Worth Reading 061025


This report examines the growing global trend of Internet blocking and its impact on the stability, openness, and interoperability of the Internet. It details how governments and private actors are increasingly using network-level interventions—such as DNS blocking, IP address blocking, and protocol filtering—to control online content.


Broadcom began shipping its answer to Nvidia’s upcoming Quantum-X and Spectrum-X switches on Tuesday: the Tomahawk 6. The chip doubles the bandwidth of its predecessor and comes in both standard and co-packaged optics flavors.


Artificial intelligence, once hailed as the great liberator of human productivity and ingenuity, is now moonlighting as a con artist, data thief, and spy.


The current craze for AI has helped drive a wave of datacenter building, but the industry has run into opposition from local communities in many areas, something it is understandably keen to address.


Low orbit space is growing increasingly crowded. Starlink has over 7,100 satellites in orbit and has plans to grow to 30,000. Project Kuiper has plans for a constellation of 3,232 satellites.

Posted in WORTH READING

Worth Reading 060925


The story of computing and communications over the past eighty years has been a story of quite astounding improvements in the capability, cost and efficiency of computers and communications.


In recent discussions, it became clear that additional information could be helpful, breaking down what a user or administrator needs to understand about TLS implementation and configuration options to better assess points of potential exposure.


The use of pseudo-random processes to generate secret quantities can result in pseudo-security. A sophisticated attacker may find it easier to reproduce the environment that produced the secret quantities and to search the resulting small set of possibilities than to locate the quantities in the whole of the potential number space.


We’ve all had the serendipity experience, even online — clicking through a chain of links, scanning Google search results, drifting between loosely connected ideas. But search engines and information retrieval systems aren’t designed to enhance serendipity.


Here I want to look at just one day of the operation of the Internet’s BGP network by looking at the behaviour of a single BGP session. The day we’ll use for this study is the 8h May 2025, and the BGP vantage point used here is an unremarkable network at the edge of the network, AS 131072.

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Worth Reading 060425


There is an interesting article from the Brookings Institute that documents four trends in infrastructure funding. The conclusions of the report surprised me and I suspect they will surprise others.


And when details do emerge, they usually involve a retraction. IBM laid off 8,000 workers in 2023, and then hired them back in May 2025. In 2024, a top headline for Klarna was “Klarna’s AI Assistant Is Doing The Job Of 700 Workers” but a year later it was “Klarna Reverses AI-Only Customer Support Strategy.”


I would like to look at the ways in which the operators of the number Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) have deployed this infrastructure in a way that maximises its available and performance and hardens it against potential service interruptions, or in other words, an examination of the resilience of the RPKI infrastructure.


OFC 2025 made one thing clear: The transition to Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) switches in data centres is inevitable, driven primarily by the power savings they offer.


I’d like to look at that spike in the total route count that occurred on the 1st May in further detail. Between 16:00 UTC on the 1st May and 18:00 UTC on the same day, the routing table grew by some 4,500 routes.

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Worth Reading 060325

Note to readers: I’m merging the worth reading and weekend reads into a “couple of times a week” worth reading. How often I post these depends on the number of articles I run across, but I’ll try to keep it to around five articles per post


I have been consistently skeptical of claims that LLMs are intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word. It is undeniably remarkable that LLMs can generate coherent conversations and articulate answers to almost any question.


For decades, Communist China’s spies, hackers and businessmen have feasted on the forced transfer of technology from vulnerable US corporate enterprises drawn to the vast Chinese market. Little has been accomplished to reduce this massive theft of intellectual property. US businesses seem to have resigned themselves to such unfair practices as the price of doing business in China.


His technical work and evangelism have improved the Internet, and I will give some examples of his contributions to the Internet community and users, but I am sad because he was a good person—idealistic, unselfish, open, and funny.


To build a data-driven story, we must use a basic narrative model. Various models exist in the literature, such as the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) pyramid4, or other models taken from cinema.


But lurking beneath the surface is a growing threat that does not involve human credentials at all, as we witness the exponential growth of Non-Human Identities (NHIs).

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Hedge 269: Web 3.0

Yes, we took an (unintentional) three-week break for medical reasons … but we’re back with a new episode.

What is Web 3.0, and how is it different from Web 2.0? What about XR, AI, and Quantum, and their relationship to Web 3.0? Jamie Schwartz joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to try to get to a solid definition of what Web 3.0 and how it impacts the future of the Internet.

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Posted in AUDIO, HEDGE

Hedge 268: Will AI take our jobs?

One of the “great fears” advancing AI unlocks is that most of our jobs can, and will, be replaced by various forms of AI. Join us on this episode of the Hedge as Jonathan Mast at White Beard Strategies, Tom Ammon, and Russ White discuss whether we are likely to see a net loss, gain, or wash in jobs as companies deploy LLMS, and other potential up- and down-sides.
 

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Posted in AUDIO, HEDGE