Hedge 286: Roundtable

It’s time again for Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ to talk about current articles they’ve run across in their day-to-day reading. This time we talk about WiFi in the home, how often users think a global problem is really local, and why providers have a hard time supporting individual homes and businesses. The second topic is one no one really cares about … apathy. What causes apathy? How can we combat it? Join us for this episode of the Hedge … if you can bring yourself to care!
 

 
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Posted in AUDIO, CULTURE, HEDGE

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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.

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Hedge 285: Post Quantum Crypto

Is quantum really an immediate and dangerous threat to current cryptography systems, or are we pushing to hastily adopt new technologies we won’t necessarily need for a few more years? Should we allow the quantum pie to bake a few more years before slicing a piece and digging in? George Michaelson joins Russ and Tom to discuss.

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Hedge 284: Netops and Corporate Culture

We all know netops, NRE, and devops can increase productivity, increase Mean Time Between Mistakes (MTBM), and decrease MTTR–but how do we deploy and use these tools? We often think of the technical hurdles you face in their deployment, but most of the blockers are actually cultural. Chris Grundemann, Eyvonne, Russ, and Tom discuss the cultural issues with deploying netops on this episode of the Hedge.
 

 
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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.

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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.

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Hedge 283: Technical Planning

We network engineers often find ourselves without a viable plan–our plans always seem to go awry, to the point that many network engineers just give up on planning. Is “giving up” the right solution? Or can we learn to be better planners? Jonathan Adams and Tim McConnaughy join Russ to discussion planning for network engineers.

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