WORTH READING

An Autonomous System (AS) can protect itself against DDoS attacks by rerouting incoming DDoS traffic through a ‘DDoS scrubber’, a process that is typically implemented using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). While BGP-based scrubbing is a useful service, its adoption on the global Internet is unknown.

Until recently, many professionals, including many doctors, thought they needed to become more machine-like to keep their jobs. Such worry contributed to the specialization trend of the last century.

In an era of growing cyber threats, traditional defensive measures can be insufficient in the face of sophisticated or novel tactics. As a result, the question of whether private or public entities should engage in active defense or offensive “hack back” tactics has taken on greater urgency.

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston explores the complex landscape of undersea cables.

By 1990 it was clear that IP had a problem. It was still a tiny Internet at the time, but the growth patterns were exponential, doubling in size every 12 months. We were stressing out the pool of Class B IPv4 addresses and in the absence of any corrective measures this address pool would be fully depleted in 1994.

If you’re using IP address truncation thinking it makes data “anonymous” or “non-personal,” you’re creating a false sense of security.

With distressingly typical Silicon Valley fake-it-till-you make-it bravado, LLM creators have been telling investors that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is just around the corner (or has already been achieved!). The problem the promoters blithely ignore is that LLMs do not know how the words they input and output relate to the real world.

Many organizations rushing to cut staff in the name of AI efficiency are expected to quietly rehire those roles – often “offshore or at lower salary.”

While Silicon Valley is investing tens of billions of dollars chasing the artificial general intelligence dream, academic computing research in the U.S. is facing a severe drought.

There are two competing forces in IT, and they are at play during the GenAI era as much as they have ever been during prior eras in the datacenter.

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.

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.

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.

A number of recent changes have helped to push Ethernet forward, advancing its capabilities to better meet the needs of AI.

Cloudflare has confessed to a coding error using a React useEffect hook, notorious for being problematic if not handled carefully, that caused an outage for the platform’s dashboard and many of its APIs.

Working with MikroTik and IP Infusion’s OcNOS to interop EVPN/VxLAN has been on my wish list for a long time.

Have you heard about MRT dumps, but never tried to use them because the bar seems too high? Or are you tired of doing “parse -> grep -> process” every time you touch BGP MRT dumps?

Unfortunately, history is again being rewritten. It is rapidly becoming clear that LLMs are not economical.

As part of our research into post-quantum cryptography (PQC) for DNSSEC, we test PQC as a drop-in replacement for classical algorithms. We explore a transition where both run simultaneously, analysing how resolvers validate records, edge cases, and the feasibility and impact of such a period.

In much of the world, we are in an era that I like to call the “post-gigabit era”. Many users have access to gigabit connections—or at least hundreds of Mbps—and have moved from an era of bandwidth scarcity to bandwidth abundance.

“Where are you?” is not an easy question to answer on the Internet. The telephone system’s address plan embedded a certain amount of physical location information in the fixed line network, and a full E.164 telephone number indicated your location in terms of your country, and your area within that country.

Sure, some days you hate your job. But how do you know when an IT position has gone from being run-of-the-mill annoying to truly toxic

The digital world is shifting toward access rather than ownership, and nothing shows this more clearly than the rise of subscription-based business models.

“Classic” TCP uses an extremely simple loss-based congestion detection algorithm that is intended to save networks from collapsing under extreme overload.

The endgame is a society where corporate algorithms make decisions about employment, education, and social interaction with no accountability.

The rise of Agentic AI, the emergence and adoption of AI agents and agent-to-agent networking to autonomously perform tasks on behalf of humans, has introduced unique challenges for existing security products.

In the landscape of organizational management, a distinction exists between teams that (a.) efficiently deliver a high-quality service or product, and (b.) those that innovate and develop their thought leadership in an area of emerging technology.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan delivered a rather defiant keynote to open the VMware Explore conference in Las Vegas recently, telling the audience they are better off using the latest version of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on-premises than hyperscale cloud service providers.

The public is told that AI systems are super smart and have the world’s info at their electronic beck and call. At the same time, it is humans and human organizations who claim professional expertise and so deliver their “truth” via media and Internet.

While Eutelsat’s OneWeb operates the second-largest commercial LEO satellite network, its real-world network performance remains largely unexplored by researchers, due to its targeted enterprise and government markets.

If AI is to become pervasive, as the model builders and datacenter builders who are investing enormous sums of money are clearly banking on it to be, then it really goes have to be a global phenomenon.

It looks to me like history is repeating itself. We’re seeing the same hype cycle for 6G that we saw for 5G.

This article taxonomizes the 25-year history of IPID-based exploits and the corresponding changes to IPID selection methods. By mathematically analyzing these methods’ correctness and security and empirically evaluating their performance, we reveal recommendations for best practice as well as shortcomings of current operating system implementations, emphasizing the value of systematic evaluations in network security.

But for NaaS to truly transform enterprise networking, one thing has been missing: standards. Enter Mplify (formerly the Metro Ethernet Forum), a non-profit focused on standardizing NaaS service definitions.