Granula Resource Demand Heterogeneity, Coulson Liang CPU pipeline complexity makes “bandwidth usage” imprecise resource usage fluctuates within 10us-level interval fine-grained scheduling possible now bc Quicksand & Granny profile w/ hardware performance counter (PMC) need “timeline”: call context of function Hiresperf w/ LDB & PMC polling & interrupt: 7% overhead at 10us interval read value from dedicated core future: self-report w/o interrupt Junzhou He, NSL lab meeting avoid WASM timing side-channel attack detect leakage from program dependence graph (PDG) repair by branch removal A Permissions Odyssey: A Systematic Study of Browser Permissions on Modern Websites, Alberto Fernandez-de-Retana website ask for permission in HTTP header Permissions-Policy many permission delegate to iframe, many using wild card browser only display permission prompt on parent webpage, not iframe address Not All Visitors are Bilingual: A Measurement Study of the Multilingual Web from an Accessibility Perspective, Masudul Hasan Masud Bhuiyan many blind speak non-Latin-script language text-to-speech bad for many non-Latin alt text missing or in English Google Lighthouse test let empty alt text pass From WebGL to WebGPU: A Reality Check of Browser-Based GPU Acceleration, Sthitadhi Sengupta implement computation in WebGL, WebGPU, CPU on Chrome GPU slower for smaller size, faster for larger size WebGPU vs WebGL similar except for loop-driven function similar for GPU from WASM/JS Scrapers selectively respect robots.txt directives: evidence from a large-scale empirical study AI/search crawler ~30% endpoint access compliance AI data crawler more compliant On YouTube Search API Use in Research, Alexandros Efstratiou people split time period for search to circumvent 500-video result limit likely returned: more view, short, fewer channel vid, older channel result delta small ⇒ time period split work poorly A first look into long-lived BGP zombies, Iliana Maria Xygkou zombie: failure to withdraw route in downstream AS BGP beacon method long-lived zombie: ≥ 8.5 month router can propagate zombie route (resurrect) service: stuck routes observatory A Framework to Evaluate MPIC Security using Real-World BGP Announcements, Cyrill Krähenbühl multi-perspective issuance corroboration (MPIC) to avoid BGP attack on SSL deploy on cloud ⇒ lose resilience ru-RPKI-ready: the Road Left to Full ROA Adoption, Deepak Gouda ROAs cover more than half prefix ROA issuance planning complicated by subprefix & leasing most remaining prefix straightforward to ROA Replication: A Two Decade Review of Policy Atoms - Tracing the Evolution of AS Path Sharing Prefixes, Weili Wu important bc prefix in same atom stick together in BGP update still true; true for IPv6 policy atom split farther away from origin TODO: this and web atom The Decentralization Dilemma: Performance Trade-Offs in IPFS and Breakpoints, Ruizhe Shi chunk & hash file for content ID (CID) into Merkle tree bitswap: ask for file, then download it make IPFS 8x slower than HTTP straggler bring down performance dramatically modify bitswap to improve performance for large file The Developer, the RFC, and the Middlebox: An HTTP/2 Compliance Story, Mahmoud Attia, Ilies Benhabbour server/proxy may ignore non-compliant part in request asymmetric compliance between client & server Protocol Compliance in Popular RTC Applications, Peiqing Chen different messaging app modify RTC protocol for own purpose ⇒ cannot interop How I learned to stop worrying and love IPv6: Measuring the Internet Readiness for DNS over IPv6, Anja Feldmann DNS marked IPv6 optional in 2004 bc cannot fragment need MTS, rely on more fallible ICMP ⇒ pain worse for longer DNSSEC ISP still dropped IPv6 fragment bc legacy security DNS over IPv6 is mostly working Do Spammers Dream of Electric Sheep? Characterizing the Prevalence of LLM-Generated Malicious Emails, Wei Hao spike from GPT-4o release; ~50% spam email similar content from some spammer bypass word frequency template Somesite I Used To Crawl: Awareness, Agency and Efficacy in Protecting Content Creators From AI Crawlers, Elisa Luo most AI crawler respect robots.txt AI blocking services block crawler user-agent An In-Depth Investigation of Data Collection in LLM App Ecosystems, Yuhao Wu crawl “GPTs” analyze what they collect w/ LLM: include password embed advertising service: can see shared context window little privacy policy statement, but collect much in practice Tracking Internet Disruptions in Ukraine: Insights from Three Years of Active Full Block Scans, Florian Holzbauer periodic ICMP to all Ukraine /24 block every 2hr more fine-grained method than IODA ISP move address out from frontline, some to Amazon winter outage more in edge & frontline power outage overlap&correlate w/ network outage Russian army damage caused specific outage in Kherson Learning AS-to-Organization Mappings with Borges, Fabián E. Bustamante AS2Org rely on WHOIS/PeeringDB org_id use LLM to extract info from RIR text field Sibling Prefixes: Identifying Similarities in IPv4 and IPv6 Prefixes, Oliver Gasser dual-stack domain in OpenIntel DNS data find matching pair w/ highest Jaccard similarity 76k sibling, over half have some organization name Have you SYN what I see? Analyzing TCP SYN Payloads in the Wild, Dario Ferrero reactive telescope: respond to packet 3/4 are HTTP GET Patchwork: A Traffic Capture and Analysis Platform for Network Experiments on a Federated Testbed, Nishanth Shyamkumar FABRIC network: testbed open for routing research Congestion Patterns in a Large-scale RDMA Datacenter, Soudeh Ghorbani congestion of AI training center moved from edge to core due to priority-based flow control (PFC) preventing last-hop drop unbalanced core from burst; revealed by PFC telemetry type (PFC) more important than frequency The SAP Cloud Infrastructure Dataset: A Reality Check of Scheduling and Placement of VMs in Cloud Computing, Arno Uhlig public dataset of CPU, mem, network, storage of VM & long-running tasks resource allocation highly imbalanced CPU usually overprovised; memory closer to capacity FP-Inconsistent: Measurement and Analysis of Fingerprint Inconsistencies in Evasive Bot Traffic, Hari Venugopalan bot detection vs evasion pay bot traffic service to visit distinct obfuscated URL half not detected often evade if can support browser plugin/ from “iPhone” ⇒ forge browser attribute often inconsistent temporal e.g. changing attribute from same device spacial e.g. nonexistent iPhone screen size TODO: learn from these bots CookieGuard: Characterizing and Isolating the First-Party Cookie Jar, Zubair Shafiq make cookie “1st-party” w/ document.cookie, then 3rd-party read&write not blocked bc 1st-party commonly in main frame exfiltration, overwrite, delete delete sometimes bc accidental name collision browser extensions: intercept & partition Cookie jar break SSO but not many sites for dev: running 3rd-party in main frame gives it full control Canvassing the Fingerprinters: Characterizing Canvas Fingerprinting Use Across the Web, Elisa Luo no need JS/consent fingerprint fingerprinting script the same way they fingerprint extract rendered canvas as base64 image ⇒ know emoji&font learn OS, browser, GPU, default font size, etc. some for CDN security adblocker list 45% of canvas fingerprinting, but only block 5% bc 1st-party exemption Where in the World Are My Trackers? Mapping Web Tracking Flow Across Diverse Geographic Regions, Robert Ricci important to know if tracker from another country bc jurisdiction visit regional popular websites w/ browser + DNS + traceroute geolocate w/ recent technique Europe largest hub for intercontinental tracker Fingerprinting QUIC clients, Seungju Lee Safari inconsistent QUIC support, other browsers good different connection ID (CID) across implementations Chunk-fu: Fingerprinting QUIC implementations using fragmented frames, Karthik Nishanth Sengottuvelavan QUIC TLS handshake frame could be chunked, method unspecified fingerprint how chunking done, runtime (big O) Passively Inferring Network Availability and Configuration from NTP Pool Clients, Paul Chung network time protocol for passive measurement use NTP pool bc anyone can reserve ground truth: US hospital ransomware report fingerprinting by hashing less-volatile NTP header ASINT: Learning AS-to-Organization Mapping from Internet Metadata, Yongzhe Xu prune news w/ LLM → named entity recognition (NER) → RAG cluster AS of the same organization When Blocks Go Missing: The Timeliness and Trustworthiness of Blockchain RPC Providers, Ye Shu most user use remote block chain node thru RPC inconsistent states give opportunities for massive censorship & attack Binance smart chain (BSC) network: many have multi-second delay/ missing block How Do You Know My Name? Investigating The Role of Domain Names for Target Reconnaissance among Web and IPv6 Scanners, Sebastian Kappes network telescope (dark net) unused IP address waiting for scanner but IPv6 scanning focused so may have no traffic use honey domain name to attract scanner most scanner scan immediately after getting DNS response, but few wait weeks early scanner tend to TCP/UDP; late scanner ICMP Towards a systematic benchmark framework for evaluating darknet-analysis methodologies, Max Gao use signature from historic outage DarkVec not much better than random; DarkSIM works somewhat The Potential of Erroneous Outbound Traffic Analysis to Unveil Silent Internal Anomalies, Andrea Sordello outbound traffic may be erroneous lack of response to ICMP error signal mistake capture from campus network w/ SDN monitor reveal malicious software & configuration mistake Identifying Disruptive Patterns in Internet Background Radiation, Xie Qiu https://ioda.live outage vizbackground radiation (telescope) to see traffic from /24 problem: spoofing, burst hard to fingerprint scanner bc distributed low and slow “scanner” from china AS, w/ many source IP IMC 2025 Student Workshop Keynote, Arpit Gupta digital inequity, vs secure & performant 100+billion spent, based on fake data from ISP oligopoly broadband querying tool (BQT): what user see from different IP ISP not executing after getting fund (CAF program) speed test data lack context of subscription tier collaborate w/ state government most ML for network don’t generalize mindset: make impact, publish paper SplatPose: On-Device Outdoor AR Pose Estimation Using Gaussian Splatting, Rajrup Ghosh, NSL meeting perspective-n-point (PnP) image retrieval (slow) vs rendering-based (fast) appearance modeling to deal w/ different lighting hierarchical depth sorting for fast 3D Gaussian rendering Towards Microsecond-Scale vm Core Provisioning Agility on Serverless Platforms, Yibo Yan, NSL meeting data-driven workload demanding, unpredictable, bursty, but has deadline ⇒ over-provisioning (waste), autoscaling (too slow) horizontal scaling slow (10s, 10s of ms) ⇒ proposal: prioritize vertical scaling (add core to VM) microsecond core reallocation (redistribute) FlusOS: library OS, work-steal, scale up/down w/ host Hybrid Data-Driven and Simulation-Driven Prediction of mmWave Network Performance, Zihao Feng, NSL meeting mmWave high data rate ~40Gbps high center frequency ⇒ wider spectrum unoccupied (B) ⇒ higher bandwidth phased array cause side lobe ⇒ interference data-driven simulator: protocol-based simulator w/ RL per-beam received signal strength (RSS, physical layer) → RL → simulator KL divergence loss between simulator throughput and measured ground truth Steve Jobs President & CEO, NeXT Computer Corp and Apple. MIT Sloan Distinguished Speaker Series , 1992 attack operational productivity w/ software, not management “object” reusability made NeXTSTEP attractive bc programmer could write 20% code to make the same “mission critical” application translate to “package” reuse today bright people produce stuff reused by others all decision maker should buy into the decision when hiring high-level people: expect them to tell you what to do, not the other way around take long term view on people: tolerate short-term mistakes to build team view manufacturing as competitive advantage view manufacturing as software engineering but w/ hardware start from the software to design hardware Defense: Automated Reproduction of Bug Reports for Mobile Applications , Zhaoxu Zhang bug report have missing/wrong step split & reorder actions in sentences for steps Markov decision process (MDP) + Q-learning for globally optimal steps ignore hidden state; only consider UI state optional: search w/ Markov chain from UI transition graph (UTG) intermediate representation to help validate non-crash bug reproduction WinCC: A step by step guide for a successful proposal , Tamim Ahmed find application of thing you worked a lot on can reuse stuff; do not reinvent the wheel proper timeline & cost (talk to financial expert) Theory Lunch: Towards Publicly Verifiable Cryptography: Obfuscation, Fully Homomorphic Encryption, and Proof Carrying State , Miryam Huang computationally impossible to obfuscate a circuit C C ′ C even w/ quantum computing/state workaround: weaker as indistinguishable obfuscation; oracle model to help obfuscater; restrict circuit class in quantum setting, obfuscate Q := ( C , ψ ) ψ proof for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) succinct non-interactive argument (SNARG) proof-carrying state (PCS): quantum proof-carrying data (PCD) useful bc quantum state not cloneable Theory Lunch: Proper Learnability and the Role of Unlabeled Data , Julian Asilis proper learning: learned fn h H e.g., majority vote for binary classification, multiclass classification why limited hypothesis class: learnablility in PAC learning, having infinite unlabeled data does not change statistical difficulty of learning but make learnability always proper distributional SRM: regularize distribution of h ∈ H Theory Lunch: An Equivalence Between Fair Division and Wagering Mechanisms , Jens Witkowski divide multiple kind of goods among multiple agent vs. wagering one-to-one correspondence incentive compatibility: no more profit by lying about preference individual rationality: participant expect non-negative utility Job talk: Expectation vs Reality: How Network Abstractions Impact Internet Security , Paul Pearce routing is abstraction for Internet scanning e.g., different route when using HTTP vs HTTPS ECMP cause packet to go thru different AS → country → censorship ⇒ need to build exact packet for traceroute censorship/ no censorship due to routing bc source IP/port, etc. IPv6 impact overlooked in security community LSTM RL system to generate IPv6 address upper-64 bit domain knowledge for lower-64 bit IMCP6 port scan show many home router accidentally public IP due to no NAT; many CVE ⇒ abstraction change: default deny → default allow Theory Lunch: Vote Delegation through the Lens of Metric Distortion , Alan Grayson York delegating vote to informed voter reduce metric distortion from θ ( α ) θ ( α ) assume 2 candidate for linear preference spectrum if informed voter among total is uniformly distributed among preference spectrum not if informedness is i.i.d. assume voter delegate vote to informed neighbor voter if expect them to vote better limitation: unrealistic assumption Guest Talk: Computational Homogenization for Inverse Design of Surface-based Inflatables , Yingying (Samara) Ren, ISTA goal: simple fabrication state, transform to complex&stable target state surface-based inflatable: flat to 3D analyze property of infinite sheet for periodic unit cell w/ different parameter using periodic homogenization w/ mesh use X/Y scale factor & bending stiffness to reverse engineer the pattern needed How to Enhance Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult , Andrew Huberman long-wavelength light in sun benefit health they penetrate skin trigger mitochondria to produce melatonin, antioxidant mitochondria produce less ATP as we age The Science of Scientific Writing , George D. Gopen, Judith A. Swan, American Scientist, 1990 writer responsible to make reader understand use structure reader expect verb immediately after subject each unit of discourse should serve single point put emphasized stuff at “stress position”, like end of sentence put context & known stuff at “topic position”, like beginning use strong action verb Thesis proposal: Incentivizing Efficient Delegation without Payments , Curtis Bechtel delegation motivation: outside contractor (agent) may not optimize for employer’s (principal) need probing constraint: cost, combination limit, etc. game: principal set constraint; agent probe, propose solution; principal accept one best proposal iff satisfy constraint or reject all delegate utility vs non-delegate utility: use agent vs as if principal doing task themselves α goal: α → 1 if probing has cost (Pandora’s Box problem), generally no constant α strategic delegation reduce to adversarial delegation (agent want to minimize principal utility) Intelligent, Robust and Trustworthy AI: Managing GenAI Challenges, Next Phase of Hybrid AI Models and Enterprise AI for Mission-Critical Applications , Amit Sheth difficult to detect if text generated RLHF reduce hallucination tweak model to avoid hateful generation neurosymbolic: neural AI combined w/ symbolic cognition AI knowledge graph auxiliary to DL, bring explainability deep infusion what do you have what other do not Scalable k k , Jack Spalding-Jamieson k-nearest neighbor w/ approximate radius metric: recall; impossible to guarantee ∃ sublinear heuristic search graph almost universally best other application: quantization, space partitioning initialization does not matter if n k k hierarchical navigable small world (HNSW) perform well start w/ approximate nearest neighbor graph of centroid prune edge to sparsify; randomly sample centroid for higher layer start from highest layer, do greedy local beam search to find best centroid on each layer “seed point” to start search: choosing from previous assignment give big speedup Full Proportional Justified Representation , Jiasen Liu representative selection: majority vs cohesion approval-based multi-winner election justified representation (JR): large cohesive group should have a winner large cohesive group: portion deserve a winner, has common approval but not fair; too weak strong cohesiveness (ℓ ℓ ℓ weak cohesiveness (weakly ( α , ℓ ) α non-transferable vs transferable (collective) utility: some voter in group satisfied (stronger) vs all 4 combination of (strong/weak cohesiveness) × (non-transferable/transferable utility) harder (coNP) to verify than finding one solution priceability: voter pay for candidate they approve under constant budget priceability imply FPJR (full proportional justified representation, weak cohesion + transferable utility) by bounding What uniform symmetric distro can a shallow circuit produce , Kewen Wu circuit: combination of logic gate mapping m n symmetric: output w/ same Hamming weight are equally likely motivation: compute parity (or something else) of n − 1 parity (xor): only e.g. where computation hard but sampling easy impossible to read 1 bit to decode compressed data only 6 case of shallow circuit (local function) mapping from uniform distro to uniform distro equal to at most 2-local cannot output 1 only on 1/3 majority bc deviation from 1/3 cannot do majority bc lack of cutoff among either independent group (neighborhood) or independent bit Defense: Efficiency in Privacy-Preserving Computation via Domain Knowledge , Weizhao Jin (advisor: Srivatsan Ravi) homomorphic encryption on selective model parameters (vis mask) to reduce overhead filter by commonly-used formula for parameter sensitivity optimize privacy budget, computed via integration entity resolution: dedup point in 2 dataset simulate ReLU via polynomial function bc HE only support + × balance degree (slow) and accuracy network path validation: avoid sending info on all node backward propagation to validate path for forward speed assuming few malicious XOR hash w/ zero-knowledge proof each pair I Slept With 100 Men in One Day | Documentary many man would do anything to have sex OnlyFans is a huge money printer but also a slippery slope The Creator Of Elixir - Top Shelf 7 Go has huge foot gun in exchange for ability to write lower level code most problem are solved; should just use library Jose Valim see Rust as functional bc explicit mutability Jose think loop hard in immutable language Jose was bitten by PL paper w/ slow implementation, and still does not understand the math in his paper as a coauthor library that cannot evolve w/o breaking backward compatibility is either a lie or poorly designed Credit card interest and interchange fees credit card companies make most money from charging merchant percentage ordinary people pay for the benefit high-end card user get Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #454 America spirit highly influenced by Scottish-Irish about not trusting authority, fighting, freedom performance as politician is not very correlated with personal life Washington DC is itself a creature not caring about even the president personnel selection is key bc many decision are made by them lower down can brick president order by delaying US immigration is crowded by relative of citizen managerial revolution (virus): not known what is going on lower down true power show when ruling w/o having the position mainstream media ask dummy question at white house stealing election was common and unhinged in US in the last century Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #452 scaling law: model do better w/ bigger network & training time & data; not seem to stop model learn local pattern, larger scale pattern, then long range correlation, etc. as they grow model feeling dumber likely bc different system prompt, user prompt, luck, or perception hard to make model both helpful/polite and concise/safe targeted regulation is needed to not have people radically against regulation mechanistic interpretability is a green field in AI constitutional AI for RL: AI to rate AI response based on prompt about principle important thing is what ultra good AI can do Amanda Askell is likely the human who talked most to Claude goal is for Claude to be helpful in front of million of people model try to please as many people by default, instead to get best result, encourage it to not care clear prompting: explain concept to model when talking about what you want, w/ example anthropomorphize w/ model: can ask why model refuse to answer use strong word to make model do something, e.g., never ever vs do not not failing signal failure bc not trying hard enough, but need to understand high-risk failure interesting idea: model refuse to talk if boring and just quit best way to measure model ability is bleeding edge research you do Defense: Real-time Multi-Resolution Neural Networks for Hand Simulation , Mianlun Zheng (Advisor: Jernej Barbič) from joint angle, simulate bone, tendon, muscle, vein, nerve, fascia, … application: medical education, robotics, Metaverse, physical therapy (committee) average (interpolate) 6 MRI scan of hand pose by calculating plastic strain & min energy function for equilibrium pattern matching bad: need huge data; no anatomy (dumb) tendon simulation: rod model; attach bone; emulate force from forearm; hook → tunnel to slide through fascia: triangle mesh + cloth solver; fat: FEM simulation; nail: rigid point cloud in skin high accuracy: < 1mm error against MRI real-time neural net challenge: nets in graphics slow; real-world usage need < 1ms; existing libraries overlook small model need: change level of detail (LOD) for Metaverse animation: deform character to vertices joint angle → linear blend skinning → net to reduce residue → real-time output LOD support: more vertex each level; restriction vs prolongation to downsample & upsample go up & down by level each level each region (by unity construction) separate net → small net → efficient further performance: reduce joint by perturbation simulation; PCA reduction for each region hot cache performance: lower output dimension & faster than prior work; much faster on high level Measuring context switching and memory overheads for Linux threads Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL) & futex several times faster than old Linux thread bearable latency: on his i7-4771 in 2018, multicore context switching took ~1.5µs, same core switching ~2.5µs, launching thread ~5µs, launching process ~22.5µs lazy memory: 8 MiB virtual via ulimit (VM), ~8 KiB resident (RSS) without touching stack Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning, Andrew Huberman neuroplasticity apply during fast eye movement sleep focus & alertness is how remember; sleep is prerequisite; meditation, NSDR are tool testing help remember; test ASAP after exposure best be open-ended, short answer, minimal prompt, require critical thinking do not matter for memory if wrong perceived familiarity hinder memory gap effect: pause in talk greatly reinforce memory ChatGPT from Scratch: How to Train an Enterprise AI Assistant • Phil Winder • GOTO 2023 post-GPT are decoder-only logistic regression is often superb for domain-specific task RLHF degrade performance parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT): use adapter alongside frozen model quantization massively reduce RAM usage Falcon-7B LLM: used in demo, said to have cleaned training data, open-source fine tuning demo done on V100 in Colab How Smartphones Shrink Our Brains anticipation trump focus habit to rely on tool kill memory trying to split attention make though shallow paper is better for thinking (I think large screen help)