Worth Reading 092026


We will be as unknowledgeable about what machines know about us as they are about what we know about them.

 


This post analyzes the technical details of the BGP hijack against Softaculous Ltd, the company behind the Softaculous auto-installer and the Virtualizor VM management platform.

 


In this episode of PING, we speak with Willem Toorop from NLnet Labs and Ilyas Rahimi, who recently completed a Master’s in Security and Network Engineering at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). They discuss their research into the effects of local root serving.

 


One effective form of attack on the Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure, including the root servers, is the so-called ‘random name attack’.

 


The original purpose of a telephone number was to identify a specific customer. When telephones first came into use, they could only be used to call people in the immediate area who could be connected by the local neighborhood operator.

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Worth Reading 091126


Recognizing that AI is a bubble requires one to apply the right test to the right companies and that requires one to understand the fundamental nature of the bubble in question.

 


Based on the insights from those articles, we now shift attention to which parts of the Internet Route Registry (IRR) landscape can – or cannot – be replaced safely with information from the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) system.

 


While many faults manifest as crashes or exceptions, others are far more subtle to identify. Silent data corruptions (SDCs), also known as silent data errors or silent errors, are violations of data integrity that occur without immediate, observable, and explicit indications.

 


Aligning intended learning outcomes, assessments, and teaching practices with the realities of AI-assisted programming.

 


AI is transforming the role of the junior developer. But as routine tasks become increasingly automated, how will the next generation of software engineers master the craft of maintaining complex systems?

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Worth Reading 090926


Information is not meaningful simply because it exists or because it is improbable. It becomes meaningful only if there exists a system that can interpret it and use it to perform a function.

 


At first glance, asking whether Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) make the Internet faster may seem almost provocative at a peering forum. Surely the answer is simply ‘yes’?

 


If you’re dealing with industrial protocols, you’ll certainly have seen Modbus packets in your network. But what are these packets used for, and what data do they contain?

 


Yet I have become increasingly concerned that, in the case of IPv6, we are evaluating the technology almost entirely from the perspective of what it allows networks to do, while giving insufficient attention to what it may allow network operators, corporations and governments to do to their users and if the benefits outweigh the risks.

 


The future of fast food was supposed to look something like this: walk into a restaurant, place an order, and watch a robot assemble your pizza with machine-like precision.

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Worth Reading 090126


The central question is therefore not whether AI should be regulated. It should. The question is what happens when regulation itself becomes a bottleneck to technological progress.

 


Does AI increase or reduce technical debt? Join Johna Johnson and John Burke as they discuss how to make strategy in environments in which AI fuels untrammeled growth in enterprise complexity–but also points the way to automated optimization (and concomitant technical debt reduction).

 


Red Hat published a benchmark analysis on June 15, 2026, that puts numbers behind a question occupying many IT departments.

 


Recent industry momentum behind open AI models reflects a growing recognition that openness is essential for accelerating innovation, broadening participation, and strengthening the global AI ecosystem.

 


In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston and I discuss how the DNS behaves during a ‘cold start’, when a resolver’s cache contains no data from previous queries.

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Worth Reading 082926


The term “content delivery network” reflects the technology’s original value proposition.

 


Sam Altman released ChatGPT for free in late 2022. Many users fell in love both with it and Altman’s argument that artificial general intelligence could be achieved through scaling. T

 


If you work around data centers and high-density builds, you have probably heard the term “Multi-Core Fiber” thrown around.

 


Ask yourself these questions, assuming you have a serious medical condition and your doctors are going to be using GenAI to scan your images and test results to discover the breadth and depth of your condition and to recommend treatment.

 


Maybe adoption is low not because people don’t believe DNSSEC is useful, but because turning it on and keeping it on is still genuinely harder than it should be.

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Worth Reading 081526


I am not a security researcher, and I have never been to Georgia. Yet within a few hours, using AI tools and nothing but public records, I was able to reconstruct the order in which 1.5 million ballots were cast in Georgia’s May 2026 primary–98.9% of the in-person ballots.

 


In profession after profession, GenAI is beginning to perform many of the tasks that traditionally served as training grounds for newcomers.

 


What’s the manifestation of the fallacy in the current case? Thinking that a system that is great at a certain kind of math problem is great at all math, great at science or even quite possibly great at everything.

 


An agent running Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5 spent 34 hours trying to get a malware dropper merged into a real open-source project during a cyber evaluation by the UK’s AI Security Institute.

 


This week, DuckDuckGo is filing an amicus brief in the appeal of a federal court decision that Google unlawfully maintained a monopoly in the general search market in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

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Worth Reading 081026


There is an interesting fight within the leadership of U.S. AI companies. It is between the supporters of open-source AI and those driven to oppose open-source AI.

 


A Chinese man accused by the communist authorities of having committed “economic crimes” figured that he could evade the long reach of the country’s police state by hiding out in plain view: in a stadium packed with 60,000 people listening to a pop concert.

 


The J2SW Prefix Advertisement Checker, my 3rd application in the network series, checks the exact prefix against live routing data and reports the origin ASN seen by RIPE RIS collectors.

 


A growing number of drivers are pushing back against increasingly tech-heavy vehicles, saying they prefer the simplicity of a

 


The IETF does not launch rockets, or design spacecraft, or even work on radio systems and spectrum assignment, but it has been engaged in the standardisation of communications protocols used to communicate with these spacecraft. Here’s a few topics that were presented at IETF 126.

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