Working on technical standards in the computing, communications and networking industries often involves dealing with patents. Like most standards-development organizations (SDOs), the IETF has policies that deal with patents covering IETF protocols, specifications and standards. The IETF’s first patent policy appeared in RFC 1310 (Mar, 1992), but the basis for today’s policy approach originated with…

Starting with AMD’s Ryzen desktop processor and Epyc server architecture, AMD will implement their scalable Infinity Fabric across all its SoC and MCM products. Think of Infinity Fabric as a superset of HyperTransport, AMD’s previous socket-to-socket interconnect architecture, now managed by the HyperTransport Consortium. Infinity Fabric is a coherent high-performance fabric that uses sensors embedded…

There are many reasons to dislike centralized storage services. They include business risk, as we see in le petit musée des projets Google abandonnés, monoculture vulnerability and rent extraction. There is thus naturally a lot of enthusiasm for decentralized storage systems, such as MaidSafe, DAT and IPFS. —DHSR

Here’s what’s happening: Young tech companies have been backed by unprecedented sums of investment money in the last three or four years. Those startup financiers in turn have collected record amounts of money from their own investors to buy pieces of future tech startups. All this money is going into the startup system, but it’s…

Mobile apps entertain and assist us, make it easy to communicate with friends and family, and provide tools ranging from maps to electronic wallets. But these apps could also seek more device information than they need to do their job, such as personal data and sensor data from components, like cameras and GPS trackers. —Google

Since the disclosures of Edward Snowden in 2013, the U.S. government has assured its citizens that the National Security Agency (NSA) cannot spy on their electronic communications without the approval of a special surveillance judge. Domestic communications, the government says, are protected by statute and the Fourth Amendment. In practice, however, this is no longer…

It would be ideal if we lived in a universe where it was possible to increase the capacity of compute, storage, and networking at the same pace so as to keep all three elements expanding in balance. The irony is that over the past two decades, when the industry needed for networking to advance the…

Over the weekend, 140,000 people in Los Angeles spent 12 steamy hours without power when a local high-voltage transformer blew up. No one knows the cause of this particular disruption of service. But it’s the latest reminder of an ominous reality. —Free Fire

Today, when people see a video of a politician taking a bribe, a soldier perpetrating a war crime, or a celebrity starring in a sex tape, viewers can safely assume that the depicted events have actually occurred, provided, of course, that the video is of a certain quality and not obviously edited. But that world…

This narrative refers to the understanding that trust mitigates the basic uncertainties that the Internet architecture has imposed upon its operators since its inception. To this day, network engineers cannot generally be certain about the validity of the routing announcements that they receive from interconnected networks, and they have little insight into the legitimacy of…