Weekend Reads 041125 Amazon was a major player in ICANN’s last top-level domain (TLD) expansion round, serving as a Registry Operator for over 50 TLDs based on over 70 strings for which they originally applied. A recent influx of /16 IPv4 address blocks has sent ripples through the secondary market, triggering a notable decline in average sale prices for the largest address sizes. It is best to appreciate the challenge. AI data centers are projected to consume approximately two to three percent of U.S. electrical consumption this year alone, with expectations of continued growth now a given. Interestingly, a fiber cut to an undersea fiber doesn’t cause as much harm as most people imagine. This map that shows all of the current submarine cable routes. There are a huge amount of redundant routes to most of the world. Is it actually possible to run a team without lying? Steven Gaffney, author of the book, “Just Be Honest”, joins Johna and John to talk about why being honest is harder than it sounds–and how (and why) to do it anyway. Posted in WEEKEND READS
Weekend Reads 032825 With global Route Origin Authorization (ROA) coverage surpassing 50% for both IPv4 and IPv6, implementing Route Origin Validation (ROV) has become increasingly critical for securing network operations One of the mysteries for me in IP networks was the Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) process. I’ve seldom seen any problems with the MTU at all. It is arguable, however, that Xsight Labs is trying to push programmability to the extreme, eventually allowing customers to use P4, Python, C/C++, Rust, Go, or what have you (maybe even NPL) to hack the data plane inside switches using its X1 and now X2 ASICs. With phpIPAM, it became possible to establish a structured, easily searchable database. This structured data now serves as the network’s SoT — a reliable foundation for network automation. On Wednesday, web infrastructure provider Cloudflare announced a new feature called “AI Labyrinth” that aims to combat unauthorized AI data scraping by serving fake AI-generated content to bots. Posted in WEEKEND READS
Weekend Reads 031325 Between 2021 and 2023, the IPv4 market was a roller coaster ride—prices shot up in 2021, peaked in 2022, and plummeted in 2023. Those who expected a recovery in 2024 were sadly disappointed. Even though most people will probably agree that software documentation is important, the topic of how to do it best is quite underdiscussed. I want to rectify this by offering some suggestions on how to do it. Using SimpleQA, the company’s in-house factuality benchmarking tool, OpenAI admitted in its release announcement that its new large language model (LLM) GPT-4.5 hallucinates — which is AI parlance for confidently spewing fabrications and presenting them as fact — 37 percent of the time. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser recently announced a coalition of 38 attorneys general and the Department of Justice have proposed a final package of remedies to end Google’s monopoly over internet search engines. 5.56 billion people are using the Internet at the start of 2025, up 136 million (2.5%) from a year earlier. This means more than two-thirds of the people on the planet are connecting to the web. Happy Eyeballs can have some funny side effects. In a project, a connection to a development web server sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t — the users got a ‘403 Forbidden’ page. The solution was quite simple. Posted in WEEKEND READS
Weekend Reads 022825 Over time, experience—and sometimes hard lessons—have shown that security is more than just technology, processes, or a team of IT specialists. Without a strong corporate culture that prioritizes cybersecurity, even the best efforts can be overlooked or misunderstood. Perhaps this is more important: Did you hear that many scientists are “sceptical”? Perhaps not; the headline wouldn’t sound as good. ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) are very much like a magic act in that their confident responses to almost any query conceal the fact that they are not intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word. The market for dielectric liquid required for immersion cooling is dominated by a small number of players that are aware of their market power. Analysis AI models like OpenAI o1/o3, DeepSeek-R1, and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking can mimic human reasoning through a process called chain of thought. Posted in WEEKEND READS
Weekend Reads 022125 It’s no wonder that techno-futurists trumpet a coming machine intelligence with such ease — they’ve lowered the standards so much to begin with. While companies are going to extraordinary lengths to obtain valuable compute power to satisfy artificial intelligence’s (AI) growing appetite, a group of vendors have found a way to dip into the existing infrastructure for the extra shot of compute. To ensure stability and security, every IXP enforces a set of rules — a code of conduct for its participants. These rules go beyond technical niceties; they are essential safeguards for the entire ecosystem. The terms Digital Sovereignty or Souveraineté numérique have recently risen in prominence to describe the international rule of law as it applies to information and communication technologies. In this second installment of Beyond Their Intended Scope, we analyze a recent BGP leak out of Brazil that briefly affected networks around the world. Posted in WEEKEND READS
Weekend Reads 012425 AI errors come at seemingly random times, without any clustering around particular topics. LLM mistakes tend to be more evenly distributed through the knowledge space. A model might be equally likely to make a mistake on a calculus question as it is to propose that cabbages eat goats. In this post, we start by explaining the configuration of our switching infrastructure using common IETF protocols to implement redundancy, full usage of resources, and seamless adaptivity in case of failures or maintenance. We then continue presenting the configuration of our route servers with a special focus on isolating different LANs and dynamically excluding invalid routes. LLMs are undeniably astonishingly good at using the text they trained on (aided by human fine tuners) to generate convincing prose. But they are really bad at distinguishing between truth and falsehoods and responding to prompts that are unlike or even slightly different from what they trained on. I wonder how many of you have noticed a subtle change in the way that you navigate the web? We’re in the midst of a transition to the zero click Internet, meaning users no longer have to click on links to reach web sites to find content. Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself. Posted in WEEKEND READS
Weekend Reads 011025 Wi-Fi 8 is coming, but it looks set to focus on greater reliability rather than on pushing the bandwidth ever higher, as the most recent updates to the venerable wireless local network technology have done. Policymakers need to carefully guide the future consumption of electricity by AI datacenters, according to a report that considers four potential scenarios and suggests a number of guiding principles to prevent it from spiraling out of control. In one of the quiet announcements that might eventually be a huge deal, the FCC voted to open the entire 6 GHz WiFi frequency band to very low-power devices (VLP – just in case you needed another new acronym to remember). Gaining a clear view of the DDoS landscape is vital for developing effective countermeasures against this prolific form of attack. A new study, carried out through collaboration between researchers from several institutions, helps bring DDoS into perspective. Salt Typhoon’s latest victims include Charter, Consolidated, and Windstream, underscoring the widening scope of China’s cyberespionage campaign against critical US infrastructure. Posted in WEEKEND READS
