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

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Reports of AI corporate implementation failures have continued to mount over the last year.

 


AI assistants now hand you a single, ready-made answer, and a harder question comes with it: who decides what we get to know, and what never makes it into the reply?

 


Vendors are trying to position “confidential computing” as the technical backbone of Europe’s sovereign cloud ambitions. But new research shows that a security protocol used to prove cryptographic trust in the system may have a fundamental architectural flaw.

 


The Internet should stop asking only who was in the room. It should ask who can bind the party bearing the loss.

 


America won’t beat China by banning AI. We’ll win by building the world’s best open models and letting innovation—not government—lead the way.

Posted in WORTH READING

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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.

Posted in WORTH READING

Hedge 311: The Dangers of AI

We are often told that if engineers who don’t go “all in” on AI will be left behind. While there are a few voices who argue that AI can be a dangerous tool, impacting not only the quality of our work, but the very quality of our thinking skills. Doug Smith, a critic of using AI for engineering, joins this episode of the Hedge to argue the contrary view of AI.

What are the dangers of relying on AI?

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You can find Doug’s blog here.

Posted in AUDIO, HEDGE

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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.

Posted in WORTH READING

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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!

Posted in WORTH READING