WORTH READING

The current debate on the existence of an “AI bubble” centers on a single question: is the current high level of investment into AI data centers a massive misallocation of capital or the key to future economic growth?

The more I have thought about it, the more convinced I am that the very technological advancements that make my life easier — the most recent being artificial intelligence — actually contribute to a busier, more overwhelming life.

Using hot water to cool supercomputers? Nvidia and others are doing it. It’s liquid cooling minus the water chillers.

New research shows that these claims aren’t true in all cases, particularly when account recovery is in place or password managers are set to share vaults or organize users into groups.

Every employer knows to conduct background checks. However, conducting background checks on IT professionals requires an extra layer of verification, given the privileged access they typically have to IT systems and tools.

For decades, many believed SDCs were rare, almost mythical events. However, major hyperscale operators including Meta, Google and Alibaba have disclosed that roughly one in 1,000 CPUs in their fleets can produce silent corruptions under certain conditions.

The fundamental rules of creativity and ownership, established in law since the time of the printing press, are now collapsing under the weight of Generative AI.

As you and your spouse head off for a two-week Maui vacation, do you hand your 17-year-old boy a bottle of smooth whiskey and the keys to your spare Ferrari, bidding him “have fun while we’re gone”?

When Meta Platforms does a big AI system deal with Nvidia, that usually means that some other open hardware plan that the company had can’t meet an urgent need for compute.

This paper introduces Whisper Leak, a side-channel attack that infers user prompt topics from encrypted LLM traffic by analyzing packet size and timing patterns in streaming responses. Despite TLS encryption protecting content, these metadata patterns leak sufficient information to enable topic classification.

If I learned one thing at NANOG 96, it’s how to build an up-to-date state of the art AI data centre! As I now understand it, the process is quite simple.

New AI models usually create excitement among the true believers and this year hasn’t been an exception. OpenAI and Anthropic released GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 respectively on the same day, February 5. T

When my phone stopped working last month during the latest calamitous network outage to hit the US, I assumed it was that pesky Amazon cloud POP in North Virginia playing up again. After all, it was AWS’s VA data centre that triggered three (3) of the last big network failures in North America.

Starlink can sometimes shift data more quickly than is possible on terrestrial networks, and improves connectivity in remote areas. But the space broadband service also presents new technical and regulatory challenges, according to speakers who took to the stage on Tuesday at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) in Jakarta, Indonesia.

The Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure is infamous for facilitating reflective amplification attacks. Countermeasures such as server shielding, access control, rate limiting, and protocol restrictions have been implemented to improve the situation. Still, DNS-based reflective amplification attacks remain.

Recent claims that IXPs “aren’t showing significant growth”, that more interconnection is happening outside exchanges, and that peering can be more expensive than transit challenge long-standing assumptions about the role of IXPs. But do these claims hold up? A new paper from NAMEX explores the data.

https://blog.apnic.net/2026/02/06/from-roots-to-reach-network-resilience-in-natural-disasters/
When communication networks break down, people cannot report their condition, responders lose situational awareness, and entire communities risk slipping beyond the reach of coordinated assistance. Network failure does not merely accompany disaster — it reshapes the human consequences.

Nuclear is the Most Reliable Path to Affordable Electricity  

Amid this “worldwide” economic backdrop, nuclear energy presents an affordable alternative to unreliable electricity sources like wind and solar. Economically, it makes no sense to abandon working production methods until new ones can replace the existing and future demand. World citizens are facing this reality in higher electricity prices.

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-02/ipasn.html
There have been a number of services that allow a lookup of an IP address or Autonomous System Number (ASN) and return information about that IP number resource. The Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) each operate a database that records (among other data items) the number resource and the details of the entity that is described in the relevant number registration record.

The Challenge of Adding Fiber to Poles

On February 5, the FCC issued a Memorandum and Order related to a pole attachment dispute between Comcast and Appalachian Power Company (APCO).

https://blog.apnic.net/2026/02/10/the-current-state-of-rdap/
While whois remains in widespread use, the RDAP ecosystem is rapidly maturing. Indeed, 2025 saw significant adoption and an accelerated expansion of RDAP services across the industry.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/10/dijkstras_algorithm_impact_on_networks/
The new algorithm is no minor tweak to Dijkstra’s but a significantly different approach. Its headline claim is that, whereas Dijkstra requires a sorting operation, and thus is only able to perform as well as the best sorting algorithm, this new approach “breaks the sorting barrier”. That is, it avoids the need for sorting and is able to deliver better bounds on performance than Dijkstra.

People often invest in companies not because they think the companies will succeed, but because they think others will invest. Thus, they try to invest before the others do, hoping there will be a greater fool who will pay more than they did.

More than half of CEOs report seeing neither increased revenue nor decreased costs from AI, despite massive investments in the technology, according to a PwC survey of 4,454 business leaders.

DNSSEC promised to secure DNS with cryptographic proof, yet messy rollouts, outages, and hype backlash ruined its reputation.

If you start the query process with an IP address, or an AS Number then you can find details about the current holder of that number resource, including its organisation name. But the reverse query is far more challenging in this database query framework.

Earlier this month, OpenAI introduced a new health focused space within ChatGPT, pitching it as a safer way for users to ask questions about sensitive topics like medical data, illnesses, and fitness.

Let’s start with hosting, and the key point here is that resource pools to host AI agents are not the answer. There are multiple reasons for this, but the main one is that the hosting location for AI agents has to balance being close to the databases used, the applications the agent is part of, and the users.

People often invest in companies not because they think the companies will succeed, but because they think others will invest. Thus, they try to invest before the others do, hoping there will be a greater fool who will pay more than they did.

More than half of CEOs report seeing neither increased revenue nor decreased costs from AI, despite massive investments in the technology, according to a PwC survey of 4,454 business leaders.

DNSSEC promised to secure DNS with cryptographic proof, yet messy rollouts, outages, and hype backlash ruined its reputation.

If you start the query process with an IP address, or an AS Number then you can find details about the current holder of that number resource, including its organisation name. But the reverse query is far more challenging in this database query framework.

Earlier this month, OpenAI introduced a new health focused space within ChatGPT, pitching it as a safer way for users to ask questions about sensitive topics like medical data, illnesses, and fitness.

Let’s start with hosting, and the key point here is that resource pools to host AI agents are not the answer. There are multiple reasons for this, but the main one is that the hosting location for AI agents has to balance being close to the databases used, the applications the agent is part of, and the users.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, wireless vendors are busy working towards the introduction of 6G starting around 2030.

The oxygen of publicity this year has mostly been consumed by our two-lettered friend, AI. There’s no reason to think this will change in 2026.

COBOL turned 66 this year and is still in use today. Major retail and commercial banks continue to run core account processing, ATM networks, credit card clearing, and batch end-of-day settlement. On top of that, many payment networks, stock exchanges, and clearinghouses rely on COBOL for high‑volume, high‑reliability batch and online transaction processing on mainframes.

This summer, AI chip startup Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of $6.9 billion. Just three months later, Nvidia celebrated the holidays by dropping nearly three times that to license its technology and squirrel away its talent.

LinkedIn job scams have become a borderless epidemic, preying on the hopes of desperate job seekers and costing victims across the globe anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $25,000.

Yet according to data from Google, the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), and Cloudflare, less than half of all netizens use IPv6 today. To understand why, know that IPv6 also suggested other, rather modest, changes to the way networks operate.