Weekend Reads 110323

3 November 2023


With security, the battle between good and evil is always a swinging pendulum. Traditionally, the shrewdness of the attack has depended on the skill of the attacker and the sophistication of the arsenal.


While cyberattacks on websites receive much attention, there are often unaddressed risks that can lead to businesses facing lawsuits and privacy violations even in the absence of hacking incidents.


A new login technique is becoming available in 2023: the passkey. The passkey promises to solve phishing and prevent password reuse.

Hedge 201: Roundtable

2 November 2023

It’s time to gather round the hedge and discuss whatever Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ find interesting! In this episode we discuss business logic vulnerabilities, and how we often forget to think outside the box to understand the attack surfaces that matter. We also discuss upcoming network speed increases like Wi-Fi 7 and 800G Ethernet. Do we really need these speeds, or are we just getting caught up in a hype cycle?

Weekend Reads 102723

28 October 2023


Passkeys are appearing more and more in tech news, with support for them increasing. Since many administrators test out new technologies themselves first, we at CIS embarked on a short project to see what happened when an intern with our CTO team had the opportunity to implement passkeys.


Draft proposals setting a “remuneration obligation” for digital platforms started to pop up in the Brazilian congress after Australia adopted its own News Media Bargaining Code.


And can companies finally trust their data to cloud providers and actually trust that CC removes the need to worry about the cloud provider as a sub-processor with access to the data?

Hedge 200: Automation with Ethan Banks

27 October 2023

We’ve been on a long streak of discussions about automation, why it works, why it isn’t working, and what the networking industry can do about it. For this episode, we’re joined by the indubitable Ethan Banks. f you don’t think there’s anything left to say, you’ve not yet listened to Ethan!

Hedge 199: Automation with Carl Buchmann

20 October 2023

Automation is a big topic–folks had a lot of feedback on our first couple of Hedge episodes on the topic. We return to automation in this episode of the Hedge with Carl Buchmann to discuss one effort at unifying automation with humble beginnings.

Weekend Reads 102023

20 October 2023


When we were not looking – and forcing ourselves to not look at any IT news because we have other things going on – that is the moment when Nvidia decides to put out a financial presentation that embeds a new product roadmap within it.


SiFive today launched a pair of RISC-V CPU cores aimed at high-performance and AI/ML applications.


LPO is short for Linear Pluggable Optics (or Linear-drive Pluggable Optics), it is a potential technology to satisfy the low power consumption and high bandwidth demand of data centers like CPO (Co-packaged Optics).

Upcoming Class: How the Internet Really Works

19 October 2023

Join me for How the Internet Really Works on the 27th!

Controversial Reads 101423

14 October 2023


Imagine a future in which AIs automatically interpret—and enforce—laws.


Using the proposed “Web Environment Integrity” means websites can select on which devices (browsers) they wish to be displayed, and can refuse service to other devices. It binds client side software to a website, creating a silo’d app.


When Alexa wouldn’t respond to his commands, he called the Amazon help desk to see what the issue was. Evidently, the company locked him out because of his apparent racism: “I was told that the driver who had delivered my package reported receiving racist remarks from my ‘Ring doorbell’ (it’s actually a Eufy, but I’ll let it slide).” Later, without any explanation or apology, Amazon allowed Jackson access again.

Weekend Reads 101323

14 October 2023


Dereferencing null pointers is one of the most common software errors. It is so infamous that Tony Hoare called the invention of null pointers his billion-dollar mistake.


To detect DDoS attacks in a telecommunications network we need to see the traffic that traverses the network, and we have multiple protocols for that purpose.


A recent trend in cloud-native development is the use of multi-architecture infrastructures, which can run workloads on either x86 or Arm architectures.

Hedge 198: Nephio with Wim Henderickx

13 October 2023

Automation is a bit of theme recently on the Hedge. In this episode we’re joined by Wim Henderickx to talk about the Linux Foundation Nephio project, which adapts Kubernetes management into a cloud native network management platform. This new take on managing networks is definitely discovering.