Worth Reading 031526

15 March 2026


 


As malicious domains continue to pose a threat across the Internet, security professionals are left to consider the measures that can effectively defend their organizations from these threats.

 


Right now, a growing chorus is treating India’s “lock and suspend” approach as a success story and a model for the world.

 


On the last day of December 2016 there was a brief hiccup as the world’s clocks adjusted their time according to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard by adding an extra second to the last minute of the 31st of December.

 


For the past decade, Docker has provided a robust solution for building, shipping, and sharing applications. But behind its simple “build and run” workflow lie many years of complex technical challenges.

 


AI assistants that produce drawings and other output that looks like evidence reduce questioning without increasing correctness.

Hedge 299: 6G

13 March 2026


 
As we discussed in the prior episode, the 6G hype is building. What’s in 6G, though, and how realistic is it that a new wireless technology is going to radically change the world? In this episode of the Hedge, George Michaelson joins us from Australia to discuss the ins and outs of 6G.

Worth Reading 031026

10 March 2026


 


Credential misuse, AI tools, and security blind spots help attackers move through breached networks faster than ever, CrowdStrike finds.

 


In theory, the design of IPv6 was such that the upper-level end-to-end transport protocols, namely TCP and UDP need not be aware of the IP layer protocol being used. We should be able to use IPv4 and IPv6 interchangeably in the DNS right?

 


Weshow that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator.

 


By virtue of its $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox Technologies completed in early 2020, Nvidia became a seller of optical transceivers for Ethernet and InfiniBand, but seven years before that deal was done, Mellanox had acquired optical technology suppliers Kotura and IPtronics to become a supplier of these components itself, correctly perceiving how important optics would be for the future.

 


The Network Management session at APRICOT 2026 brought together four presenters to share practical, data‑driven insights into how operators can better understand and optimize their networks.

Hedge 298: The 6G Hype Begins

6 March 2026


 
It’s 2026, and it’s time for a new cellular telephone hype cycle: 6G! Doug Dawson from CCG joins Russ and Tom to talk about why 5G is really 4.5G, the proposed changes for 6G, and the challenges higher frequency ranges and bandwidths face in the real world.
 
It’s definitely worth following Doug’s daily post about the telecom and wireless worlds over at Pots and Pans.

Hedge 297: MPLS

27 February 2026


 
Has MPLS really “died” because of SD-WAN services? Scott Robohon joins Tom and Russ to talk about the past and future of MPLS.

Worth Reading 022626

26 February 2026


 


The current debate on the existence of an “AI bubble” centers on a single question: is the current high level of investment into AI data centers a massive misallocation of capital or the key to future economic growth?

 


The more I have thought about it, the more convinced I am that the very technological advancements that make my life easier — the most recent being artificial intelligence — actually contribute to a busier, more overwhelming life.

 


Using hot water to cool supercomputers? Nvidia and others are doing it. It’s liquid cooling minus the water chillers.

 


New research shows that these claims aren’t true in all cases, particularly when account recovery is in place or password managers are set to share vaults or organize users into groups.

 


Every employer knows to conduct background checks. However, conducting background checks on IT professionals requires an extra layer of verification, given the privileged access they typically have to IT systems and tools.

Hedge 296: AS-SETs

20 February 2026


 
AS-SETs (not that kind) were originally designed to simplify filtering at eBGP peering points–but they seem to have gone horribly wrong. Job Snijders and Doug Madory join Tom and Russ to discuss the history, use, problems, and (hopeful) demise of AS-SETs.

Worth Reading 022026

20 February 2026


 


For decades, many believed SDCs were rare, almost mythical events. However, major hyperscale operators including Meta, Google and Alibaba have disclosed that roughly one in 1,000 CPUs in their fleets can produce silent corruptions under certain conditions.

 


The fundamental rules of creativity and ownership, established in law since the time of the printing press, are now collapsing under the weight of Generative AI.

 


As you and your spouse head off for a two-week Maui vacation, do you hand your 17-year-old boy a bottle of smooth whiskey and the keys to your spare Ferrari, bidding him “have fun while we’re gone”?

 


When Meta Platforms does a big AI system deal with Nvidia, that usually means that some other open hardware plan that the company had can’t meet an urgent need for compute.

 


This paper introduces Whisper Leak, a side-channel attack that infers user prompt topics from encrypted LLM traffic by analyzing packet size and timing patterns in streaming responses. Despite TLS encryption protecting content, these metadata patterns leak sufficient information to enable topic classification.

 

Worth Reading 021726

17 February 2026


If I learned one thing at NANOG 96, it’s how to build an up-to-date state of the art AI data centre! As I now understand it, the process is quite simple.

 


New AI models usually create excitement among the true believers and this year hasn’t been an exception. OpenAI and Anthropic released GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 respectively on the same day, February 5. T

 


When my phone stopped working last month during the latest calamitous network outage to hit the US, I assumed it was that pesky Amazon cloud POP in North Virginia playing up again. After all, it was AWS’s VA data centre that triggered three (3) of the last big network failures in North America.

 


Starlink can sometimes shift data more quickly than is possible on terrestrial networks, and improves connectivity in remote areas. But the space broadband service also presents new technical and regulatory challenges, according to speakers who took to the stage on Tuesday at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) in Jakarta, Indonesia.

 


The Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure is infamous for facilitating reflective amplification attacks. Countermeasures such as server shielding, access control, rate limiting, and protocol restrictions have been implemented to improve the situation. Still, DNS-based reflective amplification attacks remain.

 


Recent claims that IXPs “aren’t showing significant growth”, that more interconnection is happening outside exchanges, and that peering can be more expensive than transit challenge long-standing assumptions about the role of IXPs. But do these claims hold up? A new paper from NAMEX explores the data.

 

Hedge 295: Specialization

13 February 2026


 
Should network engineers focus on specializing in one technology, vendor, or solution, or should they think about building a diverse skill set? Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ discuss the advantages of each, how these options relate to the future of network engineering, and skill diversification.