had acquired optical technology suppliers Kotura and IPtronics to become a supplier of these components itself, correctly perceiving how important optics would be for the future.

The Network Management session at APRICOT 2026 brought together four presenters to share practical, data‑driven insights into how operators can better understand and optimize their networks.

The current debate on the existence of an “AI bubble” centers on a single question: is the current high level of investment into AI data centers a massive misallocation of capital or the key to future economic growth?

The more I have thought about it, the more convinced I am that the very technological advancements that make my life easier — the most recent being artificial intelligence — actually contribute to a busier, more overwhelming life.

Using hot water to cool supercomputers? Nvidia and others are doing it. It’s liquid cooling minus the water chillers.

New research shows that these claims aren’t true in all cases, particularly when account recovery is in place or password managers are set to share vaults or organize users into groups.

Every employer knows to conduct background checks. However, conducting background checks on IT professionals requires an extra layer of verification, given the privileged access they typically have to IT systems and tools.

For decades, many believed SDCs were rare, almost mythical events. However, major hyperscale operators including Meta, Google and Alibaba have disclosed that roughly one in 1,000 CPUs in their fleets can produce silent corruptions under certain conditions.

The fundamental rules of creativity and ownership, established in law since the time of the printing press, are now collapsing under the weight of Generative AI.

As you and your spouse head off for a two-week Maui vacation, do you hand your 17-year-old boy a bottle of smooth whiskey and the keys to your spare Ferrari, bidding him “have fun while we’re gone”?

When Meta Platforms does a big AI system deal with Nvidia, that usually means that some other open hardware plan that the company had can’t meet an urgent need for compute.

This paper introduces Whisper Leak, a side-channel attack that infers user prompt topics from encrypted LLM traffic by analyzing packet size and timing patterns in streaming responses. Despite TLS encryption protecting content, these metadata patterns leak sufficient information to enable topic classification.

If I learned one thing at NANOG 96, it’s how to build an up-to-date state of the art AI data centre! As I now understand it, the process is quite simple.

New AI models usually create excitement among the true believers and this year hasn’t been an exception. OpenAI and Anthropic released GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 respectively on the same day, February 5. T

When my phone stopped working last month during the latest calamitous network outage to hit the US, I assumed it was that pesky Amazon cloud POP in North Virginia playing up again. After all, it was AWS’s VA data centre that triggered three (3) of the last big network failures in North America.

Starlink can sometimes shift data more quickly than is possible on terrestrial networks, and improves connectivity in remote areas. But the space broadband service also presents new technical and regulatory challenges, according to speakers who took to the stage on Tuesday at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) in Jakarta, Indonesia.

The Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure is infamous for facilitating reflective amplification attacks. Countermeasures such as server shielding, access control, rate limiting, and protocol restrictions have been implemented to improve the situation. Still, DNS-based reflective amplification attacks remain.

Recent claims that IXPs “aren’t showing significant growth”, that more interconnection is happening outside exchanges, and that peering can be more expensive than transit challenge long-standing assumptions about the role of IXPs. But do these claims hold up? A new paper from NAMEX explores the data.

Nuclear is the Most Reliable Path to Affordable Electricity  

Amid this “worldwide” economic backdrop, nuclear energy presents an affordable alternative to unreliable electricity sources like wind and solar. Economically, it makes no sense to abandon working production methods until new ones can replace the existing and future demand. World citizens are facing this reality in higher electricity prices.

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-02/ipasn.html
There have been a number of services that allow a lookup of an IP address or Autonomous System Number (ASN) and return information about that IP number resource. The Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) each operate a database that records (among other data items) the number resource and the details of the entity that is described in the relevant number registration record.

The Challenge of Adding Fiber to Poles

On February 5, the FCC issued a Memorandum and Order related to a pole attachment dispute between Comcast and Appalachian Power Company (APCO).

https://blog.apnic.net/2026/02/10/the-current-state-of-rdap/
While whois remains in widespread use, the RDAP ecosystem is rapidly maturing. Indeed, 2025 saw significant adoption and an accelerated expansion of RDAP services across the industry.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/10/dijkstras_algorithm_impact_on_networks/
The new algorithm is no minor tweak to Dijkstra’s but a significantly different approach. Its headline claim is that, whereas Dijkstra requires a sorting operation, and thus is only able to perform as well as the best sorting algorithm, this new approach “breaks the sorting barrier”. That is, it avoids the need for sorting and is able to deliver better bounds on performance than Dijkstra.

People often invest in companies not because they think the companies will succeed, but because they think others will invest. Thus, they try to invest before the others do, hoping there will be a greater fool who will pay more than they did.

More than half of CEOs report seeing neither increased revenue nor decreased costs from AI, despite massive investments in the technology, according to a PwC survey of 4,454 business leaders.

DNSSEC promised to secure DNS with cryptographic proof, yet messy rollouts, outages, and hype backlash ruined its reputation.

If you start the query process with an IP address, or an AS Number then you can find details about the current holder of that number resource, including its organisation name. But the reverse query is far more challenging in this database query framework.

Earlier this month, OpenAI introduced a new health focused space within ChatGPT, pitching it as a safer way for users to ask questions about sensitive topics like medical data, illnesses, and fitness.

Letâ€s start with hosting, and the key point here is that resource pools to host AI agents are not the answer. There are multiple reasons for this, but the main one is that the hosting location for AI agents has to balance being close to the databases used, the applications the agent is part of, and the users.

People often invest in companies not because they think the companies will succeed, but because they think others will invest. Thus, they try to invest before the others do, hoping there will be a greater fool who will pay more than they did.

More than half of CEOs report seeing neither increased revenue nor decreased costs from AI, despite massive investments in the technology, according to a PwC survey of 4,454 business leaders.

DNSSEC promised to secure DNS with cryptographic proof, yet messy rollouts, outages, and hype backlash ruined its reputation.

If you start the query process with an IP address, or an AS Number then you can find details about the current holder of that number resource, including its organisation name. But the reverse query is far more challenging in this database query framework.

Earlier this month, OpenAI introduced a new health focused space within ChatGPT, pitching it as a safer way for users to ask questions about sensitive topics like medical data, illnesses, and fitness.

Let’s start with hosting, and the key point here is that resource pools to host AI agents are not the answer. There are multiple reasons for this, but the main one is that the hosting location for AI agents has to balance being close to the databases used, the applications the agent is part of, and the users.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, wireless vendors are busy working towards the introduction of 6G starting around 2030.

The oxygen of publicity this year has mostly been consumed by our two-lettered friend, AI. There’s no reason to think this will change in 2026.

COBOL turned 66 this year and is still in use today. Major retail and commercial banks continue to run core account processing, ATM networks, credit card clearing, and batch end-of-day settlement. On top of that, many payment networks, stock exchanges, and clearinghouses rely on COBOL for high‑volume, high‑reliability batch and online transaction processing on mainframes.

This summer, AI chip startup Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of $6.9 billion. Just three months later, Nvidia celebrated the holidays by dropping nearly three times that to license its technology and squirrel away its talent.

LinkedIn job scams have become a borderless epidemic, preying on the hopes of desperate job seekers and costing victims across the globe anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $25,000.

Yet according to data from Google, the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), and Cloudflare, less than half of all netizens use IPv6 today. To understand why, know that IPv6 also suggested other, rather modest, changes to the way networks operate.

ASPA is now available in the RIPE NCC RPKI Dashboard, adding a way to express and validate your upstream relationships on top of ROA-based origin validation. Building on its introduction at RIPE 91, this article explains what ASPA does, why it matters, and how to start thinking about deployment.

AI bots made their presence felt this year, accounting for 4.2 percent of HTML request traffic as they trawl the web for content to be used in training models.

Multimodal tasks were the weakest area across the board, with accuracy often below 50%. This matters because these tasks involve reading charts, diagrams, or images, where a chatbot could confidently misread a sales graph or pull the wrong number from a document, leading to mistakes that are easy to miss but hard to undo.

Or, for that matter, where am I? Let’s look at location on the Internet, and how the Internet “knows” where I am.

It’s not science fiction. When a solar storm hits Earth, it can have real-world consequences, and satellite networks like Starlink are on the front lines.

Two months ago, I wrote about the competition concerns with the GenAI infrastructure boom. One of my provocative claims was that the lifespan of the chips may be significantly shorter than the accounting treatment given to them.

Chinese authorities on Thursday certified the China Environment for Network Innovation (CENI), a vast research network that Beijing hopes will propel the country to the forefront of networking research.

In 2025, the domain industry moved decisively from a fragmented ecosystem into a more integrated, capital-intensive market where infrastructure, identity, and AI are increasingly intertwined.

However, OpenAI has the daunting problem that, unlike Microsoft and Google, it has no other substantial sources of revenue. To survive, it needs to generate profits from ChatGPT.

Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.

In my earlier article on Technitium and Wazuh, I described DNS as both a behavioral signal and an enforcement point. DNS queries appear early in the attack chain, often long before C2 traffic stabilizes.

Cloudflare’s network suffered a brief but widespread outage Friday, after an update to its Web Application Firewall to mitigate a vulnerability in React Server Components went wrong.

You’d think that by now, networks were well enough understood that people would stop making assumptions that we have known, almost since the dawn of networking, to be untrue. Yet as users, developers, and network administrators, we still seem curiously unable to let go of long-held beliefs.

As well as the Mac clones, there were PC-style PowerPC machines – and a version of classic MacOS for them has just been rediscovered, enabling previously unimagined combinations.

Have you ever experienced that moment of panic when you can’t recall a familiar phone number or navigate without a map app? This growing reliance on external memory—known as the “Google Effect”—is a real-world example of how we’ve outsourced core cognitive functions to our devices.

Tensor processing units (TPUs) are specially designed AI accelerators. They are a type of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), or chips designed for specific tasks. For TPUs, that task is running and optimizing AI and machine learning (ML) workflows, including training and inference.

Civil unrest can often cloud measurement data. Some measurement systems, including ours, make relatively sweeping assumptions about the stability of both end user and network service behaviours, and assume that the changes that occur from day-to-day are minor.

Identifying active IPv6 addresses is challenging. Various methods emerged to master the measurement challenge in this huge address space, including hitlists, new probing techniques, and AI-generated target lists. In this paper, we apply active Subnet-Router anycast (SRA) probing, a commonly unused method to explore the IPv6 address space.

Several months ago, I arrived at the office at 8:45 a.m., sat at my desk, and was about to start my day. The only problem was that I, for the life of me, could not remember my password. This is a bit laughable because for the past year, I had typed that exact password almost daily, sometimes from muscle memory.

Vaibhav Kakkar once tested a therapy chatbot to help with a real-life dilemma. “It responded with structured cognitive-behavioral prompts, helping me reframe my thinking,” recalled Kakkar, CEO of marketing agency Digital Web Solutions. “Impressive–but when I needed deeper guidance, it hit a wall.”

An Autonomous System (AS) can protect itself against DDoS attacks by rerouting incoming DDoS traffic through a ‘DDoS scrubber’, a process that is typically implemented using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). While BGP-based scrubbing is a useful service, its adoption on the global Internet is unknown.

Until recently, many professionals, including many doctors, thought they needed to become more machine-like to keep their jobs. Such worry contributed to the specialization trend of the last century.

In an era of growing cyber threats, traditional defensive measures can be insufficient in the face of sophisticated or novel tactics. As a result, the question of whether private or public entities should engage in active defense or offensive “hack back” tactics has taken on greater urgency.

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston explores the complex landscape of undersea cables.

By 1990 it was clear that IP had a problem. It was still a tiny Internet at the time, but the growth patterns were exponential, doubling in size every 12 months. We were stressing out the pool of Class B IPv4 addresses and in the absence of any corrective measures this address pool would be fully depleted in 1994.

If you’re using IP address truncation thinking it makes data “anonymous” or “non-personal,” you’re creating a false sense of security.

With distressingly typical Silicon Valley fake-it-till-you make-it bravado, LLM creators have been telling investors that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is just around the corner (or has already been achieved!). The problem the promoters blithely ignore is that LLMs do not know how the words they input and output relate to the real world.

Many organizations rushing to cut staff in the name of AI efficiency are expected to quietly rehire those roles – often “offshore or at lower salary.”

While Silicon Valley is investing tens of billions of dollars chasing the artificial general intelligence dream, academic computing research in the U.S. is facing a severe drought.

There are two competing forces in IT, and they are at play during the GenAI era as much as they have ever been during prior eras in the datacenter.

SpaceX has surpassed 10,000 satellite launches in its Starlink programme, following the deployment of 56 additional units on Sunday. The milestone highlights the rapid expansion of satellite-based broadband infrastructure and its increasing role in global connectivity.

While x86 has been dominant for decades, a new migration project at Google represents a significant shift to more mixed architectures.

The proliferation of data centers needed to support AI development, along with myriad announcements to onshore manufacturing supply chains, are leading to surging energy demand.

Ex-CISA head Jen Easterly claims AI could spell the end of the cybersecurity industry, as the sloppy software and vulnerabilities that criminals rely on will be tracked down faster than ever.

But is the AI being used for this actually intelligent or just very, very good at faking it? This is not a new question. American philosopher John Searle came up with the Chinese Room, aka the “Chinese Box” argument, all the way back in 1980. He argued that while a computer could eventually simulate understanding – i.e. it could pass the Turing Test – that doesn’t mean it’s intelligent.

I get the sense that hosting a ccTLD today is challenging, not because of the technical stack, but due to Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) concerns

In times of major change–whether in IT or the economy–organizations should take a fresh look at their sourcing strategy. Companies outsourcing key functions need to re-examine the reasoning and scrutinize the results.

Another multivendor development group, the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) consortium, recently published its first specification aimed at delivering an open standard interconnect for AI clusters.

The company conducted a nationwide survey of 3,790 people that asked about real-world experiences and expectations around home WiFi performance. I think every ISP I know could have predicted the gist of the responses, but I think ISPs might be surprised at the percentage of people who are unhappy with WiFi.

DNS was not originally designed with security in mind, making it easy for common threats such as DNS spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks to reroute unsuspecting users to malicious sites, often without detection.

The ease with which those images and videos traveled, the thoughtless way in which we shared them, reveals the sinister side of technological advancement. It exposes the degree to which social media has desensitized us, stripped us of the natural horror that ought to accompany the spectacle of death, and conditioned us to consume human suffering as one more item in an endless buffet of digital content.

It’s normal for post-quantum cryptography to be rolled out as an extra layer of security on top of traditional pre-quantum cryptography, rather than as a replacement.

Not that many years ago, telephone and broadband networks were structured in such a way that most outages were local events. A fiber cut might kill service to a neighborhood; an electronics failure might kill service to a larger area, but for the most part, outages were contained within a discrete and local area.

Far from a future concern, AI is already the single largest uncontrolled channel for corporate data exfiltration—bigger than shadow SaaS or unmanaged file sharing.

A new security risk has recently been brought to my attention. I was on a Teams call that included an attorney who would not let the call continue while an AI notetaker was present.

A number of recent changes have helped to push Ethernet forward, advancing its capabilities to better meet the needs of AI.

Cloudflare has confessed to a coding error using a React useEffect hook, notorious for being problematic if not handled carefully, that caused an outage for the platform’s dashboard and many of its APIs.

Working with MikroTik and IP Infusion’s OcNOS to interop EVPN/VxLAN has been on my wish list for a long time.

Have you heard about MRT dumps, but never tried to use them because the bar seems too high? Or are you tired of doing “parse -> grep -> process” every time you touch BGP MRT dumps?

Unfortunately, history is again being rewritten. It is rapidly becoming clear that LLMs are not economical.

As part of our research into post-quantum cryptography (PQC) for DNSSEC, we test PQC as a drop-in replacement for classical algorithms. We explore a transition where both run simultaneously, analysing how resolvers validate records, edge cases, and the feasibility and impact of such a period.

In much of the world, we are in an era that I like to call the “post-gigabit era”. Many users have access to gigabit connections—or at least hundreds of Mbps—and have moved from an era of bandwidth scarcity to bandwidth abundance.

“Where are you?” is not an easy question to answer on the Internet. The telephone system’s address plan embedded a certain amount of physical location information in the fixed line network, and a full E.164 telephone number indicated your location in terms of your country, and your area within that country.

Sure, some days you hate your job. But how do you know when an IT position has gone from being run-of-the-mill annoying to truly toxic

The digital world is shifting toward access rather than ownership, and nothing shows this more clearly than the rise of subscription-based business models.

“Classic” TCP uses an extremely simple loss-based congestion detection algorithm that is intended to save networks from collapsing under extreme overload.

The endgame is a society where corporate algorithms make decisions about employment, education, and social interaction with no accountability.

The rise of Agentic AI, the emergence and adoption of AI agents and agent-to-agent networking to autonomously perform tasks on behalf of humans, has introduced unique challenges for existing security products.

In the landscape of organizational management, a distinction exists between teams that (a.) efficiently deliver a high-quality service or product, and (b.) those that innovate and develop their thought leadership in an area of emerging technology.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan delivered a rather defiant keynote to open the VMware Explore conference in Las Vegas recently, telling the audience they are better off using the latest version of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on-premises than hyperscale cloud service providers.

The public is told that AI systems are super smart and have the world’s info at their electronic beck and call. At the same time, it is humans and human organizations who claim professional expertise and so deliver their “truth” via media and Internet.

While Eutelsat’s OneWeb operates the second-largest commercial LEO satellite network, its real-world network performance remains largely unexplored by researchers, due to its targeted enterprise and government markets.

If AI is to become pervasive, as the model builders and datacenter builders who are investing enormous sums of money are clearly banking on it to be, then it really goes have to be a global phenomenon.

It looks to me like history is repeating itself. We’re seeing the same hype cycle for 6G that we saw for 5G.

This article taxonomizes the 25-year history of IPID-based exploits and the corresponding changes to IPID selection methods. By mathematically analyzing these methods’ correctness and security and empirically evaluating their performance, we reveal recommendations for best practice as well as shortcomings of current operating system implementations, emphasizing the value of systematic evaluations in network security.

But for NaaS to truly transform enterprise networking, one thing has been missing: standards. Enter Mplify (formerly the Metro Ethernet Forum), a non-profit focused on standardizing NaaS service definitions.

The arrangements regarding the composition and organisation of the provision and operation of authoritative root servers are one of the more long-lasting aspects of the public Internet.

Microsoft has achieved a breakthrough in the hollow core fiber technology, reducing data transmission loss to just 0.091 dB per kilometer, the lowest ever achieved and significantly below the 0.14 dB/km limit that has constrained fiber networks for decades.

China has pursued a strategy of competition among government-owned organizations, and it initiated two government-owned constellation projects, Hongyun and Hongyan, in 2018.

There is no question that one of the smartest things that chip designer, packager, and manufacturing process manager Marvell Technology did was to shell out $650 million in May 2019 to buy Avera Semiconductor.

In early 2024, a Hong Kong-based clerk at multinational consulting engineering firm Arup was duped into transferring about $25 million to scammers who used AI to impersonate the company’s CFO, and other senior executives, in a live video meeting.

Among the plethora of advanced attacker tools that exemplify how threat actors continuously evolve their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to evade detection and maximize impact, PipeMagic, a highly modular backdoor used by Storm-2460 masquerading as a legitimate open-source ChatGPT Desktop Application, stands out as particularly advanced.

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, explores the economic inevitability of centrality in the modern Internet.

Philipp delivers a sober message for innovators: invention is only half the battle; defending your invention can define your company’s fate.

Google now estimates that the specs for a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC), which can break conventional public key encryption in a useful amount of time, are lower than they had previously estimatedﾅby 95%.

In this report, I’ll focus on the material presented at the DELEG and DNSOP Working Groups.

Can we trust AI? Will AI take our jobs? Is an AI app safe? Shall we invest in AI company? Create an AI startup? Will AI accelerate cybercrime?

This study highlights the inadequacy of current privacy protection measures and proposes an automated, sustainable approach to correlate user profiles, including homonyms and pseudonyms, solely through publicly available data.

Bargury’s attack starts with a poisoned document, which is shared to a potential victim’s Google Drive. (Bargury says a victim could have also uploaded a compromised file to their own account.)

I wrote last week about three examples of the new GPT 5.0 chatbot contradicting Sam Altman’s claim that “it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert.”

RFCs are, inherently, the result of a design-by-committee writing process; usually intended for engineers to read. Especially with cryptography, they err on the side of technical specification rather than introductory blog post.

The transition to IPv6 is now a practical necessity for networks under pressure to scale, secure, and streamline their operations.

In this episode of PING, Robert Kisteleki from the RIPE NCC discusses the RIPE Atlas system — a network of over 13,000 measurement devices deployed worldwide in homes, exchange points, stub and transit Autonomous Systems, densely connected regions and sparse island states.

The common denominator in both tests was technology called “Innovative Optical and Wireless Network” (IOWN), an all-optical networking stack that NTT hopes will mature in 2030 and expects will reduce power consumption by 100x, improve transmission capacity by 125x, and reduce network latency to 0.5 percent of current levels.

Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) are often overlooked in discussions about critical infrastructure. Yet their role in routing stability, local resilience, and digital sovereignty is undeniable.

Is adding AI to your environment a software purchase? Or is it more like hiring an employee?

Design by committee should always ring alarm bells, particularly in technology. The desire to achieve acceptable compromises between various opinions often leads to compromised technical outcomes, and it seems to me that the current work on redefining zone cuts and delegation in the DNS is leading to this same outcome

The TCP/IP Interoperability Conference—later renamed Interop—began as a small workshop in August 1986. It quickly grew in scope to incorporate tutorials, and by 1988 an exhibition network connected 51 exhibitors to each other and to the global Internet.

There is a relatively new fiber technology that most readers will not have heard about. Multi-core fiber (MCF) is a technology that packs multiple strands of fiber inside a bundle that is about the same size as a single strand of fiber today.

This is where the “Jericho” StrataDNX switch/router chips and their related “Ramon” fabric elements come in, which are an important part of the Broadcom datacenter networking portfolio.

We had a series of mini-outages at sketch.dev on July 15th, caused by LLM-written code.

The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts on, and data brokers you’ve never heard of.

It turns out that, if you have your domain hosted by a big provider (we happen to use GoDaddy), it’s easy to turn on DNSSEC. But I think it says a lot that it took us this long (and the stimulus of working on a new security book) to get us to turn on DNSSEC

As we left the laboratory, I thought about how we in the computing field build a tremendous number of things that really cannot be called beautiful and then are commonly tossed aside without a thought.

The accelerated migration to advanced services will be accompanied by unprecedented complexity, and security and reliability concerns that must be addressed by the network-engineering and formal-methods communities.

Quantum scientists have long treated quantum entanglement as precious cargo, forging fresh links for every secure message or computation. A new theoretical study proposes a thriftier route, letting an existing pair pass portions of its entanglement down an extended chain.

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.

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 at the skill levels of humans.