Intelligence
Latest Articles
Latest intelligence on infrastructure operators, policy decisions, market moves, and digital power shifts.
Global Cloud Services Trends
GitLab's separate projects can share the same stopping point
A build allowance belongs to a top-level namespace, not to each team's sense of ownership. GitLab.com's rules for shared consumption and non-transferable purchased minutes make the group boundary a commercial decision as well as an organisational one.
Creators
Stefan Savage and measuring cybercrime as a system
Stefan Savage’s research repeatedly replaced isolated attack stories with measurements of traffic, supply chains, incentives and failure paths. From DDoS and network worms to spam, payment networks, cloud infrastructure and connected vehicles, the method is consistent: identify…
IETF
Chris Wendt and the Signed Response That Did Not Authenticate the Media
A telephone caller needs more than a signal that looks official. The practical question is whether the party reached is the intended party, what evidence supports that conclusion, and what a device should do when the evidence does not arrive. Chris Wendt’s co-authored RFC 9970…
Creators
Stefan Savage and the measurement of cybercrime as a system
Stefan Savage’s research repeatedly replaced stories about attacks with measurements of traffic, supply chains, incentives and failure paths. From denial-of-service and worms to spam, payment networks, cloud infrastructure and connected vehicles, the recurring method is to…
IETF
Michael Prorock and the Algorithm Identifier That Did Not Choose a Trust Policy
An algorithm label can make two implementations speak precisely about the same kind of key. It cannot tell a verifier why that key arrived, who stands behind it, which claims it may support, or what action the verifier should take. RFC 9964, co-authored by Michael Prorock and…
Story
APNIC REx: When a Date Becomes a Matching Key
Three historical address records changed their dates without changing their ranges. The case shows why reconstructing a resource's past also requires understanding the past of the fields used to identify it.
Leaders
Abdiel Marin and the Workflow Architecture Behind Specialty Eye Care Software
Abdiel Marin built EyeMD EMR around a practical premise: ophthalmology software has to follow the clinic's real work, not force clinicians into a generic record system. His operating decisions connected specialty imaging, interoperability standards, edge computing and patient…
Global Cloud Services Trends
Fastly unbundles the domain. Buyers still have to arrange its handover
A public address can outlive several application teams. Fastly's versionless domains make that separation easier to manage, but the commercial benefit depends on who retains the proof and permissions to put a new operator behind the old name.
History
The Version Number Survived. The Security Framework Did Not: RFC 1441
In one of SNMP's durable historical jokes, the integer `1` in a message wrapper can mean community-based SNMP version 2. The arithmetic is harmless. The assumption it invites is not. A version field tells a receiver how to process a message; it does not, by itself, reveal which…
IETF
Dan Harkins and the Bootstrap Key That Could Not Supply Its Own Custody
A device can demonstrate control of a private key without answering the question that mattered before the handshake: who put the corresponding public key in the server’s hands, under what conditions, and with what right? RFC 9966 makes that boundary unusually plain. Its…
History
The Alarm Survived. Its Route to the Other Manager Had Expired: RFC 1451
The monitoring station was still sampling. The threshold still meant what its operator had configured. The event definition was still present. Yet the row that told the station how to notify another manager could count itself down to destruction. RFC 1451 made operational…
Creators
Albert Greenberg: The Network as a Distributed Computer
Across AT&T, Microsoft Azure and Uber, Albert Greenberg has worked on a recurring problem: how to make a vast network behave as one coherent system when topology, traffic, control software, hardware and failure patterns change at different speeds. His influence is best understood…
Global Institutional
OIF and the work to align 1.6-terabit links
The Optical Internetworking Forum sits between formal standards and commercial products, turning optical, electrical and management decisions into implementation agreements that suppliers can build to and operators can test. Its influence is strongest where coherent modules, host…
History
The Username Looked Like a Person. The Namespace Only Promised a Slot: RFC 1439
In 1993, a tidy rule for turning names into email accounts met a problem that no directory card could hide: two people could produce the same string, and a successful delivery could still reach the wrong human. RFC 1439 treated the collision not as clerical untidiness but as a…
Global Cloud Services Trends
Wasabi's Storage Bill Remembers More Than the Latest File
Overwriting one entity can leave several generations on the bill. A shorter minimum duration, a new invoice and a new price each change a different part of that history.
IETF
David Benjamin and the Compatibility Code Point That Did Not Become a General Permission
An old cryptographic device can make a modern protocol migration fail at a very specific point. The remedy matters only if it preserves that specificity. RFC 9963 opens a constrained route for a legacy client signature; it does not reopen a general TLS 1.3 permission for the…
Global Institutional
OIF and the work of making 1.6-terabit links agree
The Optical Internetworking Forum sits between formal standards and commercial products, turning optical, electrical and management choices into implementation agreements that vendors can build and operators can test. Its influence is clearest when several layers have to work…
History
The File Arrived. The Recipient Had Not Accepted It: RFC 1440
In 1993, an experimental Internet protocol tried to deliver a file the way a network might deliver a parcel: the sender pushed it without logging into the destination, the receiving host put it aside, and the named recipient decided what to do later. That convenience depended on…
IETF
Al Morton and the Capacity Test That Did Not Become a Service Promise
A speed measurement can be valuable evidence about a particular method, path and time. It becomes unreliable when its bounded result is promoted into a promise about every future session, an access plan, an application or a whole network.
Global Institutional
Batfish and the promise of checking a network before change
Batfish turns multi-vendor configurations into a common routing and forwarding model so operators can test reachability, policy and selected failures before production changes. Its value still depends on snapshot completeness, parser coverage, explicit intent and post-deployment…