Weekend Reads 090724

7 September 2024


A federal judge struck down a Biden administration rule on Tuesday that banned employers from using noncompete agreements, which would have affected the contracts of millions of Americans.


The Open Compute Project, the org best known for offering designs for hyperscale hardware, has rounded up AWS, Google, Meta, and Microsoft to help it test concrete.


Recent trends show that ransomware attacks continue to grow more advanced and persistent.

Hedge 242: The Myth of the Coder

5 September 2024

In the early days of computer programming, some thought there was a difference between a coder and a programmer. Did this division ever really exist, and are there similar divisions in network engineering?

Weekend Reads 083024

31 August 2024


Microsoft on Thursday disclosed four medium-severity security flaws in the open-source OpenVPN software that could be chained to achieve remote code execution (RCE) and local privilege escalation (LPE).


Cybersecurity researchers have discovered multiple critical flaws in Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings that, if successfully exploited, could result in serious consequences.


As many as 10 security flaws have been uncovered in Google’s Quick Share data transfer utility for Android and Windows that could be assembled to trigger remote code execution (RCE) chain on systems that have the software installed.

The Hedge 241: Starlink Performance w/Geoff Huston

29 August 2024

When Starlink first went into service we heard a lot of stories about how its Internet service was slow and unreliable. We’re a few years into Starlink launching satellites—how is Starlink holding up? Is service improving? Geoff Huston joins Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ to look into Starlink’s performance today.

August Rule 11 Academy Update

26 August 2024

I’ve been working on new material over at Rule 11 Academy. This month’s posts are:

  • BGP Route Reflector Lab
  • The Clos Fabric (history)
  • The Default Free Zone
  • Network Addresses
  • BGP Policy Entrance Selection (2)
  • Interview Rubric Sample
  • BGP Policy Entrance Select (1)
  • Interviewing Background

    • This brings us up to a total of 39 lessons. Each lesson should be about 15 minutes, so about 10 hours of material so far. The trial membership will take you through the end of the year. After the first of the year, the trial membership will last 2 months.

Hedge 240: Build or Buy?

23 August 2024

Many network operators think the idea of building rather than buying is something that’s out of reach–but is it? Join Steve Dodd, Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ as we discuss the positive and negative aspects of build versus buy, what operators get wrong, and what operators don’t often expect.

Weekend Reads 081624

16 August 2024


Beware of Internet FORCES aiming to change your mind or direct your decisions! That acronym, coined by behavioral scientist Patrick Fagan, helps people know when they’re being “nudged.”


Enter your name into an internet search engine and the first few results will probably include detailed profiles of you compiled by “people-search” websites with names like Intelius, PeopleFinders, and Spokeo.


Following the July 19 outages caused by a bad update, the cybersecurity firm faces shareholder lawsuits and pressure to pay damages for at least one major customer, Delta Airlines. Will software liability follow?


Since 1998 — the last year Congress passed a major law to reform the tech industry and protect children in the virtual space — a lot has changed.


According to a damning report from 404 Media, backed with internal Slack chats, emails, and documents obtained by the outlet, Nvidia helped itself to “a human lifetime visual experience worth of training data per day,” Ming-Yu Liu, vice president of Research at Nvidia and a Cosmos project leader, admitted in a May email.


It has been an enduring fascination to see how we could use packet networking in the context of digital communications in space.


At a recent conference I attended, a speaker referenced media ecologist Neil Postman and his “rules” for evaluating the pros and cons of any given technological development.


In the 18th century, Wolfgang von Kempelen’s victorious mechanical Turk (1770) amazed the world, see Figs.1-4. However, there was a person hidden inside.


LibreQoS is an open source project and the subject of a popular recent APNIC Academy webinar. Responding to feedback given at the webinar, this post will look at the features of LibreQoS.


Huawei Cloud has developed a network monitoring tool that, when used in production on three of its own regions, was able to observe more of its infrastructure than existing tools, and revealed issues that previously evaded human efforts.


Decoupling authorization from your main application code makes authorization more scalable, easier to maintain, and simpler to integrate with your components. However, these benefits are difficult to realize if you don’t consciously plan for them within your authorization implementation.


In this episode of PING, Casper Schutijser and Ralph Koning from SIDN Labs in the Netherlands discuss their post-quantum testbed project.

Hedge 239: AI for Network Operations

15 August 2024

There are (at least) three different aspects of AI in network engineering: network design to support AI, AI for development, and AI for operations. J.P. Vassuer joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss AI for understanding and operating networks. What are the possibilities? What are the pitfalls? What can we expect to see?

Weekend Reads 081024

10 August 2024


Network observability tools provide information on the health and behavior of applications, offer insights into end-user experience, and detect anomalies that are indicative of security incidents.


Maestro is a general-purpose, horizontally scalable workflow orchestrator designed to manage large-scale workflows such as data pipelines and machine learning model training pipelines.


It might be time to get the pens and notebooks back out and shut off the keyboard for a while. Just pretend you’re back in the first grade and don’t have a minicomputer in your back pocket.

Hedge 238: What Went Wrong? (Crowdstrike)

8 August 2024


 
The massive failure resulting from a failed update to 8.5 million Windows hosts by Crowdstrike will live in Internet history for years to come. The failure will be studied by engineering teams and college classes to understand what went wrong and how we can stop this from happening in the future. Derick Winkworth (@cloudtoad), Eyvonne Sharp, Tom Ammon, and Russ White hang out at the hedge to talk about what happened and lessons learned from a network engineering perspective.