Hedge 304: Deep Dive into a Network Master’s Program

If you’ve ever been curious about what an advanced degree in network engineering looks like, you’ll want to join us for this episode of the Hedge. Levi Perigo from the University of Colorado at Boulder joins Tom and Russ to talk through what earning a Master’s in Networking involves and what kinds of things you would learn.
 

 
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Hedge 302: Communications in Biological Systems

What does biology have to do with computer networks? Much more than you might think. Communications systems, after all, need to solve the same problems–and they often use the same kinds of tools. In this episode of the Hedge, Emily Reeves and Joe Deweese join Russ and Tom to talk about a recent paper comparing computer communications to biological communications.
 

 
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