Worth Reading: Examining an African Cable Break

23 May 2024


On Sunday, May 12, two submarine cables (Seacom and EASSy) suffered breaks along a stretch of coastline between the cable landing stations in Mtunzini, South Africa and Maputo, Mozambique. It was the latest in a historically bad run of submarine cable failures that have led to disruptions of internet service around the continent of Africa.

Worth Reading: When Colorless Green DNNs Sleep Furiously in an Unexplainable Fantasy

23 May 2024


It seems that the misguided hype surrounding deep learning and in turn artificial intelligence (AI) does not seem to be subsiding. In fact, with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) and products therefrom, such as GPT-4, Sora, Copilot, Llama 3, etc., many have been raising up the ante as we started to hear of declarations such as “AGI (artificial general intelligence) is near,” or that “kids should stop learning to code because AI programming is here.”

Worth Reading: Americans Work Too Much and Too Little

22 May 2024


Engaging with literal pornbots on Twitter is less soul-sucking than reading the tone-deaf striver banalities and motivational tripe that festoon the place: “Here are five things I learned about peer-to-peer marketing after proposing to my girlfriend,” etc.

Worth Reading: [Podcast] Measuring RPKI and BGP with Oregon RouteViews

22 May 2024


This time on PING, Doug Madory from Kentik discusses his recent measurements of the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) system worldwide, and its visible impact on the stability and security of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

Worth Reading: The FTC Ban on Noncompete Agreements Is Misguided

21 May 2024


The Federal Trade Commission has shifted focus in recent months away from its traditional goal of protecting consumers and toward one of protecting workers instead. Most recently, the agency issued a rule that would ban essentially all noncompete agreements in employment contracts.

Worth Reading: Authenticated DNSSEC Bootstrapping

21 May 2024


When a domain owner decides to have their zone secured with DNSSEC, adding validation keys and signatures to the zone are only half the story. To allow resolvers to start validating signatures, it is also necessary to link a least one of the domain’s validation keys (DNSKEY records) to the global DNSSEC chain of trust.

Worth Reading: LLMs’ Data-Control Path Insecurity

20 May 2024


Data and control used the same channel. That is, the commands that told the phone switch what to do were sent along the same path as voices.

Worth Reading: Command-line routing stats with BGPKIT Monocle and Cloudflare Radar API

20 May 2024


With BGPKIT Monocle, users can glance at routing stats for any ASN, economy, or the whole Internet or look up prefix origins and examine their RPKI validation status as well as prefix visibility on global routing tables.

Worth Reading: Active or Inactive DHCP Reservations

16 May 2024


In DHCP servers you can configure IP address reservations, meaning that you statically configure the IP addresses that you want the specific DHCP clients to get.

Worth Reading: How SSH got to be on port 22

16 May 2024


Tatu Ylonen may not be the best-known name in protocol development these days, but chances are that anyone doing systems work copying data between hosts or managing a Unix host will be using his software. He wrote the ubiquitous ‘SSH’ program back in 1995.