The Hedge 81: Jana Iyengar and QUIC
QUIC is a middle-aged protocol at this point—it’s several years old, and widely deployed although TCP still dominates the transport layer of the Internet. In this episode of the Hedge, Jana Iyengar joins Alvaro Retana and Russ White to discuss the motivation for developing QUIC, and its ongoing development and deployment.
The Hedge 80: Ian Goetz and 5G
Although there are varying opinions 5G—is it real? Is it really going to have extremely low latency? Does the disaggregation of software and hardware really matter? Is it really going to provide a lot more bandwidth? Are existing backhaul networks going to be able to handle the additional load? For network engineers in particular, the world of 5G is a foreign country with its own language, expectations, and ways of doing things.
Complexity Reduction?
Back in January, I ran into an interesting article called The many lies about reducing complexity:
Reducing complexity sells. Especially managers in IT are sensitive to it as complexity generally is their biggest headache. Hence, in IT, people are in a perennial fight to make the complexity bearable.
The Hedge 79: Brooks Westbrook and the Data Driven Lens
Many networks are designed and operationally drive by the configuration and management of features supporting applications and use cases. For network engineering to catch up to the rest of the operational world, it needs to move rapidly towards data driven management based on a solid understanding of the underlying protocols and systems. Brooks Westbrook joins Tom Amman and Russ White to discuss the data driven lens in this episode of the Hedge.
Loose Lips
When I was in the military we were constantly drilled about the problem of Essential Elements of Friendly Information, or EEFIs. What are EEFis? If an adversary can cast a wide net of surveillance, they can often find multiple clues about what you are planning to do, or who is making which decisions. For instance, if several people married to military members all make plans to be without their spouses for a long period of time, the adversary can be certain a unit is about to be deployed. If the unit of each member can be determined, then the strength, positioning, and other facts about what action you are taking can be guessed.
The Hedge 78: Mike Bushong and Radical Candor
Communication is one of those soft skills so often cited as a key to success—but what does effective communication entail? Mike Bushong joins Eyvonne Sharp and Russ White on the Hedge to discuss radical candor, and the importance of giving and taking honest feedback to relationships and business.
Time and Mind Savers: RSS Feeds
I began writing this post just to remind readers this blog does have a number of RSS feeds—but then I thought … well, I probably need to explain why that piece of information is important.
The amount of writing, video, and audio being thrown at the average person today is astounding—so much so that, according to a lot of research, most people in the digital world have resorted to relying on social media as their primary source of news. Why do most people get their news from social media? I’m pretty convinced this is largely a matter of “it saves time.” The resulting feed might not be “perfect,” but it’s “close enough,” and no-one wants to spend time seeking out a wide variety of news sources so they will be better informed.
On the ‘net: From Stamps to the Stack
I’ve started publishing in the Public Discourse on topics of technology and culture; the following is the first article they’ve accepted. Note the contents might be classified as a little controversial.
The Hedge 77: The Internet is for End Users
When the interests of the end user, the operator, and the vendor come into conflict, who should protocol developers favor? According to RFC8890, the needs and desires of the end user should be the correct answer. Mark Nottingham joins Alvaro Retana and Russ White on this episode of the Hedge to discuss why the Internet is for end users.
The Insecurity of Ambiguous Standards
Why are networks so insecure?
One reason is we don’t take network security seriously. We just don’t think of the network as a serious target of attack. Or we think of security as a problem “over there,” something that exists in the application realm, that needs to be solved by application developers. Or we think the consequences of a network security breach as “well, they can DDoS us, and then we can figure out how to move load around, so if we build with resilience (enough redundancy) we’re already taking care of our security issues.” Or we put our trust in the firewall, which sits there like some magic box solving all our problems.