Worth Reading 121925


In my earlier article on Technitium and Wazuh, I described DNS as both a behavioral signal and an enforcement point. DNS queries appear early in the attack chain, often long before C2 traffic stabilizes.


Cloudflare’s network suffered a brief but widespread outage Friday, after an update to its Web Application Firewall to mitigate a vulnerability in React Server Components went wrong.


You’d think that by now, networks were well enough understood that people would stop making assumptions that we have known, almost since the dawn of networking, to be untrue. Yet as users, developers, and network administrators, we still seem curiously unable to let go of long-held beliefs.


As well as the Mac clones, there were PC-style PowerPC machines – and a version of classic MacOS for them has just been rediscovered, enabling previously unimagined combinations.


Have you ever experienced that moment of panic when you can’t recall a familiar phone number or navigate without a map app? This growing reliance on external memory—known as the “Google Effect”—is a real-world example of how we’ve outsourced core cognitive functions to our devices.

Hedge 291: The Assault on Standards


 
As the Internet centralizes and gets “big,” standards are often being sidelined or consumed. What are the possible results of abandoning standards? Is there anything “normal network engineers” can do about it?

Worth Reading 121725


Tensor processing units (TPUs) are specially designed AI accelerators. They are a type of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), or chips designed for specific tasks. For TPUs, that task is running and optimizing AI and machine learning (ML) workflows, including training and inference.


Civil unrest can often cloud measurement data. Some measurement systems, including ours, make relatively sweeping assumptions about the stability of both end user and network service behaviours, and assume that the changes that occur from day-to-day are minor.


Identifying active IPv6 addresses is challenging. Various methods emerged to master the measurement challenge in this huge address space, including hitlists, new probing techniques, and AI-generated target lists. In this paper, we apply active Subnet-Router anycast (SRA) probing, a commonly unused method to explore the IPv6 address space.


Several months ago, I arrived at the office at 8:45 a.m., sat at my desk, and was about to start my day. The only problem was that I, for the life of me, could not remember my password. This is a bit laughable because for the past year, I had typed that exact password almost daily, sometimes from muscle memory.


Vaibhav Kakkar once tested a therapy chatbot to help with a real-life dilemma. “It responded with structured cognitive-behavioral prompts, helping me reframe my thinking,” recalled Kakkar, CEO of marketing agency Digital Web Solutions. “Impressive–but when I needed deeper guidance, it hit a wall.”

2010 great wall (33) SQ

Great Wall (Beijing)

DSC01691 SQ

Wheels (Chattanooga)

2018 flam norway (20) SQ

Altar (Flam)