Worth Reading 021326

https://blog.apnic.net/2026/02/06/from-roots-to-reach-network-resilience-in-natural-disasters/
When communication networks break down, people cannot report their condition, responders lose situational awareness, and entire communities risk slipping beyond the reach of coordinated assistance. Network failure does not merely accompany disaster — it reshapes the human consequences.

https://cornwallalliance.org/nuclear-is-the-most-reliable-path-to-affordable-electricity/
Amid this “worldwide” economic backdrop, nuclear energy presents an affordable alternative to unreliable electricity sources like wind and solar. Economically, it makes no sense to abandon working production methods until new ones can replace the existing and future demand. World citizens are facing this reality in higher electricity prices.

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-02/ipasn.html
There have been a number of services that allow a lookup of an IP address or Autonomous System Number (ASN) and return information about that IP number resource. The Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) each operate a database that records (among other data items) the number resource and the details of the entity that is described in the relevant number registration record.

https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2026/02/09/the-challenge-of-adding-fiber-to-poles/
On February 5, the FCC issued a Memorandum and Order related to a pole attachment dispute between Comcast and Appalachian Power Company (APCO).

https://blog.apnic.net/2026/02/10/the-current-state-of-rdap/
While whois remains in widespread use, the RDAP ecosystem is rapidly maturing. Indeed, 2025 saw significant adoption and an accelerated expansion of RDAP services across the industry.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/10/dijkstras_algorithm_impact_on_networks/
The new algorithm is no minor tweak to Dijkstra’s but a significantly different approach. Its headline claim is that, whereas Dijkstra requires a sorting operation, and thus is only able to perform as well as the best sorting algorithm, this new approach “breaks the sorting barrier”. That is, it avoids the need for sorting and is able to deliver better bounds on performance than Dijkstra.

Hedge 294: Resource Constrained Environments


 
The future of network design and architecture is–based on current trends–is going to be working with and around resource constraints. How would resource constraints impact the way we design and manage networks? Mike Bushong joins Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ to ponder network engineering in a resource constrained world.

Hedge 293: Moore’s Law


 
Is there an interaction between Moore’s Law and network computing? If so, what is the relationship? How do advances in silicon capabilities and network speeds and feeds rely and drive one another. Geoff Huston joins Russ on this episode of the Hedge to look at a bit of the history.

Hedge 292: Data Center Costs


 
The cost of building and maintaining a data center is rising rapidly–and not just in financial terms. George Michaelson joins Tom and Russ to discuss the wider costs of data centers.

Best of the Hedge 9: Ethics in IT


 
Nash King (@gammacapricorni) joins Russ White and Tom Ammon in a wide ranging discussion of ethics in IT, including being comfortable with standing up and saying “no” when asked to do something you consider unethical and the virtue ethic.

Worth Reading 122625


ASPA is now available in the RIPE NCC RPKI Dashboard, adding a way to express and validate your upstream relationships on top of ROA-based origin validation. Building on its introduction at RIPE 91, this article explains what ASPA does, why it matters, and how to start thinking about deployment.


AI bots made their presence felt this year, accounting for 4.2 percent of HTML request traffic as they trawl the web for content to be used in training models.


Multimodal tasks were the weakest area across the board, with accuracy often below 50%. This matters because these tasks involve reading charts, diagrams, or images, where a chatbot could confidently misread a sales graph or pull the wrong number from a document, leading to mistakes that are easy to miss but hard to undo.


Or, for that matter, where am I? Let’s look at location on the Internet, and how the Internet “knows” where I am.


It’s not science fiction. When a solar storm hits Earth, it can have real-world consequences, and satellite networks like Starlink are on the front lines.


Two months ago, I wrote about the competition concerns with the GenAI infrastructure boom. One of my provocative claims was that the lifespan of the chips may be significantly shorter than the accounting treatment given to them.


Chinese authorities on Thursday certified the China Environment for Network Innovation (CENI), a vast research network that Beijing hopes will propel the country to the forefront of networking research.


In 2025, the domain industry moved decisively from a fragmented ecosystem into a more integrated, capital-intensive market where infrastructure, identity, and AI are increasingly intertwined.


However, OpenAI has the daunting problem that, unlike Microsoft and Google, it has no other substantial sources of revenue. To survive, it needs to generate profits from ChatGPT.


Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.