Worth Reading 081325

13 August 2025


The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts on, and data brokers you’ve never heard of.


It turns out that, if you have your domain hosted by a big provider (we happen to use GoDaddy), it’s easy to turn on DNSSEC. But I think it says a lot that it took us this long (and the stimulus of working on a new security book) to get us to turn on DNSSEC


As we left the laboratory, I thought about how we in the computing field build a tremendous number of things that really cannot be called beautiful and then are commonly tossed aside without a thought.


The accelerated migration to advanced services will be accompanied by unprecedented complexity, and security and reliability concerns that must be addressed by the network-engineering and formal-methods communities.


Quantum scientists have long treated quantum entanglement as precious cargo, forging fresh links for every secure message or computation. A new theoretical study proposes a thriftier route, letting an existing pair pass portions of its entanglement down an extended chain.

Fast Following Fails

9 August 2025

Fast following fails.

Whenever I hear a leader in a technology business say, “We’re going to fast follow because it’s the most profitable place to be,” I know I’m looking at a failed organization. I didn’t come to this conclusion by thinking about it. I came to this conclusion by observing it repeatedly.

Hedge 276: Common Mistakes in RFPs

7 August 2025

Requests for proposals (RFPs) are a little understood part of running a network–or any other IT system. What are some common mistakes, and some things engineers should think about, when building and executing RFPs? Andreas Taudte joins Tom and Russ to discuss RFPs.

Worth Reading 072725

27 July 2025


We sketch out the enabling technologies for AI. They include search, reasoning, neural networks, natural language processing, signal processing and computer graphics, programming and conventional software engineering, human-computer interaction, communications, and specialized hardware that provides supercomputing power.


For decades, thanks to the low latency enabled by Remote Direct Memory Access, or RDMA, a method of allowing CPUs and then GPUs and finally other kinds of XPUs to directly access the main memory of each other without having to go through the entire network software stack, InfiniBand found a niche and was one of the reasons why Nvidia shelled out $6.9 billion to acquire Mellanox Technologies more than five years ago.


Shipments of tape storage media increased again in 2024, according to HPE, IBM, and Quantum – the three companies that back the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Format.


In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, discusses a day in the life of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Not an extraordinary day, not a special day, just a regular day.


Dumb phones represent the laziest possible solution to a complex behavioral problem. They’re the dietary equivalent of having your jaw wired shut.

Hedge 275: Jevon’s Paradox

24 July 2025


 
What is Jevon’s Paradox? Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ discuss how this famous paradox impact network engineering.

Worth Reading 072425

23 July 2025


They call themselves Scattered Spider. They’re probably younger than your college freshman. They live in suburban bedrooms across America and Britain, and they’ve just brought industries to their knees.


The RPKI makes use of RSA signatures. These “traditional” digital signatures are expected to be vulnerable to attacks with powerful quantum computers. While no quantum computer currently exists that can break traditional cryptography, the development of quantum computers is progressing rapidly, and it is expected that they will be able to break RSA and other traditional cryptographic algorithms, be it in several years or several decades.


Analysing Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) SYN segments, the initial step in the TCP three-way handshake, can reveal patterns and anomalies in network traffic, providing insights into potential threats.


One way to establish if a QUIC connection is viable without paying a time penalty is for the server to signal the capability to use QUIC to the client in the first (TCP/TLS) connection, allowing the client to initiate a QUIC session on the second and subsequent connections.


These are not bugs but are inherent limitations of the technology. The same limitations make it unlikely that LLM machines will ever be capable of performing all human tasks at the skill levels of humans.

Worth Reading 071725

17 July 2025


Is Your Wi-Fi Router Tracking Your Browsing? Here’s What 30,000 Words of Privacy Policies Revealed.


Browser Dating wants your search history — all of it. Your 3 a.m. Reddit rabbit holes, your medical anxieties, your peculiar curiosities about President Trump’s hair, and whether cats plot murder.


Now, people are rethinking the trade-off. Ubuntu has disabled some protections, resulting in 20% performance boost.


Each time you swipe a loyalty card, you’re not just saving on groceries—you’re feeding a powerful data machine known as retail media.


Over the last ten years, more than 600 million websites have been secured with free certificates from Let’s Encrypt. Here’s how it all began and why.

Hedge 274: DNS DELEG

17 July 2025

What is DNS Delegation and what is it used for? What is new in the Delegation world, and what impact does it have on DNS security and operations? George Michaelson joins Tom Ammon and Russ White for a discussion about DNS DELEG in this episode of the Hedge.

Hedge 273: The Future is Operations

11 July 2025

Many of us old timers (and a lot of young timers) worry about the future of networking. What if the future isn’t a technology, or even AI, but a change in focus? Mike Bushong joins Tom and Russ to argue for operations as the future of networking.

Worth Reading 070325

3 July 2025


Ossification is still a major issue in today’s networking environment, and while it’s not a theme in the architecture of the transmission platform, we see it in the Internet Protocol itself, in our transport protocols, in our routing protocols, and in various applications.


The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is issuing this Public Service Announcement to warn the public about cyber criminals exploiting Internet of Things (IoT)1 devices connected to home networks to conduct criminal activity using the BADBOX 2.0 botnet2.


hile the architecture of the 900 series had no support for partitioning memory (requiring cooperation for multi-user activity), and many ran without any operating system at all, there was an optional NPL interface.


Most protocols do not have the equivalent of an X-Forwarded-For header. To solve this, HAProxy came up with the PROXY protocol, which is a Layer 4 protocol that allows a proxy server to communicate client information to a backend server.


If you built a proper technology strategy in the first place, driven by the business strategy, then no matter what is happening don’t ignore it, and don’t throw it out—update it and stick to it!