Worth Reading 061026 When business volume and market capitalization cross a critical threshold, vertically integrating infrastructure ceases to be merely a cost-cutting financial tactic; it becomes an existential imperative for computational resilience and commercial survival. It looks like industry mergers and acquisition activity is in high gear lately. Building multi-agent systems right now feels painfully identical to the early, chaotic days of the micro services gold rush. The standard is called DNS-AID (Domain Name System for AI Discovery). Its premise is that the internet already solved the problem of finding things at scale forty years ago with DNS — and that the same infrastructure should handle AI agents. Mythos is real. I know a big chunk of the industry thinks it’s a marketing stunt, and I get why. I get it. But I’ve seen the findings, and they’re bad. Posted in WORTH READINGLeave a comment
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 READINGLeave a comment
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 READINGLeave a comment
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
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