Worth Reading 051526 Given the trend of using generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude for software development, many companies have decided that developers must use GenAI to succeed. I strongly disagree. Here, through a series of randomized controlled trials on human-AI interactions (N = 1,222), we provide causal evidence for two key consequences of AI assistance: reduced persistence and impairment of unassisted performance. Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Last month, market research company, Gartner, said that AI companies need close to “$2 trillion per year in revenue by 2029”, token consumption of between 50,000 and 100,000 times its current rate by 2030, and “a 10% profit margin per token.” With huge losses and small revenues, it is not likely that AI companies will achieve these goals on time. He said that about 20% of all network traffic today, about 80 exabytes, comes from machine-to-machine traffic, and that alone is big news. Nokia is betting its future growth will come from meeting this growing demand. For centuries, political power has repeatedly attempted to territorialize systems whose operational logic depended upon openness, circulation, and coordination beyond borders. Posted in WORTH READING
Worth Reading 051226 The screenshot feature has cultivated a wide range of impactful academic research across computing and social scientific fields. When Motorola unveiled its Iridium global satellite-based mobile telephony service in the late 1990’s everything augured well for a revolution in the satellite communications market, only it didn’t happen. While the software industry has made genuine strides over the past few decades to deliver products securely, the furious pace of AI adoption is putting that progress at risk. The analytic company IDC says the U.S. economy will be generating 394 trillion zettabytes of data annually by 2028 (a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes). Enterprise strategists need to worry about securing their environments against AI-powered attacks. Posted in WORTH READING
Worth Reading 050926 These milestones highlight the significance RPKI has gained over the past decade. Starting off as an experimental technology, it has become a central component of the Internet, affecting a large percentage of its networks. More than 9.7 million third-party businesses sell goods on Amazon, and Amazon makes a lot of money charging those third parties to sell on its platform—$117.7 billion in 2022, representing 23% of Amazon’s total revenues. For much of the history of computing, it was reasonably safe to assume that a machine was doing what you told it to do (and what its creators promised it would do), because its operations were local. There is always the case that the unexpected happens, and X.509 certificates are no exception. There are circumstances where the certificate should be marked as unusable immediately, which is before the notAfter expiration time. Our investigation uncovers two sophisticated telecom surveillance campaigns and, for the first time, links real-world attack traffic to mobile operator signalling infrastructure. Posted in WORTH READING
Worth Reading 050626 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. Posted in WORTH READING
Worth Reading 050426 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. Posted in WORTH READING
Worth Reading 042926 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. Posted in WORTH READING
Worth Reading 042226 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. Posted in WORTH READING
