Best of the Hedge 9: Ethics in IT


 
Nash King (@gammacapricorni) joins Russ White and Tom Ammon in a wide ranging discussion of ethics in IT, including being comfortable with standing up and saying “no” when asked to do something you consider unethical and the virtue ethic.

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In case you haven’t been paying attention, wireless vendors are busy working towards the introduction of 6G starting around 2030.


The oxygen of publicity this year has mostly been consumed by our two-lettered friend, AI. There’s no reason to think this will change in 2026.


COBOL turned 66 this year and is still in use today. Major retail and commercial banks continue to run core account processing, ATM networks, credit card clearing, and batch end-of-day settlement. On top of that, many payment networks, stock exchanges, and clearinghouses rely on COBOL for high‑volume, high‑reliability batch and online transaction processing on mainframes.


This summer, AI chip startup Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of $6.9 billion. Just three months later, Nvidia celebrated the holidays by dropping nearly three times that to license its technology and squirrel away its talent.


LinkedIn job scams have become a borderless epidemic, preying on the hopes of desperate job seekers and costing victims across the globe anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $25,000.


Yet according to data from Google, the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), and Cloudflare, less than half of all netizens use IPv6 today. To understand why, know that IPv6 also suggested other, rather modest, changes to the way networks operate.

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ASPA is now available in the RIPE NCC RPKI Dashboard, adding a way to express and validate your upstream relationships on top of ROA-based origin validation. Building on its introduction at RIPE 91, this article explains what ASPA does, why it matters, and how to start thinking about deployment.


AI bots made their presence felt this year, accounting for 4.2 percent of HTML request traffic as they trawl the web for content to be used in training models.


Multimodal tasks were the weakest area across the board, with accuracy often below 50%. This matters because these tasks involve reading charts, diagrams, or images, where a chatbot could confidently misread a sales graph or pull the wrong number from a document, leading to mistakes that are easy to miss but hard to undo.


Or, for that matter, where am I? Let’s look at location on the Internet, and how the Internet “knows” where I am.


It’s not science fiction. When a solar storm hits Earth, it can have real-world consequences, and satellite networks like Starlink are on the front lines.


Two months ago, I wrote about the competition concerns with the GenAI infrastructure boom. One of my provocative claims was that the lifespan of the chips may be significantly shorter than the accounting treatment given to them.


Chinese authorities on Thursday certified the China Environment for Network Innovation (CENI), a vast research network that Beijing hopes will propel the country to the forefront of networking research.


In 2025, the domain industry moved decisively from a fragmented ecosystem into a more integrated, capital-intensive market where infrastructure, identity, and AI are increasingly intertwined.


However, OpenAI has the daunting problem that, unlike Microsoft and Google, it has no other substantial sources of revenue. To survive, it needs to generate profits from ChatGPT.


Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.

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