Doug Madory publishes an interesting blog post describing the evolution of the top Tier-1 ASes during the last twenty years. Interesting to see that these top ASes regularly change.

XKCD published a nice comic illustrating ping with ICMP Echo request and Echo response.

Larry Peterson discusses his views on how the next generation of networking students should be educated in an interesting blog post

The RFC Editor has published RFC9868 which introduces a format for UDP options. This is an exercise in extending a very simple and old protocol like UDP. Despite the fact that the document is standards track, it is unlikely that it will be widely deployed.

Brian Krebs published an interesting article on his blog discussing the new Aisuru botnet and its DDoS capabilities.

Amazon Web Services had an outage on October 19th and 20th, 2025. Many web services became unusable during this period. AWS hosts a large number of services used y web sites and provides DNS services. A 2024 study predicted that 25% of the top 10,000 web sites would be affected by a failure of AWS. Dan Goodin provides some details about the failure in an article published by arts.technica. Luke Kehoe discusses the impact of the failure based on data from downdetector notably. AWS has published some technical details about the outage.

Generative AI applications have attracted millions of users world wide. A recent technical report analyzes 60 hours of packet traces collected on smartphones using ChatGPT, CoPilot and Gemini. They reveal different communication patterns and different protocols. All applications use TLS, but Gemini is the only one to use QUIC.

The HTTP protocol provides numerical status codes in response to each request. The https://http.pizza/ web site provides an image with a pizza which can be used as a way to provide additional information about the status codes. It also provides additional information about the status code leveraging https://http.dev/. A nice way to illustrate HTTP status codes.

ARCEP, the French telecommunication regular, published a very interesting study carried out by Plum that analyzes the deployment of optical fiber in France, taking into account the technical and the economical aspects. The report clearly explains the problems faced when deploying fiber and provides interesting statistics.

The US government could ban TP-Link from selling access routers in the US. In the US, most home users buy their own access router. By providing cheap prices, TP-Link, a Chinese company, has captured more than one third of the US market. Although the US government seems to be worrying that these routers could be used by state-sponsored hackers, the main problem with access routers is that they need to be correctly configured, maintained by upgraded when vulnerabilities are discovered. There is an interesting tussle to be discussed. In some countries, access routers are provided by the ISPs that manage and upgrade them. These ISPs have the expertise to manage the access routers of their customers and can react when problems occur. Unfortunately, this can limit innovation as ISPs will typically only deploy a few types of access routers that they manage and rent to their customers. On the other hand, the US model where each home user selects his/her access router could in theory encourage innovation since many brands can provide access routers. Unfortunately, home users often tend to keep their old access routers for (too) many years and have difficulties in managing them correctly. Which is the best approach ? User-controlled access routers which can be old and insecure ? ISP-controlled access-routers which will be more secure but might not evolve as expected by some users…

This blog aims at encouraging students who read the open Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice ebook to explore new networking topics. You can follow this blog by subscribing to its RSS feed or by following @cnp3_ebook on mastodon. Feel free to share the posts that you find interesting on your preferred social network.