A few years ago, Juniper Networks used cartoons and humour to attack its rival cisco in a marketing campaign with companion postcards and lots of cartoons. Recently, Juniper decided to come back to traditional marketing and removed the cartoons from its website. Cisco took the opposite direction with a new marketing campaign based on flash videos : http://www.cisco.com/cdc_content_elements/flash/security/therealm/index....

Fifteen years ago, Richard Stevens wrote the first volume of TCP/IP Illustrated. In his book, he took a different approach than the existing books. Instead of describing TCP/IP from a theoretical viewpoint, he took an "exploratory" approach. He set up a small network and looked at the packets exchanged to explain in details the core IPv4 and TCP protocols. Today, the TCP/IP protocol suite has changed significantly with the introduction of IPv6, new applications and changes to many of the Internet protocols.

In Europe, a large fraction of the Internet traffic is exchanged at interconnection points such as LINX in London, BNIX in Belgium, SFINX, in Paris. AMS-IX, based in Amsterdam is one of the oldest and the largest interconnection points in Europe.

Researchers who are working on improving BGP are familar with popular sources of BGP updates and tables including :

• http://www.routeviews.org
• http://www.ripe.net/ris
• http://bgp.potaroo.net
• http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/topology/

During the Defcon conference, two security researchers have shown by a live exploit that interdomain routing with today's BGP is not secure. Additional details about the exploit may be found in :

• http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080827-inherent-security-flaw-pos...
• http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/revealed-the-in.html

The IETF is becoming more and more concerned about the need to migrate to IPv6 and the difficulty of migrating the Internet to something else than the current IPv4. During the Dublin meeting, there were several interesting presentations about IPv6 :

• Google's IPv6 deployment started as a 20% project like gmail, but it is progressing quickly and we can expect more and more IPv6 content from google : http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/08jul/slides/plenaryw-4.pdf
  

This book written by Robin Sharp and published by Springer Verlag takes an unusual path to describe computer network protocols. While most standard networking texts mainly focus on a textual description of the different protocols and mechanisms, Robin Sharp starts from formal description techniques. More precisely, he chooses the Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) notation proposed by Hoare. CSP is a process algebra that allows to model the interactions among communicating processes.