Worth Reading 050926

9 May 2026


 


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.

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

8 May 2026


 
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.

Worth Reading 050626

6 May 2026


 


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.

Worth Reading 050426

4 May 2026


 


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.

Worth Reading 042926

29 April 2026


 


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.

Hedge 303: Data Centers?

23 April 2026


 
In this roundtable episode of the Hedge, Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ hang out and talk about data centers–why are we building all these things again? Our second topic is the FCC’s ban on non-US made home routers. Was this the right thing to do? Was it the wrong thing to do? Were there any other policy options?

Worth Reading 042226

22 April 2026


 


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.

Hedge 302: Communications in Biological Systems

17 April 2026


 
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.

Worth Reading 041326

13 April 2026


 


Tech leaders hoping AI might help save money and improve efficiency in IT infrastructure should know that only 28 percent of use cases fully succeed and offer return on investment (ROI).

 


The best strategy in the world won’t succeed if a team falters operationally. But what is operational excellence, and what does it take to acquire it

 


Industry analysts are using the word convergence as shorthand for competition that bundles cell service with broadband. Convergence is the newest strategy that replaces the traditional bundling strategy of selling a package of broadband, cable TV, and voice.

 


Leaving aside my discovery that YouTube videos on the Naturalistic Fallacy are branded by female cleavage (???), we move on to the two problems embedded in statements I hear by articulation and by implication in the public discourse: “We must cultivate trust in AI,” and “AI acquiescence is inevitable.”

 


Most engineers don’t think about securing TCP itself. We rely on the applications riding on top of the network. When you run routing protocols or long-lived control sessions across untrusted or shared infrastructure, TCP becomes part of your attack surface whether you planned for it or not.

Best of the Hedge: Episode 30, Network Fundamentals

10 April 2026


 
What are networking fundamentals, and why are they important? Join us for this repost of a classic Hedge discussion with Ethan, Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ.