Interesting links, week 3, 2024

Interesting telco/tech news for this week:

• Android and Emergency Calling: Nick is explaining one of the way Android have to understand if a number dialed is an emergency call.
• La CNMC elimina las restricciones al wifi público: [ES] Spanish regulator is removing the constraints for municipality to gut their WiFi access points power levels in order to not compete with MNOs, as well as the need to register - a 2000 era protectionist measure. This was in direct contradiction with the WiFi4EU project, which helps numerous “pueblos” to get decent Internet connection despite the lack of engagement of MNOs. (Ansó for example in the Pyrénées is a great example).
• DECT-2020: [FR] great post explaining the DECT-2020-NR which is part of the 5G specs, and based on a band - 1.9Ghz - supported to be available anywhere. NordicSemi has a post as well. As usual with IoT and 3GPP is unclear how much of the actual standard is actually used.
• Layoff at CableLabs: The entity behind the DOCSIS standard is refocusing on core activities, following the request of cables operators relying on this technology.
• Exploring eUICC and eSIM using pySim, osmo-smdpp: this sounded like an interesting one, unsure if this was recorded.
• Buy eSIM for Gaza: an interesting twist for eSIM - dematerialization enables people to offer connectivity in case of emergency.
• AWS Global Infrastructure Map: AWS Point of Presences with Wavelength sites with operators.
• Movistar presenta Smart Mobile: [ES] Telefonica has launched an app to enable possible boosting of the mobile connection in exchange of “tokens”. This triggers so many questions - how is this implemented ? at packet gateway level ? with dedicated bearer of some sort ? The source code of the OpenGateway API specs is giving away a possible provider, which presented a Free5GC-based demo. It seems to rely on proper PCF policies, so probably the RAN is instructed to deliver more or less QoS to the UE providing you are on an 5G SA network. Is this what the commercial service is based on?
• MAP-T on french MNO: [FR] video on french MNO/ISP commenting on its IPv6 implementation using IPv6 first (MAP-T). In that setup, the IPv4 traffic is translated within the core network, so it means the final customer does not actually control the public IPv4 anymore.

Found a couple of nice links this week on the Internet:

• Work Is Work: “Queueing theory is a harsh mistress.”. What an article on work organizations! A must read.
• Perfecting Protocol Parsing with eBPF: notes on parsing protocol from eBPF, applied to BGP.
• High-speed 10Gbps full-mesh : It is nice to see that IP over Thunderbolt is rediscovered and functional out of the box in 2023 with USB4.
• Wikihouse: Love the idea of a wiki-like to share construction designs, especially with the concepts of blocks that can be later on dismantled or adapted when the necessity appears. Early days however, because the target audience seems the rich architects for one-shot events.
• sourcehut: Sourcehut postmortem is interesting in the sense that they used OVH hosts as a defense against a DDoS attack, by NATting the traffic back to the private upstream servers. That could be an amazing use case for something like Tailscale control plane.
• Tweet on GPS jamming: an interesting visualization of GPS outages in Europe by observing on a longer time period.
• The Go compiler needs to be smarter: some insight on Go compiler approach to things.
• Kagi Postmortem: a very transparent postmortem on an incident affecting the search engine.
• Section 174: a newsletter issue explaining the Section 174 of US tax law.
• The build/operate trade-off: I found myself very aligned with this post, i.e. the default engineering culture in startup is to build (perhaps too much), although my personal experience is that you might be entangled quickly too much in operations when the product is considered “good enough”, especially by non-engineers folks.
• The incredible shrinking podcast industry: the bubble on podcasting might be popping, due to download counts being a poor proxy of the actual audience.
• Empezando con Apache Kafka en Golang: [ES] a good intro post to using Kafka from a golang user perspective.
• LeftoverLocals: a disclosure post from ToB which explain how a co-resident attacker can recover the output of an LLM engine.
• PixieFail: some vulnerabilities have been found in the PXE IPv6 part of the stack, but the problem seems to be that the upstream project is lacking resources to address them.
• Reinkstone: a eink display powered by NFC for your phone case. Why not ?

Podcasts:

• Go Time: a good episode covering the challenges of Kafka based architecture and the expectations behind it.