Worth Reading 060526


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.

Posted in WORTH READING

Hedge 307: bgproutes.io

If you advertise routes into the default free zone (or global Internet), you might struggle with seeing and understanding what they look like “on the other side.” While there are many manual tools to help operators with this process, bgproutes.io gives you visibility in the global routing table through interfaces like BMP. Listen to this episode of the Hedge to learn more.
 
You can find bgprotues.io here.
 

 
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Posted in AUDIO, HEDGE

Worth Reading 052926


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.

Posted in WORTH READING

Hedge 306: RPKI Transport

Synchronizing information across the Internet, at an initial glance, looks like a fairly simple problem to solve. Just copy a file to a host and create a magic protocol, right? Not really. Each kind of data has a fairly unique set of requirements–and RPKI data, used to provide security information for BGP, is no different. Job Snijders joins Tom and Russ to talk about ERIK, a protocol developed to synchronize RPKI records.
 
For more information, check out Job’s web site and the IETF draft.
 

 
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Posted in AUDIO, HEDGE

Worth Reading 052126


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.

Posted in WORTH READING

Worth Reading 051826


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.

Posted in WORTH READING

Worth Reading 051526


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.

Posted in WORTH READING