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.

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.

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.

The screenshot feature has cultivated a wide range of impactful academic research across computing and social scientific fields.

When Motorola unveiled its Iridium global satellite-based mobile telephony service in the late 1990’s everything augured well for a revolution in the satellite communications market, only it didn’t happen.

While the software industry has made genuine strides over the past few decades to deliver products securely, the furious pace of AI adoption is putting that progress at risk.

The analytic company IDC says the U.S. economy will be generating 394 trillion zettabytes of data annually by 2028 (a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes).

Enterprise strategists need to worry about securing their environments against AI-powered attacks.

These milestones highlight the significance RPKI has gained over the past decade. Starting off as an experimental technology, it has become a central component of the Internet, affecting a large percentage of its networks.

More than 9.7 million third-party businesses sell goods on Amazon, and Amazon makes a lot of money charging those third parties to sell on its platform—$117.7 billion in 2022, representing 23% of Amazon’s total revenues.

For much of the history of computing, it was reasonably safe to assume that a machine was doing what you told it to do (and what its creators promised it would do), because its operations were local.

There is always the case that the unexpected happens, and X.509 certificates are no exception. There are circumstances where the certificate should be marked as unusable immediately, which is before the notAfter expiration time.

Our investigation uncovers two sophisticated telecom surveillance campaigns and, for the first time, links real-world attack traffic to mobile operator signalling infrastructure.

DDoS mitigation often relies on BGP for “scrubbing”, but how this appears in routing data is not well understood. We analyse five major providers to distinguish between always-on and on-demand protection.

This column argues that without AI, adequate privacy has become simply out of reach. This is not because AI is benign; it most definitely is not. Rather, the modern digital ecosystem has evolved to a point where no human, unaided, can understand, monitor, or manage the complexity of today’s data practices.

Conventional memory schemes follow the Pareto Principle, in which approximately maintaining 20% hot data can meet 80% of requests. L

Google has just forked its Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, designs for these two workloads, the very first time in more than a decade that TPU systems of the same generation were truly architecturally distinct from each other.

Fake domains are not a new problem. What’s now changing is the scale and how easily attackers can blend into your domain ecosystem with lookalikes, inactive registrations, and domains set up purely for email.

What can we learn about QUIC deployments just by listening to unsolicited QUIC traffic? This question becomes specifically exciting since QUIC aims for enhanced privacy by obfuscating metadata.

Securing AI means securing all the AI layers and throughout the lifecycle: data, model, and applications, in training and in inference.

According to a Reuters report, Meta is installing tracking software on its employees’ work computers. The tool, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will log mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes. It will also take occasional screenshots of employees’ screens.

Despite its usage, the behaviour of BGP-based scrubbers is not well understood, such as whether scrubbers are always on-path or activated on-demand.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has officially endorsed passkeys as the default authentication standard, marking the first time the agency has told consumers to move away from passwords entirely.

Many BGP route leaks reported by automated detection systems are actually brief, low-impact artifacts of normal BGP convergence.

Long round‑trip times have serious consequences for protocols like TCP, which rely on a steady stream of acknowledgements (ACKs) to manage sending rates, estimate delay, and trigger retransmissions.

As datacenter networks evolve toward ultra-high-speed links, the energy footprint of host-side packet processing grows increasingly significant.

The old perception of satellite internet as slow, expensive, and marginal is increasingly outdated. Today’s market includes multiple orbital models, each with distinct technical and operational characteristics.

What can we learn about QUIC deployments just by listening to unsolicited QUIC traffic? This question becomes specifically exciting since QUIC aims to enhance privacy by obfuscating metadata.

In late 2024, the federal government’s cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft’s biggest cloud computing offerings.

This report explores the evolution and current state of neuro- symbolic artificial intelligence, an approach that integrates neural network capabilities with symbolic reasoning.

The Linux 7.0 kernel is now out, and it’s one of the most impactful releases in years for networking professionals.

The human-speed defense of small business is being obliterated by the machine-speed offense of AI-driven cybercrime. Today, what large companies treat as a manageable risk is a terminal expense for small enterprises, with 60% of small enterprises shutting down within six months of a major attack.

The original frustration was familiar. You build on one provider, they change pricing, deprecate an API, or just aren’t the right tool anymore, and migrating is brutal.

Tech leaders hoping AI might help save money and improve efficiency in IT infrastructure should know that only 28 percent of use cases fully succeed and offer return on investment (ROI).

The best strategy in the world won’t succeed if a team falters operationally. But what is operational excellence, and what does it take to acquire it

Industry analysts are using the word convergence as shorthand for competition that bundles cell service with broadband. Convergence is the newest strategy that replaces the traditional bundling strategy of selling a package of broadband, cable TV, and voice.

Leaving aside my discovery that YouTube videos on the Naturalistic Fallacy are branded by female cleavage (???), we move on to the two problems embedded in statements I hear by articulation and by implication in the public discourse: “We must cultivate trust in AI,” and “AI acquiescence is inevitable.”

Most engineers don’t think about securing TCP itself. We rely on the applications riding on top of the network. When you run routing protocols or long-lived control sessions across untrusted or shared infrastructure, TCP becomes part of your attack surface whether you planned for it or not.

Stanford researchers are warning that using AI chatbots for personal advice could backfire. The problem isn’t just accuracy, it’s how these systems respond when you’re dealing with complicated, real-world conflicts.

During the APNIC Routing Security Special Interest Group (SIG) session at APRICOT 2026 / APNIC 61, APNIC and LACNIC presented a case study of a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijack that combined a technical attack with social engineering.

It is widely believed that all BGP routers within an Autonomous System (AS) must be connected in a full iBGP mesh, or, when this becomes impractical, that route reflectors or confederations must be used. However, a full mesh is not always necessary, and in some scenarios it may even be undesirable.

The skies are quickly filling with communications satellites. Following is a short list of the many ventures that have or will soon be launching large numbers of broadband satellites.

In early demos, the system looked impressive. It could summarize logs, explain configuration issues, and suggest possible fixes. Instead of digging through internal docs, the answers were coming back in seconds. For a while, it really felt like this system was going to work as expected.

What appears as double extraction at the operator level becomes something larger and more serious at the level of the state. It becomes sovereignty inversion.

Major memory makers have already sold all the kit they can make this year, creating shortages and price increases.

It’s fading from our collective memory, but almost thirty years ago the global IT industry was gripped by Y2K fever.

What do you get when you combine Big Tech, a Bill Clinton fixer, Davos, the architect of the Hunter Biden laptop disinfo, and “Artificial Intelligence”? The biggest heist in world history.

Stop blaming the GPUs! Your AI feels slow because data is getting stuck in traffic. Fix the “supply chain” to keep those tokens flowing.

This document provides DNS deployment guidelines to secure the DNS protocol and infrastructure, mitigate misuse or misconfiguration, and provide an additional layer of network security as part of a zero trust and/or defense-in-depth security risk management approach.

However, eBPF has not seen similarly widespread adoption in other types of networked applications, such as web servers and databases. In this blog post, we argue that this gap stems from limitations in the current eBPF architecture — specifically, the kernel runtime, APIs, and compiler toolchain.

Time and again, I see people begging for companies with deep pockets to fund open source projects. I mean, after all, they’ve made billions from this code. You’d think they could support the code’s creators and maintainers. It would be only fair, right?

The weird, rare, surprising patterns that make data rich slowly get smoothed out when an AI model trains on outputs from a previous model.

In the previous note, the claim was not that the registry layer merely imposes visible fees or administrative inconvenience. The claim was more precise. The first extraction occurs when a scarce, transferable, revenue-enabling resource is kept institutionally discounted through non-asset rhetoric, conditional recognition, and friction around transfer and use

The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), a machine that profoundly reshaped computing, marked its 80th anniversary on 15 February 2026. ENIAC was a technological leap that laid the foundation for the modern computing revolution and eventually transformed nearly every aspect of society.

During the APNIC Routing Security SIG session, held at APRICOT 2026 in Jakarta, the community heard about six applications of Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) to the problem of secure Internet routing.

There is no doubt that automation offers benefits such as speed, accuracy, reliability, and efficiency, and goes far beyond simple configuration management tasks, including resource provisioning. However, it may not be a good fit for every infrastructure environment. One must evaluate and compare the pros and cons before adopting automation.

Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are a privacy nightmare, with footage of naked people, sensitive information, and violent acts captured and seen by Meta’s AI and an army of employees.

MOSAIC ditches lasers for cheap MicroLEDs and medical imaging fiber, cuts cabling energy by up to 50%, and already fits in a standard transceiver after a proof-of-concept with MediaTek.

As malicious domains continue to pose a threat across the Internet, security professionals are left to consider the measures that can effectively defend their organizations from these threats.

Right now, a growing chorus is treating India’s “lock and suspend” approach as a success story and a model for the world.

On the last day of December 2016 there was a brief hiccup as the world’s clocks adjusted their time according to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard by adding an extra second to the last minute of the 31st of December.

For the past decade, Docker has provided a robust solution for building, shipping, and sharing applications. But behind its simple “build and run” workflow lie many years of complex technical challenges.

AI assistants that produce drawings and other output that looks like evidence reduce questioning without increasing correctness.

Credential misuse, AI tools, and security blind spots help attackers move through breached networks faster than ever, CrowdStrike finds.

In theory, the design of IPv6 was such that the upper-level end-to-end transport protocols, namely TCP and UDP need not be aware of the IP layer protocol being used. We should be able to use IPv4 and IPv6 interchangeably in the DNS right?

Weshow that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator.

By virtue of its $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox Technologies completed in early 2020, Nvidia became a seller of optical transceivers for Ethernet and InfiniBand, but seven years before that deal was done, Mellanox had acquired optical technology suppliers Kotura and IPtronics to become a supplier of these components itself, correctly perceiving how important optics would be for the future.

The Network Management session at APRICOT 2026 brought together four presenters to share practical, data‑driven insights into how operators can better understand and optimize their networks.

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.

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.

Letâ€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.

ASPA is now available in the RIPE NCC RPKI Dashboard, adding a way to express and validate your upstream relationships on top of ROA-based origin validation. Building on its introduction at RIPE 91, this article explains what ASPA does, why it matters, and how to start thinking about deployment.

AI bots made their presence felt this year, accounting for 4.2 percent of HTML request traffic as they trawl the web for content to be used in training models.

Multimodal tasks were the weakest area across the board, with accuracy often below 50%. This matters because these tasks involve reading charts, diagrams, or images, where a chatbot could confidently misread a sales graph or pull the wrong number from a document, leading to mistakes that are easy to miss but hard to undo.

Or, for that matter, where am I? Let’s look at location on the Internet, and how the Internet “knows” where I am.

It’s not science fiction. When a solar storm hits Earth, it can have real-world consequences, and satellite networks like Starlink are on the front lines.

Two months ago, I wrote about the competition concerns with the GenAI infrastructure boom. One of my provocative claims was that the lifespan of the chips may be significantly shorter than the accounting treatment given to them.

Chinese authorities on Thursday certified the China Environment for Network Innovation (CENI), a vast research network that Beijing hopes will propel the country to the forefront of networking research.

In 2025, the domain industry moved decisively from a fragmented ecosystem into a more integrated, capital-intensive market where infrastructure, identity, and AI are increasingly intertwined.

However, OpenAI has the daunting problem that, unlike Microsoft and Google, it has no other substantial sources of revenue. To survive, it needs to generate profits from ChatGPT.

Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.

In my earlier article on Technitium and Wazuh, I described DNS as both a behavioral signal and an enforcement point. DNS queries appear early in the attack chain, often long before C2 traffic stabilizes.

Cloudflare’s network suffered a brief but widespread outage Friday, after an update to its Web Application Firewall to mitigate a vulnerability in React Server Components went wrong.

You’d think that by now, networks were well enough understood that people would stop making assumptions that we have known, almost since the dawn of networking, to be untrue. Yet as users, developers, and network administrators, we still seem curiously unable to let go of long-held beliefs.

As well as the Mac clones, there were PC-style PowerPC machines – and a version of classic MacOS for them has just been rediscovered, enabling previously unimagined combinations.

Have you ever experienced that moment of panic when you can’t recall a familiar phone number or navigate without a map app? This growing reliance on external memory—known as the “Google Effect”—is a real-world example of how we’ve outsourced core cognitive functions to our devices.

Tensor processing units (TPUs) are specially designed AI accelerators. They are a type of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), or chips designed for specific tasks. For TPUs, that task is running and optimizing AI and machine learning (ML) workflows, including training and inference.

Civil unrest can often cloud measurement data. Some measurement systems, including ours, make relatively sweeping assumptions about the stability of both end user and network service behaviours, and assume that the changes that occur from day-to-day are minor.

Identifying active IPv6 addresses is challenging. Various methods emerged to master the measurement challenge in this huge address space, including hitlists, new probing techniques, and AI-generated target lists. In this paper, we apply active Subnet-Router anycast (SRA) probing, a commonly unused method to explore the IPv6 address space.

Several months ago, I arrived at the office at 8:45 a.m., sat at my desk, and was about to start my day. The only problem was that I, for the life of me, could not remember my password. This is a bit laughable because for the past year, I had typed that exact password almost daily, sometimes from muscle memory.

Vaibhav Kakkar once tested a therapy chatbot to help with a real-life dilemma. “It responded with structured cognitive-behavioral prompts, helping me reframe my thinking,” recalled Kakkar, CEO of marketing agency Digital Web Solutions. “Impressive–but when I needed deeper guidance, it hit a wall.”