Russ White's Blog

In this episode of the Hedge, Geoff Huston joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the ideas behind DNS over HTTPS (DoH), and to consider the implications of its widespread adoption. Is it time to bow to our new overlords?

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If you are struggling with building labs on lighter weight systems–or if you’re just interested in what Containerlab is and does–join Rick, Roman, and Russ for this discussion of what Containerlab is, what it does, and where its going.

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An Autonomous System (AS) can protect itself against DDoS attacks by rerouting incoming DDoS traffic through a ‘DDoS scrubber’, a process that is typically implemented using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). While BGP-based scrubbing is a useful service, its adoption on the global Internet is unknown.

Until recently, many professionals, including many doctors, thought they needed to become more machine-like to keep their jobs. Such worry contributed to the specialization trend of the last century.

In an era of growing cyber threats, traditional defensive measures can be insufficient in the face of sophisticated or novel tactics. As a result, the question of whether private or public entities should engage in active defense or offensive “hack back” tactics has taken on greater urgency.

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston explores the complex landscape of undersea cables.

By 1990 it was clear that IP had a problem. It was still a tiny Internet at the time, but the growth patterns were exponential, doubling in size every 12 months. We were stressing out the pool of Class B IPv4 addresses and in the absence of any corrective measures this address pool would be fully depleted in 1994.

If you’re using IP address truncation thinking it makes data “anonymous” or “non-personal,” you’re creating a false sense of security.

With distressingly typical Silicon Valley fake-it-till-you make-it bravado, LLM creators have been telling investors that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is just around the corner (or has already been achieved!). The problem the promoters blithely ignore is that LLMs do not know how the words they input and output relate to the real world.

Many organizations rushing to cut staff in the name of AI efficiency are expected to quietly rehire those roles – often “offshore or at lower salary.”

While Silicon Valley is investing tens of billions of dollars chasing the artificial general intelligence dream, academic computing research in the U.S. is facing a severe drought.

There are two competing forces in IT, and they are at play during the GenAI era as much as they have ever been during prior eras in the datacenter.

Sometimes we just like to talk about “life issues” as they relate to network engineering and technology career fields. Loneliness seems to especially plague network engineering and other “small” IT fields, where communities are small, change is rapid, and stress is high. Loneliness expert Lucy Rose joins Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ to discuss loneliness.

Check out the Cost of Loneliness here.

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Do planned economies, like China, have an advantage in deploying IPv6? What do the numbers on the DFZ show? George Michaelson joins Russ and Tom to discuss.

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SpaceX has surpassed 10,000 satellite launches in its Starlink programme, following the deployment of 56 additional units on Sunday. The milestone highlights the rapid expansion of satellite-based broadband infrastructure and its increasing role in global connectivity.

While x86 has been dominant for decades, a new migration project at Google represents a significant shift to more mixed architectures.

The proliferation of data centers needed to support AI development, along with myriad announcements to onshore manufacturing supply chains, are leading to surging energy demand.

Ex-CISA head Jen Easterly claims AI could spell the end of the cybersecurity industry, as the sloppy software and vulnerabilities that criminals rely on will be tracked down faster than ever.

But is the AI being used for this actually intelligent or just very, very good at faking it? This is not a new question. American philosopher John Searle came up with the Chinese Room, aka the “Chinese Box” argument, all the way back in 1980. He argued that while a computer could eventually simulate understanding – i.e. it could pass the Turing Test – that doesn’t mean it’s intelligent.

It’s time again for Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ to talk about current articles they’ve run across in their day-to-day reading. This time we talk about WiFi in the home, how often users think a global problem is really local, and why providers have a hard time supporting individual homes and businesses. The second topic is one no one really cares about … apathy. What causes apathy? How can we combat it? Join us for this episode of the Hedge … if you can bring yourself to care!
 
https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-286.mp3
 
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I get the sense that hosting a ccTLD today is challenging, not because of the technical stack, but due to Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) concerns

In times of major change–whether in IT or the economy–organizations should take a fresh look at their sourcing strategy. Companies outsourcing key functions need to re-examine the reasoning and scrutinize the results.

Another multivendor development group, the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) consortium, recently published its first specification aimed at delivering an open standard interconnect for AI clusters.

The company conducted a nationwide survey of 3,790 people that asked about real-world experiences and expectations around home WiFi performance. I think every ISP I know could have predicted the gist of the responses, but I think ISPs might be surprised at the percentage of people who are unhappy with WiFi.

DNS was not originally designed with security in mind, making it easy for common threats such as DNS spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks to reroute unsuspecting users to malicious sites, often without detection.

Is quantum really an immediate and dangerous threat to current cryptography systems, or are we pushing to hastily adopt new technologies we won’t necessarily need for a few more years? Should we allow the quantum pie to bake a few more years before slicing a piece and digging in? George Michaelson joins Russ and Tom to discuss.

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