Weekend Reads 041125

11 April 2025


Amazon was a major player in ICANN’s last top-level domain (TLD) expansion round, serving as a Registry Operator for over 50 TLDs based on over 70 strings for which they originally applied.


A recent influx of /16 IPv4 address blocks has sent ripples through the secondary market, triggering a notable decline in average sale prices for the largest address sizes.


It is best to appreciate the challenge. AI data centers are projected to consume approximately two to three percent of U.S. electrical consumption this year alone, with expectations of continued growth now a given.


Interestingly, a fiber cut to an undersea fiber doesn’t cause as much harm as most people imagine. This map that shows all of the current submarine cable routes. There are a huge amount of redundant routes to most of the world.


Is it actually possible to run a team without lying? Steven Gaffney, author of the book, “Just Be Honest”, joins Johna and John to talk about why being honest is harder than it sounds–and how (and why) to do it anyway.

Hedge 266: SR/MPLS

11 April 2025

When most people think of segment routing (SR), they think of SRv6–using IPv6 addresses as segment IDs, and breaking the least significant /64 to create microsids for service differentiation. This is not, however, the only way to implement and deploy SR. The alternative is SR using MPLS labels, or SR/MPLS. Hemant Sharma joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss SR/MPLS, why operators might choose MPLS over IPv6 SIDs, and other topics related to SR/MPLS.

You can find Hermant’s recent book on SR/MPLS here.

Hedge 265: Out of Band Networks

4 April 2025

Out of band management networks were once more common than they are today. Should we go back to building out of band management networks? Should out of band management networks be virtual or physical? How can we sell out of band management networks to the folks paying the bills? Daryll Swer joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the importance of OOB management.

Weekend Reads 032825

28 March 2025


With global Route Origin Authorization (ROA) coverage surpassing 50% for both IPv4 and IPv6, implementing Route Origin Validation (ROV) has become increasingly critical for securing network operations


One of the mysteries for me in IP networks was the Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) process. I’ve seldom seen any problems with the MTU at all.


It is arguable, however, that Xsight Labs is trying to push programmability to the extreme, eventually allowing customers to use P4, Python, C/C++, Rust, Go, or what have you (maybe even NPL) to hack the data plane inside switches using its X1 and now X2 ASICs.


With phpIPAM, it became possible to establish a structured, easily searchable database. This structured data now serves as the network’s SoT — a reliable foundation for network automation.


On Wednesday, web infrastructure provider Cloudflare announced a new feature called “AI Labyrinth” that aims to combat unauthorized AI data scraping by serving fake AI-generated content to bots.

Hedge 264: Documentation and Tech Debt

28 March 2025

On this episode of the Hedge, Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ talk about topics near and dear to every network engineer’s heart–documentation, legacy, and tech debt. What should our philosophy of documentation be? What are legacy, end of life, and tech debt, really?

Hedge 263: NFTs

21 March 2025


 
How do Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, impact value and the future of all things digital? How are they different from–and similar to–blockchain? Jaime Schwarz joins Russ White and Tom Ammon to talk about what NFTs are, how they work, and how they might impact the future.

Weekend Reads 031325

14 March 2025


Between 2021 and 2023, the IPv4 market was a roller coaster ride—prices shot up in 2021, peaked in 2022, and plummeted in 2023. Those who expected a recovery in 2024 were sadly disappointed.


Even though most people will probably agree that software documentation is important, the topic of how to do it best is quite underdiscussed. I want to rectify this by offering some suggestions on how to do it.


Using SimpleQA, the company’s in-house factuality benchmarking tool, OpenAI admitted in its release announcement that its new large language model (LLM) GPT-4.5 hallucinates — which is AI parlance for confidently spewing fabrications and presenting them as fact — 37 percent of the time.


Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser recently announced a coalition of 38 attorneys general and the Department of Justice have proposed a final package of remedies to end Google’s monopoly over internet search engines.


5.56 billion people are using the Internet at the start of 2025, up 136 million (2.5%) from a year earlier. This means more than two-thirds of the people on the planet are connecting to the web.


Happy Eyeballs can have some funny side effects. In a project, a connection to a development web server sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t — the users got a ‘403 Forbidden’ page. The solution was quite simple.

Hedge 262: Stealthy BGP Attacks

13 March 2025


 
Many providers count on detection in the global routing table to discover and counter BGP route hijacks. What if there were a kind of BGP hijack that cannot be detected using current mechanisms? Henry Birge-Lee joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss a kind of stealthy BGP attack that avoids normal detection, and how we can resolve these attacks.

Weekend Reads 022825

1 March 2025


Over time, experience—and sometimes hard lessons—have shown that security is more than just technology, processes, or a team of IT specialists. Without a strong corporate culture that prioritizes cybersecurity, even the best efforts can be overlooked or misunderstood.


Perhaps this is more important: Did you hear that many scientists are “sceptical”? Perhaps not; the headline wouldn’t sound as good.


ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) are very much like a magic act in that their confident responses to almost any query conceal the fact that they are not intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word.


The market for dielectric liquid required for immersion cooling is dominated by a small number of players that are aware of their market power.


Analysis AI models like OpenAI o1/o3, DeepSeek-R1, and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking can mimic human reasoning through a process called chain of thought.

Hedge 261: The NTIA, Spectrum, and Broadband

1 March 2025

In the United States, the National Telecommunications and Infrastructure Administration manages spectrum and researches the current state of Internet connectivity for policy makers. Henning Schulzrinne joins Tom and Russ to discuss the role of the NTIA, spectrum management, and broadband management.