Worth Reading 080126


The honest target is goodput, meaning requests per second that actually met your latency targets. Count anything else and you are counting cold plates.

 


I find it strange that as a software industry, we put in so much effort to make our systems efficient to design, build, and scale with DevOps practices, cloud native architectures, event-driven functions, optimized databases and storage, and resource-sipping Lean IT — then we threw it all out the window when Big AI came along.

 


If there is one universal law in internet infrastructure, it is that no good intention goes unpunished by the practical realities of legacy software maintenance.

 


This Article updates and expands on 2012 research on encryption and globalization, analyzing what the authors call “Round 3” of the Going Dark Debate: the current controversies over end-to-end encryption (E2EE).

 


Using our unique position on the Internet, we took an investigative look at one of the well-known mandatory attributes in BGP, the ORIGIN attribute.

Posted in WORTH READING

Worth Reading 072826


Today’s Internet runs on a vast infrastructure of replicated data, and the difference between order and chaos lies in maintaining consistency through synchronization across the many distributed points where that data is published.

 


IPv6-only networks often still depend on IPv4 subnets and ARP. This article introduces an IETF proposal to eliminate both.

 


Traditional software engineering approaches reliability as a binary state of uptime and downtime. Modern ML pipelines render this paradigm obsolete.

 


Yet while the radios and protocols largely reuse terrestrial 5G designs, one small but crucial component has been left behind: The control plane timers that quietly govern how registration, mobility, and session procedures behave under real-world conditions.

 


Apparently, nearly all of them have reached the same conclusion. I don’t merely need AI occasionally. I need it waiting inside every search bar, messaging app, music player, and document reader I already use.

Posted in WORTH READING

Hedge 313: Out of Band Management Networks

Most designers and operators default to carrying all traffic–including network management traffic–across the same paths as application data, or in band. Is this the right choice, or should operators seriously consider creating an out-of-band network just for network management? If you decide to build an out-of-band network, what are some of the considerations and lessons learned? Daryll Swer joins Tom and Russ to discuss.
 

 
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Posted in AUDIO, HEDGE

Worth Reading 072226


Email authentication has quietly held the internet’s mail together for two decades, and it has just taken its biggest step forward yet.

 


A few months ago in Mercer County, Kentucky, more than 200 residents packed a planning and zoning commission meeting until every seat was filled, with citizens standing along the walls. Yard signs reading “NO DATA CENTER” lined farm roads from Harrodsburg to Burgin.

 


AI coding tools have changed the software development world in a few short years, but security risks and rising costs associated with AI-generated code mean organizations should consider their potential return on investment (ROI) before jumping into the deep end.

 


A recent PING episode noted that, for the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) at least, ‘the shape of the curve’ appears to have changed.

 


Today’s Internet runs on a vast infrastructure of replicated data, and the difference between order and chaos lies in maintaining consistency through synchronization across the many distributed points where that data is published.

Posted in WORTH READING

Worth Reading 071926


In fact, in Q1 2026, the Ethernet switch market grew faster than the overall server market did according to the latest statistics from IDC.

 


We are tempted to treat a capable language model as a knowledgeable colleague whose conclusions we can accept. It is more accurate, and more useful, to treat it as an untrusted component that produces plausible output which must be checked before it is relied upon.

 


In my view, MoQ occupies a middle ground between WebRTC (which is used for lots of video conferencing applications like Google Meet) and DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) which powers most entertainment video streaming on the web.

 


Content consumption is detached from the website itself, as users rely on AI-driven systems to aggregate, summarize and contextualize information without visiting the original source. Instead of researching across multiple tabs, readers ask an AI system to do the work for them.

 


Shifting data centers from earth to space has become an alternative touted as solving concerns without generating new ones. In sun synchronous, low Earth orbit, orbiting data centers (“ODCs”) may have comparatively less environmental impact and lower operating costs.

Posted in WORTH READING

Hedge 312: Keys and DNS

The entire technology world has, for decades, treated the IP address as a shorthand host identifier. This is clearly not the way IP was designed, but what are our other choices? In this episode of the Hedge, Scott Robohn joins Russ And Tom to discuss a recent paper arguing cryptographic keys should be the primary host identifier, and another article on the centrality of DNS to the Internet.

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Posted in HEDGE