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SpaceX has surpassed 10,000 satellite launches in its Starlink programme, following the deployment of 56 additional units on Sunday. The milestone highlights the rapid expansion of satellite-based broadband infrastructure and its increasing role in global connectivity.


While x86 has been dominant for decades, a new migration project at Google represents a significant shift to more mixed architectures.


The proliferation of data centers needed to support AI development, along with myriad announcements to onshore manufacturing supply chains, are leading to surging energy demand.


Ex-CISA head Jen Easterly claims AI could spell the end of the cybersecurity industry, as the sloppy software and vulnerabilities that criminals rely on will be tracked down faster than ever.


But is the AI being used for this actually intelligent or just very, very good at faking it? This is not a new question. American philosopher John Searle came up with the Chinese Room, aka the “Chinese Box” argument, all the way back in 1980. He argued that while a computer could eventually simulate understanding – i.e. it could pass the Turing Test – that doesn’t mean it’s intelligent.

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Hedge 286: Roundtable

It’s time again for Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ to talk about current articles they’ve run across in their day-to-day reading. This time we talk about WiFi in the home, how often users think a global problem is really local, and why providers have a hard time supporting individual homes and businesses. The second topic is one no one really cares about … apathy. What causes apathy? How can we combat it? Join us for this episode of the Hedge … if you can bring yourself to care!
 

 
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Posted in AUDIO, CULTURE, HEDGE

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I get the sense that hosting a ccTLD today is challenging, not because of the technical stack, but due to Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) concerns


In times of major change–whether in IT or the economy–organizations should take a fresh look at their sourcing strategy. Companies outsourcing key functions need to re-examine the reasoning and scrutinize the results.


Another multivendor development group, the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) consortium, recently published its first specification aimed at delivering an open standard interconnect for AI clusters.


The company conducted a nationwide survey of 3,790 people that asked about real-world experiences and expectations around home WiFi performance. I think every ISP I know could have predicted the gist of the responses, but I think ISPs might be surprised at the percentage of people who are unhappy with WiFi.


DNS was not originally designed with security in mind, making it easy for common threats such as DNS spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks to reroute unsuspecting users to malicious sites, often without detection.

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Hedge 285: Post Quantum Crypto

Is quantum really an immediate and dangerous threat to current cryptography systems, or are we pushing to hastily adopt new technologies we won’t necessarily need for a few more years? Should we allow the quantum pie to bake a few more years before slicing a piece and digging in? George Michaelson joins Russ and Tom to discuss.

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Posted in AUDIO, HEDGE

Hedge 284: Netops and Corporate Culture

We all know netops, NRE, and devops can increase productivity, increase Mean Time Between Mistakes (MTBM), and decrease MTTR–but how do we deploy and use these tools? We often think of the technical hurdles you face in their deployment, but most of the blockers are actually cultural. Chris Grundemann, Eyvonne, Russ, and Tom discuss the cultural issues with deploying netops on this episode of the Hedge.
 

 
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Posted in AUDIO, CULTURE, HEDGE

Worth Reading 101725


The ease with which those images and videos traveled, the thoughtless way in which we shared them, reveals the sinister side of technological advancement. It exposes the degree to which social media has desensitized us, stripped us of the natural horror that ought to accompany the spectacle of death, and conditioned us to consume human suffering as one more item in an endless buffet of digital content.


It’s normal for post-quantum cryptography to be rolled out as an extra layer of security on top of traditional pre-quantum cryptography, rather than as a replacement.


Not that many years ago, telephone and broadband networks were structured in such a way that most outages were local events. A fiber cut might kill service to a neighborhood; an electronics failure might kill service to a larger area, but for the most part, outages were contained within a discrete and local area.


Far from a future concern, AI is already the single largest uncontrolled channel for corporate data exfiltration—bigger than shadow SaaS or unmanaged file sharing.


A new security risk has recently been brought to my attention. I was on a Teams call that included an attorney who would not let the call continue while an AI notetaker was present.

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