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For those who don't know, #Netnod manages a #DNS root server, a big IXP (Internet exckange point), secure time distribuition (an important thing for Netnod)... It's one of the organizations that make the Internet run.

80 PoP for the #Netnod #DNS anycast network.

Now, the first talk" Artificial Intelligence is really good for the environment?" (Bill Gates said yes.)

We often talk about electricty production but, in many countries, distribution is the bottleneck. many grids are overloaded.

An example of an AI data center: xAI in Memphis. 100,000 H100 GPUs (150 MW).
Some power provided by "Solar turbines" (which are not solar at all, it is the name of the company)
The local electricity company agreed to provide more, if they receive public money for that.

Basically, it is not clear they'll manage to get as much electricity.

"Nuclear seems the perfect solution to power AI data centers"

But delays and costs have a bad habit of slipping out of control.

Subcontract to Rosatom?

"When I was a child [the speaker has a grey beard], nuclear fusion was 40 years in the future. It still is."

What about #SMR (Small Nuclear Reactors)? Have your own nuclear reactor in your backyard!

You can already buy one from russian or chinese companies. Or Nuscale in the USA. Others are in the pipeline.

Designing a data center for AI, by Nokia. Connecting GPUs: the pattern of traffic is different than ordinary traffic (more bursty, with long perios of network rest, when the GPU "think").

Despite "common knowledge", Ethernet works as well as InfiniBand here.

Now, #football "Evaluation of the impact of #UEFA Champions League Wednesday matches on Internet traffic at MINAP and NAMEX" by Gianluca Sironi. "Football is a religion"

https://www.minap.it/ https://www.namex.it/

OK, back with cybersecurity. Networks and penetration testing.

(I'm surprised to be the only one raising my hand when the speaker asked "who redid his/her threat model since 21 Jan.?")

Interesting weakness: nobody ever upgrades the firmware of the power supplies and, these days, they even have a HTTP server.

"Who scanned the QR code at the entrance of the building?" [Nobody raises a hand.] "You are liars."

"Blessed are the paranoids, for they test their backups."

"We wrote this software, which means we have bipedal documentation inside the company."

Network administration automation. Level 0 "cutting and pasting from Microsoft Word" Level 1 "you have simple scripts"

...

Level 5 : AI?

Interesting talk by Steve Jones, about the power consumption of optical links in metro networks.

I learn that almost all the transceivers consume *less* power than was is written on the datasheet.

But for every watt used to power the links, you need more or less another watt to cool the hardware.

Now, geopolitics: analysis of Baltic Sea cable NSC East-West and C-LION1 breaks. Using RIPE Atlas probes. Only the effects, not the [unknown] cause [there are a lot of theories].

Anchors (big servers running Atlas software) continuously test each other. After the break, latency increases in 1/4 of the paths. "It won't ruin your cat video"

No packet loss. Other routes were found very fast.

The Internet worked.

30 % of the route changes were inter-domain (thanks, #BGP)
50 % were intra-domain (thanks, OSPF and IS-IS).
The rest was a change in the circuits, but with the same routers.

Presentation of the national swedish system to distribute secure and reliable time in the country.

#Roughtime, a protocol to get secure time, specially for a constrained device (IoT).

Correct time is critical for security (X.509, DNSSEC, TOTP, logs, etc). So, time has to be secured.

The typical thing has a poor clock, not backed by a battery. They depend on network time. (Picture of a thing displaying time as 1970-01-01)

We have a #NTS (#NTP secure) but it depends on TLS which depends on X.509 certificates which depend on time... Chicken-and-egg problems are common when securing time.

#Roughtime is currently a Internet-Draft. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ntp-roughtime/ (speaker is a co-author).

Important concepts: very long-term server keys, several servers queried by the client

Already several implementations of #Roughtime and may be soon an experimental RFC.

https://roughtime.se/

@cbrocas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_inauguration_of_Donald_Trump