Weekend Reads 061120

Mapping the Internet’s topology improves our understanding of its interconnectivity, and thus its robustness and resilience. One of the best ways to do this is to capture data at the router level; it provides the greatest detail of the physical infrastructure of the Internet. —Kevin Vermeulen

A number of groups are using different approaches to measure Internet outages, including active probing of most of the IPv4 Internet, and passive observation of traffic. Our group at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California (USC/ISC), developed Trinocular, a system that pings millions of /24 IPv4 blocks every 11 minutes (since October 2014). —Guillermo Baltra

Benefits like wearing pajama bottoms to work and going for a mid-day run can be mitigated by the costs to your motivation, self-confidence, and self-esteem when you no longer hear “you aced it!” from your boss on the walk back from a client meeting, or when you can’t get a high-five in the coffee room from a teammate — or even a smile from the receptionist on your way to the elevator. —Deborah Grayson Riegel

It’s a truism that in computing, the easiest way in the door is with a general-purpose computer, but when you need serious scale for solving a particular problem, you turn to purpose-built hardware. This can be for reasons of cost, performance, or both. —John Scudder

It all started in 2003 when I wrote my master’s thesis — an experimental DHCPv6 implementation for Linux. Back in the day, IPv6 was a novelty. The IETF RFC documents that defined it were a bit over four years old. —Tomek Mrugalski

At the same time, the QUIC headline feature is its built-in low latency handshake that is more reliant on small handshake sizes than is widely understood. QUIC implementations are now faced with the decision of whether or not updating their embedded TLS code to support certificate compression is urgent. —Patrick McManus

We are now more than a year into what the carriers are labeling as 5G. If you read this blog regularly you know by now that I don’t think we’ve seen any 5G yet – what has been introduced so far is new spectrum. A new band of spectrum can improve broadband performance in crowded markets, and so the carriers are getting some praise for this development. But these new spectrum bands are operating as 4G LTE and are not yet 5G. —Doug Dawson

Automated bots that collect content, product descriptions, pricing, inventory data, and other public-facing information from websites have a greater economic and performance impact than many organizations might realize, a new study suggests. —Jai Vijayan

And Finally, this is worth watching on why computers barely work, and this is worth watching on “all links are safe.”