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  • Human Infrastructure 407: Remembering Fred Baker, An AI Risk Trifecta, Building a Switch, and More

Human Infrastructure 407: Remembering Fred Baker, An AI Risk Trifecta, Building a Switch, and More

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Drew Conry-Murray & Ethan Banks
June 26, 2025

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Fred Baker was the long-time chair of the v6ops working group, and had a distinguished career at Cisco as a Technical Fellow. Fred passed away this June. To honor Fred and his contributions to the IT community, the IPv6 Buzz team has re-released an episode they recorded with him in 2019. Rest in peace, Mr. Baker.  - Drew 

As the tech industry barrels towards agentic AI, supported by nascent open-source protocols such as MCP, flags are being raised about some of the risks this new tech is exposing us to. One risk is that LLMs are good at following instructions. Why is that a problem? As Simon notes in his post “they don’t just follow our instructions. They will happily follow any instructions that make it to the model, whether or not they came from their operator or from some other source.” The upshot is that if you have an agent that can access sensitive data, and that agent is also exposed to untrusted content, it’s possible that an attacker could implant malicious instructions inside that content and the agent will accept and act on those instructions. Simon provides a variety of links to support his assertion that this is a common problem, and right now we don’t have a lot of good fixes for it.  - Drew

Natalie is kicking off a blog series on container security. In the first installment she starts off by describing how we got to containers in the first place, the differences between VMs and containers, and the operational benefits and costs of containers. In short, there are tradeoffs that come with containers, and if you don’t understand them, you can’t secure against them. I’m looking forward to more entries in this series. In the meantime, I got the chance to talk with Natalie about some of this in a recent Packet Protector episode. - Drew 

I love a good “fundamentals” post and this is a prime example. Suresh walks you step-by-step, with screenshots and diagrams, on how to set up an AWS VPC with subnets and route tables, a gateway for outbound communication, and an EC2 instance. He also shows you how to set up your key pair for identity management, security groups, and testing your instance. This post is like having an expert standing over your shoulder to walk you through the process. - Drew

Andrew Zonenberg is building a switch more or less from scratch. “One of my longest-running projects has been an open hardware Ethernet switch. This has been one of the key driving forces behind many of my other projects, such as ngscopeclient and the high speed probes. It was also the project that got me into high speed digital design.

So I figured it’s time to kick off a series with a short writeup of where things are now, how we got there, and what’s coming next. If you follow me on Mastodon you’ve probably seen most of this in bits and pieces but I wanted to collect it all in one place.”

He’s published 2 parts thus far with lots of pictures and details.

Enjoy! - Ethan

MORE BLOGS

The Internet Resilience Report 2025 is now here! Download your copy today

Now in its second year, this annual report delivers critical insights into the state of Internet health, stability, and performance. Learn how leading organizations navigate a digital landscape where resilience is no longer optional.

Key findings include:

  • 51% of organizations lost over $1 million in the past month due to internet outages and disruptions

  • 73% of respondents agreed that fast websites and apps are critical to success

  • 85% of organizations will increase their AI investments in the next 18 months

TECH NEWS 📣

TL;DR. For Europeans who want to move infrastructure away from American clouds, it’s challenging depending on your compute needs (wants?). European cloud options offering IaaS-only don’t compete well with American clouds offering IaaS & a complex panoply of PaaS. - Ethan

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared on the Packet Pushers Slack by Kaj. And side note: If you haven’t seen Donnie Yen’s Ip Man movies, go watch the first one. It’s a gem!

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

There are serious security and data privacy concerns around generative AI and LLMs. Kyler Middleton (who also happens to be co-host of Day Two DevOps in the Packet Pushers media empire) presented at AWS re:Inforce about how she’s building a genAI assistant for her organization while also incorporating privacy, security, and regulatory compliance controls into the tool. Kyler talks about tool choice, architectural decisions, and lessons learned. If you’re looking for non-hype, real-world use cases for genAI, check this out. - Drew 

Why Rexx? The site says, “Rexx is a versatile programming language that combines ease of use with power. It runs on nearly all platforms—so your skills apply everywhere and your code runs anywhere. It’s as easy as JavaScript or PHP, yet as powerful as Perl.

Several free procedural interpreters are available plus a free object-oriented version—Open Object Rexx—and a free Java-compatible version—NetRexx. Rexx offers hundreds of free tools so it interfaces to GUIs, databases, web servers, Java, almost anything.

Rexx can function as a macro language and an embedded language and it has a world-wide community and an international users group.

It's all free!”

I’m aware of Rexx as it’s embedded in the (commercial) terminal emulator I’ve been using for many years—Zoc by Emtec. So when this site popped up, it caught my eye. Much useful technology fades away not because it isn’t still useful, but because it falls out of fashion. - Ethan

I’ll be really happy when the whole “vibe” thing dies off. We get it. You used an AI to help you code while you were watching YouTube or whatever. I’m not all negative here. I believe that AI-assisted coding is normal at this point. I doubt AI will 100% replace coders (much to the chagrin of C-suites everywhere), but assist coders? Absolutely. Tried it myself. It kinda works. (Also kinda doesn’t in my limited experience, but definitely a timesaver overall.)

Anyway…here’s a potentially interesting tool someone built with Claude Code. Unlike many other vibecoding testimonials I’ve read, this post goes into a good bit of detail as to how they got the project done and the role Claude Code played. Even if you don’t care about the tool itself, you might get value from the article. - Ethan

MORE RESOURCES

  1. Puter Networking - a complete networking stack for front-end web developers

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Gluware, which makes network automation software, has released version 5.6 of its platform. Among the features are enhanced version control with the native Git Protocol and support for external repositories including GitHub and BitBucket, and expanded support for multiple vendor products including HPE Aruba, Cisco Meraki, and Arista. There’s also a new template builder for network RPA to help you test automation workflows. - Drew 

Service provider Arelion has released the 2025 version of its DDoS threat report. Highlights include an increase in DDoS attacks in Europe, a 97% increase in the average volumetric attack, and an uptick in UDP floods against Asian gaming platforms. You can get the full report (in exchange for contact details) at this link. - Drew  

This is a pre-release feature mentioned in the Let’s Encrypt community site. Staff member JamesLE says, “We're almost ready to issue certificates for IP address SANs [Subject Alternative Names] from Let's Encrypt's production environment. They'll only be available under the shortlived profile (which has a 6-day validity period), and that profile will remain allowlist-only for a while.

Please note: We have more work to do before we're ready to launch this feature for the public. We don't yet have a timeline, and aren't ready to accept allowlist requests.” - Ethan

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

  1. Probe lenses and focus stacking: the secrets to incredible photos taken inside [musical] instruments - Digital Photography Review

  2. Linux Router Project (now defunct but it fit on a floppy!) - Wikipedia

  3. The Hewlett Packard Archive (vintage HP catalogs, manuals, periodicals) - HPArchive.com

  4. The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord (1997, but still really on point) - Peter’s Evil Overlord List

  5. False Sense of Security as a Service (certified to fail every security audit & featuring “Military-Grade DES-56Bit Encryption” 😂) - FSOSaaS.com

  6. A new Pitt study has upended decades-old assumptions about brain plasticity - Pittwire

  7. Don't Panic, Humans: Auto Plants Are The Last Places Where Robots Will Steal Your Jobs - Jalopnik

LAST LAUGH 😆

Shared on the Packet Pushers Community Slack by Kaj.