Intelligence
Latest Articles
Latest intelligence on infrastructure operators, policy decisions, market moves, and digital power shifts.
Global Institutional
PCI-SIG: The common rules that power AI servers
PCI-SIG sets the common rules that let AI server components work together and backs them with compliance testing. Its authority is limited to connectivity layer.
Global Institutional
PCI-SIG: the internal rulebook of the AI server
An AI server can bring together processors, accelerators, network cards, storage controllers, switches, retimers and security devices from competing companies. PCI-SIG maintains the common interface that lets these components discover one another and exchange data, then organises…
Global Institutional
PCI-SIG and the internal rules of the AI server
An AI server can bring together processors, accelerators, network adapters, storage controllers, switches, retimers and security devices from companies that compete with one another. PCI-SIG maintains the common interface that lets these components discover one another and…
Global Institutional
PCI-SIG and the rulebook in the AI server
An AI server can combine processors, accelerators, network cards, storage controllers, switches, retimers and security devices from companies that otherwise compete with one another. PCI-SIG maintains the common interface through which these components discover each other and…
Global Institutional
PCI-SIG and the interconnect rules inside AI servers
An AI server may combine processors, accelerators, network cards, storage controllers, switches, retimers and security devices from companies that compete elsewhere. PCI-SIG maintains the shared interface that allows these components to recognise one another, negotiate…
Global Institutional
PCI-SIG and the rules that make an AI server work
A single AI server can contain processors, accelerators, network adapters, storage controllers, switches, retimers and security components from companies that compete everywhere else. PCI-SIG maintains the common interface that lets these components find and talk to each other…
Global Institutional
PCI-SIG and the rulebook inside the AI server
An AI server may bring together processors, accelerators, network adapters, storage controllers, switches, retimers and security devices from companies that compete everywhere else. PCI-SIG maintains the shared interface that lets those parts find one another and exchange data…
Global Institutional
Console Connect: The Telecom Network Behind a Cloud-Style API
Console Connect presents global connectivity through the language of cloud consumption: choose endpoints, select capacity, create a service and manage it through a portal or API. Beneath that interface sits a more complicated system of carrier backbone, data-centre ports, local…
North America Cloud Services Trends
AWS EBS in 2011: recovery capacity as accountability
A network change in one Availability Zone exposed a deeper continuity problem: redundancy can become a source of load when many replicas try to heal at once. The 2011 EBS disruption shows why recovery capacity, shared control paths, isolation, and verifiable closure belong inside…
Creators
Steven Bellovin and the security questions that escaped the network
Steven M. Bellovin began by testing the claims computers accepted from packets: source addresses, routes, sequence numbers and names. His later work applied the same suspicion to institutions, asking what systems make the public trust when governments demand access, companies…
Global Institutional
Caliptra and the root of trust inside the data-centre chip
Modern servers contain several chips that boot code, hold keys and enforce policy before the host operating system is awake. Caliptra gives those components a common open root of trust, but factories, provisioning systems, physical implementations and fleet verifiers still decide…
Creators
Ion Stoica and the abstractions behind distributed computing
Distributed systems fail when software assumes machines are interchangeable. Ion Stoica’s work repeatedly moves complexity behind a narrower abstraction—from packet-carried state and Chord to Mesos, Spark, Ray and cross-cloud placement—then tests how much operational, economic…
NANOG
The Corporation NANOG Built—and the Networks It Did Not Own
When NANOG left Merit’s institutional shelter, the decisive transfer concerned a trademark, a domain, archives, contracts and financial responsibility—not routers, address space or the authority to speak for North America’s autonomous networks.
Story
Resolution 201804.407 Renewed the CEO Contract Before Final KPIs and Performance Evaluation
AFRINIC’s Board approved a three-year renewal on the same employment terms at a special meeting on 19 April 2018, even as its own resolution deferred finalising the chief executive’s KPIs and performance evaluation until May. The surviving sequence supports a precise governance…
Story
AFRINIC’s Interim Management Committee Was Given Six Months. Who Renewed It?
AFRINIC gave three senior employees collective responsibility for day-to-day management during its CEO vacancy and said the arrangement would last six months or until a new chief executive arrived. The announcement was public; the full authority chain was not. Using the…
Story
Eight elected seats in one notice: what AFRINIC’s 12 September result proves
AFRINIC’s brief announcement did something institutionally significant: it named an occupant for every member-elected Board seat in a single exceptional reconstitution cycle. Yet the notice remains a declaration, not a complete result receipt. Its evidentiary value becomes clear…
Story
The Deadline Had Two Doors
On 26 June 2025, a Mauritian court turned AFRINIC’s stalled return to ordinary governance into a test with three coordinates: conduct a new election process, constitute a Board, and do both by one outer date. The discipline of Order SC/COM/MOT/000467/2025 lies not in the calendar…
Story
Three Days, One Election, and the Missing Logic of a Total Annulment
The Receiver’s decision to annul AFRINIC’s entire 2025 Board-election process converted an unspecified irregularity into a universal consequence. The central governance question is not whether the concern deserved attention, but what public reasoning should connect a protected…
Story
When a Membership Label Becomes a Ballot Gate
AFRINIC’s court-directed explanation of its member categories exposed a consequential but usually hidden junction: the point where a private corporate record becomes an input to election administration. Making that junction visible was valuable. It was not the same as proving…
Story
The ICANN case made the official transcript the court record
On 19 June 2025, a Mauritian court gave a digitally recorded oral proceeding a decisive procedural status: it would be the official transcript. That narrow act matters because, when institutional commitments are spoken rather than set out in a self-contained written order, the…