Worth Reading 062425


There has been a major change in the landscape of the internet over the past few years with the progressive introduction of the QUIC transport protocol. Here I’d like to look at where we are up to with the deployment of QUIC on the public Internet. But first, a review of the QUIC protocol.


The PCI Special Interest Group (PIC-SIG) just released official specs for PCIe 7.0, doubling the bandwidth again for high-performance kit such as network cards, while hinting that PCIe 8.0 may not achieve the same.


Our model training with adversarial data significantly enhanced our defenses against indirect prompt injection attacks in Gemini 2.5 models (technical details).


Apple has a new paper; it’s pretty devastating to LLMs, a powerful followup to one from many of the same authors last year.


Good intentions don’t always result in good outcomes. This is especially the case with recent suggestions regarding end-to-end-encryption adaptability requirements for number independent communication services.

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Worth Reading 062325


asically, model collapse happens when the training data no longer matches real-world data, leading the new LLM to produce gibberish, in a 21st-century version of the classic computer aphorism “garbage in, garbage out.”


As AI workloads scale to thousands of accelerators, the interconnect fabric (also known as a scale-up fabric) for rack-scale systems is under intense scrutiny. Significant advancements are reshaping scale-up connectivity in 2025.


Standardized in 2021, QUIC is a UDP-based protocol designed to improve upon the TCP / TLS stack. While the QUIC protocol recommends pacing, and congestion control algorithms like BBR rely on it, the user-space nature of QUIC introduces unique challenges.


According the Google Cloud’s mini incident report, the issue occurred due to an invalid automated quota update to the API management system, which was distributed globally, causing external API requests to be rejected.


The specification details enhancements to Ethernet that improve low-latency transport in high-throughput networking deployments. It includes a modern Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) approach, direct memory access implementations, transport protocols, and congestion control mechanisms.

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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.

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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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