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  • Human Infrastructure 415: Lab Options, Hot Prompt Injection Summer, and More

Human Infrastructure 415: Lab Options, Hot Prompt Injection Summer, and More

AuthorAuthor

Drew Conry-Murray & Ethan Banks
September 04, 2025

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

A researcher named Johann Rehberger published a ton of AI-related bug reports in August of 2025. This blog post by Simon collects, links to, and summarizes 15 of them. Simon also offers his own analysis of the common patterns among the 15, including prompt injection attacks, privilege escalation, and arbitrary command execution. Lots of good crunchy info here, whether you’re a security researcher or tasked with understanding the risks of AI use within your organization. - Drew  

When researchers share bug or vulnerability details with a vendor and coordinate on publicizing the information (typically in conjunction with the release of a patch or fix), it’s typically called “responsible disclosure.” The term is now widely used across the industry, and some vendors offer bug bounties to encourage this practice. This post makes some valid arguments about why that term isn’t specific enough. Instead, the author suggests options including "vendor-coordinated disclosure", "maintainer-coordinated disclosure", and "user-coordinated disclosure." It might be slightly pedantic, but it does provide more context, and I don’t have a problem with that. - Drew  

Netlab is an open-source labbing platform created by Ivan Pepelnjak. This blog post walks through the benefits of Netlab and how to get it up and running so you can start labbing faster. The post notes: “Instead of manually dragging devices in a GUI or typing the same base configs over and over, you describe your lab in a simple YAML file. Netlab then takes care of creating the topology, assigning IP addresses, configuring routing protocols, and even pushing custom configs. Netlab works with containerlab (or vagrant) so you can spin up realistic network topologies in minutes and reproduce them anywhere automagically.”

By the way, Ethan Banks recorded a Heavy Networking episode last year with Ivan about Netlab if you’d like to listen. - Drew

This is an interesting post about tech innovation happening in the agricultural sector in Africa. Startups are finding ways to help small farmers across the continent increase their yields, pool resources to improve profits, and secure credit. Not all venture investment has to be on a grand scale or take huge swings at big technologies to make a difference. - Drew 

Aimed at home labbers, this is a hands-on discussion about using Opentofu to automate installation of VMs on Proxmox. And then automating the installation of K3s onto a VM. Lots and lots (and lots) of screen output with explanations. - Ethan

MORE BLOGS

  1. Grepping logs remains terrible (databases instead of text files FTW) - Chronicles Of Weird Things

  2. 40 years later, are Bentley's "Programming Pearls" still relevant? (yes, definitely) - Terence Eden’s Blog

  3. Markdown Is a Disaster: Why and What to Do Instead - public voit

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TECH NEWS 📣

Ah yes, parental controls. Famously effective at keeping kids and teens from accessing inappropriate content, engaging with social media, and otherwise doing things online that their parents don’t want them to. These controls are nice to have, but let’s be honest; the primary purpose of parental controls is to serve as a liability shield. - Drew 

The Fina Root Certificate Authority issued 3 TLS certs for Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS server. These certs can be used to decrypt intercepted DNS queries sent via DoH, and further used for man-in-the-middle attacks. No one seems to know how it happened. Worse, no one noticed for about 4 months. Folks are scrambling to figure out what happened and mitigate the damage. - Ethan

TL;DR. SK Telecom got fined due to gross cybersecurity incompetence that led to being badly hacked with resulting customer impact. - Ethan

Very short piece that points out, “A new generation of intelligent aerospace platforms—drones, airships, and satellites—will be part of tomorrow’s 6G networks, acting as, in effect, base stations in the sky. They’re expected to roll out in the early 2030s.” - Ethan

Hollow-core fiber (HCF) is what you think it is—fiber optic cable with an air rather than silica core. The idea is that light travels through the air faster than silica…so…if you can make HCF a thing, the light can travel further and faster. Scientists haven’t been able to make HCF a thing though—early iterations have performed worse that silica core fiber.

Until now! “Researchers from the University of Southampton and Microsoft claim to have made a breakthrough in HCF design in a recently published study in Nature Photonics. The new fiber achieves a record low loss of 0.091 dB/km at 1,550 nm, compared to a 0.14 dB/km minimum loss for silica-based fibers. The new design maintains low losses of around 0.2 dB/km over a 66 THz bandwidth and boasts 45% faster transmission speeds.”

If HCF can be commercialized, we’ll get fiber optic spans that can go further without amplification. - Ethan

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared on the Packet Pushers Community Slack by Kaj.

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Yet another CCNA study guide, this one published on July 31, 2025. I haven’t looked at this one, but it’s got 4.9 stars from 19 reviewers. The reviews I looked at appear to be genuine, and not AI fakery. Seems like a solid resource for CCNA candidates. For US folks, Amazon is reporting $40 for the Kindle version and $45 for the dead tree version. - Ethan

“Penn’s work shows, for the first time on live commercial fiber, that a chip [Penn team’s tiny “Q-chip”] can not only send quantum signals but also automatically correct for noise, bundle quantum and classical data into standard internet-style packets, and route them using the same addressing system and management tools that connect everyday devices online.” - Ethan

Linux Journey - Learn the ways of Linux-fu, for free. - LabEx
https://labex.io/linuxjourney

Online lessons to learn Linux. Well organized and laid out. Exercises. Quizzes. Save your progress if you like. Someone put a LOT of work into this. - Ethan

“WiFi devices push out radio frequency waves into physical space around them and toward a receiving device, typically a computer or phone. As the waves pass through objects in space, some of the wave is absorbed into those objects, causing mathematically detectable changes in the wave.

Pulse-Fi uses a WiFi transmitter and receiver, which runs Pulse-Fi’s signal processing and machine learning algorithm. They trained the algorithm to distinguish even the faintest variations in signal caused by a human heart beat by filtering out all other changes to the signal in the environment or caused by activity like movement.”

Lots more details on the click. - Ethan

Qasim Chaudhari reports, “For the past few years, I have been writing articles on digital signal processing, wireless communications, and software-defined radios on this website that reach hundreds of thousands of readers across the globe every year. Over time, many suggested that I compile some of these writings into a single, cohesive volume that could serve as a learning companion for those navigating the same technical terrain.

This book is the result of those suggestions. Whether you are optimizing wireless communication systems, designing radar platforms, or diving into embedded DSP architectures, this book offers intuitive, ground-up explanations of fundamental concepts that bridge the gap between theory and practice.” - Ethan

MORE RESOURCES

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INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Kentik has launched a new feature aimed at service providers and large enterprises that want to track the traffic costs of a specific network slice. Called Traffic Cost, Kentik analyzes traffic flows and SNMP, and integrates it with contract data, to provide flow-based cost estimates for traffic slices. These slices can include “customer, geographical market, ASN, CDN, OTT services, or even a specific set of IP addresses.” - Drew  

Arelion (formerly Telia Carrier) has deployed new fiber cables in existing ducts across three Nordic countries to boost capacity for hyperscale data centers. The new cables will add high-fiber-count cables among three capital cities: Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen. An Arelion press release says “The upgrade will secure long-term fiber availability to meet fast-growing demand for AI infrastructure and strengthen network resilience in the Nordics. In addition, it complements Arelion's extensive network, providing businesses with direct connectivity into Europe, North America and beyond.” - Drew 

Portknox, which makes a zero trust access platform, is partnering with EDR vendor SentinelOne. According to the press release, the partnership “delivers smarter, more precise access decisions – strengthening security at every connection. This allows organizations to automatically block or quarantine devices exhibiting suspicious behavior, effectively isolating threats before they can spread.” This partnership makes sense. If you’re going to offer a zero trust product, it helps to have the kind of device-specific context you get from an EDR product. - Drew  

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆

I’d replace the “NFL” pillar with “Vibes”, but otherwise this seems about right. Shared on the Packet Pushers Community Slack by Kaj.