Worth Reading 071126

11 July 2026


 


A unanimous Supreme Court reversed a $1 billion dollar jury award against a broadband provider in its March 2026 ruling in Cox Communications v. Sony Music.

 


Differential privacy (DP) data synthesizers are increasingly proposed to afford public release of sensitive information, offering theoretical guarantees for privacy (and, in some cases, utility), but limited empirical evidence of utility in practical settings.

 


LLMs are relentless data miners that train on unimaginably large text databases, looking for multi-dimensional statistical relationships among small chunks of text called tokens.

 


Regulatory filings and new business models suggest hyperscalers are shifting from simply building AI capacity to managing the enormous financial risks that come with it.

 


olicymakers are casting more and more problems as issues of cybersecurity. So reframed, wildly different policy issues, from misinformation, to child social media safety laws, to antitrust regulations, to alleged journalist misconduct, to anti-sex trafficking statutes become what this Article calls “cybersecuritized.

Hedge 311: The Dangers of AI

9 July 2026

We are often told that if engineers who don’t go “all in” on AI will be left behind. While there are a few voices who argue that AI can be a dangerous tool, impacting not only the quality of our work, but the very quality of our thinking skills. Doug Smith, a critic of using AI for engineering, joins this episode of the Hedge to argue the contrary view of AI.

What are the dangers of relying on AI?

Hedge 310: AI Ops

3 July 2026


 
What is AI Ops, and how can it be useful for your network? Akshay Balaganur and Sushanth Mascaren join Tom and Russ to discuss various aspects of AI Ops.

Worth Reading 070126

1 July 2026


 


A better, more nuanced understanding of tasks in recommender systems can help minimize user costs across the entire recommendation process.

 


The current estimate of the world’s population is 8.264 billion people, so the share price of SpaceX is currently at a phenomenal USD $261 per head.

 


The analysis from space monitoring firm LeoLabs, provided to Breaking Defense, found that from January 2021 to January 2025 China has abandoned 51 spent rocket bodies in LEO above 650 kilometers (about 404 miles) in altitude, more than doubling the number for the previous five years to bring the total to 96.

 


A big problem, Pauzauskie said, revolves around reproducibility. So far, labs haven’t been able to show that they can consistently cool semiconductors.

 


This article recounts the evolution of modern computing systems to provide an analysis of security risks and their evolution, with a past and present look at key cyber-defense innovations as well as a perspective on future cybersecurity hard problems.

Worth Reading 062926

29 June 2026


 


It’s no longer just about your IP address or the specific endpoint you think you’re connecting to, it’s about your location and which intermediary services can most effectively handle your request.

 


Earlier this month, a German court ruled that Google is liable for its AI search summaries. Rejecting defenses like “users can check for themselves,” and that they generally know “that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted,” the court held that the AI’s summaries are reflections of the company and “above all an expression of Google’s business activities.”

 


The distribution of Content Delivery Networks (CDN), cloud and content provider capacity across Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) provides a fascinating lens into the physical infrastructure of the Internet and public peering.

 


The memory market – by which we mean dynamic main memory as well as flash persistent memory – has been utterly and perhaps forever changed by the GenAI boom.

 


These days you could be excused by suspecting that the world has gone AI-mad, and if you were at the NANOG meeting your suspicions would’ve only been confirmed!

Worth Reading 062426

24 June 2026


 


As the development of data centers in the U.S. faces intense criticism from local communities and legal action, project supporters are claiming “foreign influence” could be fueling the fire.

 


In this bingecast installment of the Mind Matters News podcast, host Robert J. Marks welcomes economics professor and author Gary Smith to discuss the hype around artificial intelligence and its impact on the market.

 


In the DNS name resolution space queries are free. To what extent do we see over-querying on the part of recursive resolvers in the DNS?

 


Over the past year, the Ethernet community has examined 400Gbps‑per‑lane signaling from many angles: AI network use cases, modulation options, channel limitations, and technology feasibility. Those discussions have been necessary, but they now need to converge into decisions that allow the industry to move forward.

 


For most of the internet era, distribution was scarce and content was abundant. Platforms that controlled distribution captured the majority of value.

Hedge 309: DNS Persist

19 June 2026


 
As DNS is more widely used to distribute certificate information, proving ownership of a resource becomes more critical. The constant challenges required to prove resource ownership, however, increase delay in connecting or using a resource. DNS persists–as the name implies–creates a persistent connection between a resource and a certificate authority. Henry Birge-Lee, Michael Slaughter, and Shiloh Heurich join Russ and Tom to explain how this new record type works and it’s importance to DNS.

Worth Reading 061926

19 June 2026


 


In this post, I discuss our recent work that models and analyses the resilience of authoritative DNS infrastructure that supports individual domain names on the Internet.

 


The RIPE NCC made its all-powerful single sign-on tokens available to over 1000 third parties. From a single link click, any logged-in RIPE NCC user would leak their session token.

 


Identifying active IPv6 addresses is a challenging task, but it’s also an important one. As researchers and network operators, it helps us understand the current deployment, identify weak spots that need strengthening, and detect vulnerable devices for disclosure.

 


The fundamental bubble barometer is that speculators buy an asset because they expect the price to keep rising, not because they want the income generated by the asset. Indeed, most speculators don’t plan on holding the asset long enough receive any income.

 


Recently, there has been a surge in progress in quantum computing that has shortened the hypothetical timeline on which quantum computers can ‘break’ traditional public-key cryptography that uses the RSA scheme.

Hedge 308: Hidden Competence

11 June 2026


 
We all talk about how engineers deal with imposter syndrome–but we don’t often talk about the experience of making things work “in the background.” What is competence, and what do we do when competence isn’t recognized? Justin Wilson (j2sw) joins Russ and Tom to discuss.
 
https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-308.mp3
 
download

Worth Reading 061026

10 June 2026


 


When business volume and market capitalization cross a critical threshold, vertically integrating infrastructure ceases to be merely a cost-cutting financial tactic; it becomes an existential imperative for computational resilience and commercial survival.

 


It looks like industry mergers and acquisition activity is in high gear lately.

 


Building multi-agent systems right now feels painfully identical to the early, chaotic days of the micro services gold rush.

 


The standard is called DNS-AID (Domain Name System for AI Discovery). Its premise is that the internet already solved the problem of finding things at scale forty years ago with DNS — and that the same infrastructure should handle AI agents.

 


Mythos is real. I know a big chunk of the industry thinks it’s a marketing stunt, and I get why. I get it. But I’ve seen the findings, and they’re bad.