Hedge 286: Roundtable

31 October 2025

It’s time again for Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ to talk about current articles they’ve run across in their day-to-day reading. This time we talk about WiFi in the home, how often users think a global problem is really local, and why providers have a hard time supporting individual homes and businesses. The second topic is one no one really cares about … apathy. What causes apathy? How can we combat it? Join us for this episode of the Hedge … if you can bring yourself to care!

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24 October 2025


I get the sense that hosting a ccTLD today is challenging, not because of the technical stack, but due to Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) concerns


In times of major change–whether in IT or the economy–organizations should take a fresh look at their sourcing strategy. Companies outsourcing key functions need to re-examine the reasoning and scrutinize the results.


Another multivendor development group, the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) consortium, recently published its first specification aimed at delivering an open standard interconnect for AI clusters.


The company conducted a nationwide survey of 3,790 people that asked about real-world experiences and expectations around home WiFi performance. I think every ISP I know could have predicted the gist of the responses, but I think ISPs might be surprised at the percentage of people who are unhappy with WiFi.


DNS was not originally designed with security in mind, making it easy for common threats such as DNS spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks to reroute unsuspecting users to malicious sites, often without detection.

Hedge 285: Post Quantum Crypto

24 October 2025

Is quantum really an immediate and dangerous threat to current cryptography systems, or are we pushing to hastily adopt new technologies we won’t necessarily need for a few more years? Should we allow the quantum pie to bake a few more years before slicing a piece and digging in? George Michaelson joins Russ and Tom to discuss.

Hedge 284: Netops and Corporate Culture

17 October 2025

We all know netops, NRE, and devops can increase productivity, increase Mean Time Between Mistakes (MTBM), and decrease MTTR–but how do we deploy and use these tools? We often think of the technical hurdles you face in their deployment, but most of the blockers are actually cultural. Chris Grundemann, Eyvonne, Russ, and Tom discuss the cultural issues with deploying netops on this episode of the Hedge.

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17 October 2025


The ease with which those images and videos traveled, the thoughtless way in which we shared them, reveals the sinister side of technological advancement. It exposes the degree to which social media has desensitized us, stripped us of the natural horror that ought to accompany the spectacle of death, and conditioned us to consume human suffering as one more item in an endless buffet of digital content.


It’s normal for post-quantum cryptography to be rolled out as an extra layer of security on top of traditional pre-quantum cryptography, rather than as a replacement.


Not that many years ago, telephone and broadband networks were structured in such a way that most outages were local events. A fiber cut might kill service to a neighborhood; an electronics failure might kill service to a larger area, but for the most part, outages were contained within a discrete and local area.


Far from a future concern, AI is already the single largest uncontrolled channel for corporate data exfiltration—bigger than shadow SaaS or unmanaged file sharing.


A new security risk has recently been brought to my attention. I was on a Teams call that included an attorney who would not let the call continue while an AI notetaker was present.

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10 October 2025


A number of recent changes have helped to push Ethernet forward, advancing its capabilities to better meet the needs of AI.


Cloudflare has confessed to a coding error using a React useEffect hook, notorious for being problematic if not handled carefully, that caused an outage for the platform’s dashboard and many of its APIs.


Working with MikroTik and IP Infusion’s OcNOS to interop EVPN/VxLAN has been on my wish list for a long time.

Hedge 283: Technical Planning

10 October 2025

We network engineers often find ourselves without a viable plan–our plans always seem to go awry, to the point that many network engineers just give up on planning. Is “giving up” the right solution? Or can we learn to be better planners? Jonathan Adams and Tim McConnaughy join Russ to discussion planning for network engineers.

Hedge 282: Future of Operations

3 October 2025

On this episode of the Hedge, Anil Varanasi joins Russ to talk about the complexities of network operations and what Meter is doing in this space.

note: even though this is a more product-heavy episode of the Hedge than usual, it is not sponsored

Best of the Hedge: Episode 4

26 September 2025


 
Multicloud is all the rage — but is this always an intentional state of affairs, or do companies just “fall into” multicloud? Security in multicloud and certifications round out this episode of the Hedge, where we are joined by Joe Cozzupoli. You can get in touch with Joe through twitter at @jcozzupo24150.

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19 September 2025


“Classic” TCP uses an extremely simple loss-based congestion detection algorithm that is intended to save networks from collapsing under extreme overload.


The endgame is a society where corporate algorithms make decisions about employment, education, and social interaction with no accountability.


The rise of Agentic AI, the emergence and adoption of AI agents and agent-to-agent networking to autonomously perform tasks on behalf of humans, has introduced unique challenges for existing security products.


In the landscape of organizational management, a distinction exists between teams that (a.) efficiently deliver a high-quality service or product, and (b.) those that innovate and develop their thought leadership in an area of emerging technology.


Broadcom CEO Hock Tan delivered a rather defiant keynote to open the VMware Explore conference in Las Vegas recently, telling the audience they are better off using the latest version of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on-premises than hyperscale cloud service providers.


The public is told that AI systems are super smart and have the world’s info at their electronic beck and call. At the same time, it is humans and human organizations who claim professional expertise and so deliver their “truth” via media and Internet.


While Eutelsat’s OneWeb operates the second-largest commercial LEO satellite network, its real-world network performance remains largely unexplored by researchers, due to its targeted enterprise and government markets.


If AI is to become pervasive, as the model builders and datacenter builders who are investing enormous sums of money are clearly banking on it to be, then it really goes have to be a global phenomenon.


It looks to me like history is repeating itself. We’re seeing the same hype cycle for 6G that we saw for 5G.


This article taxonomizes the 25-year history of IPID-based exploits and the corresponding changes to IPID selection methods. By mathematically analyzing these methods’ correctness and security and empirically evaluating their performance, we reveal recommendations for best practice as well as shortcomings of current operating system implementations, emphasizing the value of systematic evaluations in network security.


But for NaaS to truly transform enterprise networking, one thing has been missing: standards. Enter Mplify (formerly the Metro Ethernet Forum), a non-profit focused on standardizing NaaS service definitions.