Recently, middle-mile fiber construction and upgrades are using 400 Gbps lasers. Vendors have already developed and field-tested terabit lasers with a speed of 1,000 Gbps.

This week I heard the quote, “I made the mistake of trying to derive meaning FROM my work instead of bringing meaning TO my work. I thought that if I would just get the right job, somehow it would fulfill me. Instead, I have learned that God uses our work to do his work in us. My work has been the crucible for the formation of my soul.”

For this write-up, I wanted to reflect on the stubborn persistence of technologies such as ISATAP, which is an early IPv6 transition mechanism and DVMRP AskNeighbors2, which is an experimental IP multicast debugging protocol.

This month, the Council of Europeﾒs Committee on Artificial Intelligence (CAI) wrapped up negotiations on a groundbreaking draft Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence, human rights, democracy and the rule of law.

In 2021, the story was price. In 2022, the story was price and large block supply. The story in 2023 is decline—but with a notable caveat.

Worth Reading: The Backdoor to Control the Internet
Few people are aware, but over the last several days, a perceptive developer foiled a multi-year plot to install a remote backdoor into, well, the entire Internet. Two years ago, a programmer known as Jia Tan (JiaT75) started helping out with a lesser-known compression library, known as xz.

The need for carrier hotels became apparent in the year after the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That new law allowed local competition for telephone service. New competitive exchange carriers (CLECs) had to tie their network into the public switched telephone network (PSTN), which was largely controlled by the big Bell Telephone companies and a few others.

Eight countries in West Africa reported Internet outages after damage was reported to four different undersea fiber cables. The most affected countries are Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Benin, with additional problems caused in Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon.

Starlink’s megaconstellations deliver broadband Internet to customers around the globe. But while the tech promises to democratise Internet access, it’s not always clear how existing protocols and regulations apply beyond the clouds. In this episode, Geoff Huston talks about the future of low-orbit Internet.

A few days later, Paul Baran published a second less-known seminal paper that would also fundamentally reshape the cyber world. That paper directed at the U.S. national security community known as Memorandum RM-3765 described a bold new world of cybersecurity–articulating all the threats and mitigations.