Weekend Reads 111524


Techno-futurists love to dream up visions of the future. Invariably, these are worlds where everything is under control—where every problem has a solution, and the future unfolds exactly as planned. We do seem to be moving toward some sort of centralized loss of agency.


The representational structures of the Internet governance institutions are highly varied (indicating once again that there is no “multistakeholder model”), but they all have one thing in common: decision-making power is vested in non-state actors.


The rapid expansion of AI and generative AI (GenAI) workloads could see 40% of data centers constrained by power shortages by 2027, according to Gartner.


Chiplets and 3D devices, long discussed in the future tense, are a growing sector of the market. Moore’s Law? It’s still alive, but manufacturers and designers are following it by different means than simply shrinking transistors.


Monitoring traffic at Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) is a long-standing operational practice. It is essential for several reasons related to the entire Internet infrastructure’s stability, security, and efficiency.


If you want to sell a lot of hardware to support AI workloads, then the best way to do that is to convince every country on Earth that AI is so important that they must have a lot of it within their borders. Just in case some political or economic crisis makes AI technology unavailable through the world-spanning cloud builders.


The number of online-accessibility lawsuits has grown rapidly of late. In 2023, about 2,800 such suits clogged federal courts, near the all-time high, recorded the previous year, and up from just 814 in 2017.


During the meeting, I was asked to simplify the concept of power budget calculations for new hires, and I was happy to oblige. I decided to share my brief discussion on power budget calculations and related parameters with APNIC blog readers as well.


While it doesn’t look like there was any malicious intent in this case, the big takeaway for companies of any size should be that it doesn’t change the outcome. Online businesses that release customer data without the express permission of users will still be in breach of data privacy regulations like GDPR and the regulator may see fit to sanction them.


Increasingly, datacenter operators are putting their faith in the promise of miniaturized nuclear power plants – better known as small modular reactors (SMRs) – to fuel their ever-growing energy demands.

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Weekend Reads 110924


Toward the end of August 2024, a customized malware dubbed “Voldemort” based on strings found in its code was used in a cyber espionage campaign targeting various countries.


Until 2019, it was a Google partner running full Android. Then it forked its own version of Android, called it HarmonyOS, stopped including Google proprietary apps, and set up its own Android app store.


As previously discussed in this post, Xiong’an New Area (Xiong’an), a pilot city established in 2017 about 100 kilometres west of Beijing, aims to be a model for future digital cities, built with IPv6-only infrastructure from the start.


A little over three dozen security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in various open-source artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models, some of which could lead to remote code execution and information theft.


Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Kentik’s Cloud Latency Map, a public service that uses Kentik Synthetics to continuously measure latency between the regions of the biggest cloud providers.


Data can undergo a similar transformation—two pieces of data, linked, such that changing one has an impact on the other. Think of this as “spooky data at a distance.”


In this work, we aim to address the limitations in the recent poisoning (backdoor) attacks on the code completion

models [5, 68], and introduce a stronger and easy-to-trigger backdoor attack (“CODEBREAKER”), which can mislead the

backdoored model to generate codes with disguised vulnerabilities, even against strong detection.


Many fiber businesses clearly have the goal of growing large enough to flip to somebody larger. The investors in these businesses are largely venture capitalists who hope to sell companies at a premium multiple of what they paid to build the business.


It’s a vast domain ecosystem that needs to be protected from online threats. Often, to better understand this need for domain security, we need to understand how critical and interconnected domains are within a business.


Both due to workload creep and the proliferation of third-party solutions, having a document automation framework in place is a downright necessity that saves time and large sums of money for organizations at all growth stages.


Microsoft is experimenting with datacenters made out of wood in a bid to cut the growing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that result from constructing its expanding network of bit barns.


On the other side are investment analysts who believe that big productivity improvements and profits are right around the corner.


Meta’s plan to build a nuclear-powered datacenter for AI workloads has been undone by bugs, specifically bees.

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Weekend Reads 110124


Do you want to analyse decrypted TLS traffic in Wireshark or let an Intrusion Detection System (IDS), like Suricata, Snort or Zeek, inspect the application layer data of potentially malicious TLS encrypted traffic?


Thousands of machines running Linux have been infected by a malware strain that’s notable for its stealth, the number of misconfigurations it can exploit, and the breadth of malicious activities it can perform, researchers reported Thursday.


More evidence has emerged that AI-driven demand for energy to power datacenters is prolonging the life of coal-fired plants in the US.


The Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) together ensure the stability of the Internet Numbers Registry System. In order to strengthen their accountability, efforts are under way to revise the criteria for the accreditation of RIRs, and the obligations they must continuously meet.


What happens on the network if you’re joining a Microsoft Active Directory domain? Which protocols are used? As I suspected, it’s a bit more complex than just seeing a single known protocol like HTTPS.


The demand for optical interconnects is so high, given the immense bandwidth bottlenecks for accelerator-to-accelerator and accelerator to memory needs, that raising venture funding is not a problem.


The basic approach to resolving the problems of data destruction is to keep historic values of data around even after some operation updates or deletes a record.


Recent headlines have proclaimed that Chinese scientists have hacked “military-grade encryption” using quantum computers, sparking concern and speculation about the future of cybersecurity.


Early on, mathematics was of great importance for astronomy, navigation, time measurement, and surveying.


Analysis Shortly after the launch of AMD’s first-gen Epyc processors codenamed Naples in 2017, Intel quipped that its competitor had been reduced to gluing a bunch of desktop dies together in order to stay relevant.


The Irish data protection watchdog on Thursday fined LinkedIn €310 million ($335 million) for violating the privacy of its users by conducting behavioral analyses of personal data for targeted advertising.


A government report’s criticism of the 100x metric often used to justify fixing software earlier in development fuels a growing debate over pushing responsibility for secure code onto developers.


As AI systems become more advanced and integrated into our lives, there has been a corresponding urgency to ensure they align with social values and norms, and that their benefits significantly outweigh any potential harms.


During its time out of the spotlight AI became more pluralistic as loss of faith in formerly dominant approaches created space for new ideas.


In a joint statement to the European Commission’s new tech appointee, Henna Virkkunen, a coalition of internet advocacy groups has firmly opposed recent proposals aimed at imposing network fees on content providers.

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