Worth Reading 060826


In a paper published late in 2025, Østergaard and colleagues reported on their examination of almost 40 psychiatric referrals across Denmark that implicated AI chatbots in harmful interactions, including suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, and fostering delusions

 


Since its deployment in 2011, the adoption of RPKI by Internet Service Providers has shown continuous growth, a trend that persists to this day. As this growth continues it is important to measure its effect on BGP stability.

 


AI companies, AI influencers and famous professors have been making extraordinary claims for years about AI.

 


A robotic system that can produce a rubbery pancake is a true technical and logistic achievement, but why all this work to automate the production of mediocrity?

 


The greatest risk we face today isn’t that AI is becoming “too smart”; it’s that we are beginning to treat this technology as an infallible “oracle” rather than a capable, yet fundamentally fallible, “intern.”

Posted in WORTH READING

Best of the Hedge: Episode 15, Supporting Open Source

Many companies rely on open source, regardless of whether or not they realize it. In this best of the Hedge episode, Alistair Woodman joins Russ White and Tom Ammon to talk about not only why you should support the open source projects you use, but how you can.
 

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Reposting a classic episode this week because I was out of town and didn’t get around to editing an episode.

Posted in AUDIO, HEDGE

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