This Week in NET

Welcome to our weekly review of stories from our blog and other sources, covering a range of topics from product announcements, tools and features to disruptions on the Internet. João Tomé is joined by our CTO, John Graham-Cumming.

In this week's program, we start by welcoming Michele Yetman as Cloudflare's new Chief People Officer. Next, we discuss a new addition to our Load Balancing solution, but also emphasize the importance of Cloudflare Tunnels — a private, secure connection between your data center or web servers and Cloudflare.

Cloudflare’s Birthday Week is approaching later this month, so let's take a look at how these innovation weeks originated and what they involve. The official launch occurred on September 27, 2010. In 2012, Cloudflare began the tradition of unveiling “gifts” in the form of products and partnerships that give back to the Internet during this late September week. For a few years now, Birthday Week has been one of the around seven or eight innovation weeks we typically do each year.

Last but not least, we delve into trends from Cloudflare Radar related to the major earthquake in Morocco and how it impacted the Internet there. We also discuss how the iPhone 15 announcement made tech news-related sites trend in our domain ranking list.

You can check the mentioned blog posts:

Welcome to our weekly review of stories from our blog and other sources, covering a range of topics from product announcements, tools and features to disruptions on the Internet. João Tomé is joined by our CTO, John Graham-Cumming.

In this week's program, we're back with episode #36. We start with our most recent announcement: Cloudflare One for Data Protection — our unified suite to protect data everywhere across the web, SaaS, and private applications.

There's also a lot to unpack in terms of new tools and insights from our platform for general Internet insights, Cloudflare Radar. We also showcase how Meter, a provider of Internet infrastructure, is leveraging the Tenant API integration for DNS filtering to help their clients enforce acceptable Internet use policies. Additionally, we draw conclusions from our Application Security report for Q2 2023.

Furthermore, there are some Google.com domain trends, considering that Google was officially founded 25 years ago, on September 4, 1998. Plus, an important warning: if you have an iPhone, update it. Researchers have discovered an actively exploited zero-click vulnerability that can put iPhone users at risk.

You can check the mentioned blog posts:

Welcome to our weekly review of stories from our blog and other sources, covering a range of topics from product announcements, tools and features to disruptions on the Internet. João Tomé is joined by our CTO, John Graham-Cumming.

In this week's program, we discuss Cloudflare’s inaugural 2023 phishing threat report, which delves into millions of malicious emails, brand impersonations, identity deceptions, and other predominant attack trends based on a year's worth of email security data.

Next, we venture into a more technical realm with a blog post that offers developers an improved method to debug Rust and Wasm using our developer platform, Cloudflare Workers. It is followed by two projects, conceived by Cloudflare’s interns, that evolved into features:

Debug Queues from the dash: send, list, and ack messages

Introducing scheduled deletion for Cloudflare Stream

We also shine a spotlight on our new AI hub: ai.cloudflare.com. Here, we explore how both individual developers and expansive enterprises are using Cloudflare to build AI tools. This includes the creation of ChatGPT plugins and a tour of some of our AI tools, like Constellation (allowing everyone to run machine learning models and perform inference on top of Cloudflare Workers).

Finally, we explain the history behind our use of lava lamps — and a lava lamp wall in our San Francisco office — for Internet security. These have come to symbolize Cloudflare’s commitment to security, rooted in the scientific principles of randomness and entropy. We'll retrace the journey from the idea in 2013 to its implementation in 2017. We'll also discuss how our lava lamps story became part of the culture, the subject of news articles, inspired a season of the TV show NCIS, and was popularized by a segment by science YouTuber Tom Scott.

Learning center: How do lava lamps help with Internet encryption?

Welcome to our weekly review of stories from our blog and other sources, covering a range of topics from product announcements, tools and features to disruptions on the Internet. João Tomé is joined by our CTO, John Graham-Cumming.

In this week's program, most of our Portugal team is responsible for welcoming everyone. We also cover some of the blog posts from the last two weeks. This includes Cloudflare Radar's new BGP origin hijack detection system, the most exploited vulnerabilities of 2022, and our Project Cybersafe Schools, which offers free security tools to small K-12 school districts in the United States.

We will also focus on a more general topic: the process of building things, from new features to the decision-making process of working on shipping new categories of products to the world. How has Cloudflare approached this, from ideas to demos to iteration? And how has the process evolved over the years? Workers, our developer platform used by many thousands of developers, is one example of this.

You can check the mentioned blog posts:

Welcome to our weekly review of stories from our blog and other sources, covering a range of topics from product announcements, tools and features to disruptions on the Internet. João Tomé is joined by our CTO, John Graham-Cumming.

In this week's program, we spend most of the time going over some of the recent Cloudflare Radar (our tool for Internet insights) announcements and insights, including Internet disruptions and DDoS threats. Here’s what we discuss, in order:

At the end, there's also a bit of Oppenheimer vs. Barbie movie phenomenon suggestion.

Welcome to our weekly review of stories from our blog and other sources, covering a range of topics from product announcements, tools and features to disruptions on the Internet. João Tomé is joined by our CTO, John Graham-Cumming.

In this week's program, we don't have any blog posts to go over. Instead, we start by discussing “Threads”, the new Twitter alternative from Instagram/Meta. That said, we mostly take the opportunity to pay homage to a piece of Internet history: Minitel.

Before the World Wide Web transformed the Internet into a medium for the masses in the 1990s, Minitel pioneered as a French computer network. In the 1980s, it provided millions of users in France with access to a range of services, including email, online purchases (ecommerce), including train reservations, general search, game playing, chat, and even a form of online porn.

It was 43 years ago, on July 15, 1980, that Minitel was first experimentally rolled out, in Saint-Malo, France. It gained widespread adoption in 1983, 40 years ago, when the French government distributed free terminals to every French telephone subscriber. Minitel was discontinued only on June 20, 2012, which upset some people in France, including farmers (we explain why). It was considered a cultural phenomenon and had an impact beyond France, reaching other countries.

John Graham-Cumming has a few old Minitel devices to show and some stories to share. And last but not least, we pivot from Minitel to the newest Indiana Jones movie. The first Indy movie was released on June 12, 1981, when the Minitel project was just getting started.

MIT’s Minitel dedicated site: https://minitel.us/

Welcome to our weekly review of stories from our blog and other sources, covering a range of topics from product announcements, tools and features to disruptions on the Internet. João Tomé is joined by our CTO, John Graham-Cumming.

In this week's program, we go over our Speek Week recap, mentioning a few blog posts we didn’t cover last week, including how Cloudflare scaled and protected Eurovision 2023 voting with Pages and Turnstile. Next, we talk about a deep dive with insights into the process of investigating networking issues and how to begin debugging dropped packets issues from negative header lengths. There’s also an explanation on how Cloudflare Zaraz now supports JSONata, enabling precise data customization for enhanced workflows.

We also have “A bit of history” moment, to celebrate and remember Alan Turing’s importance to mathematics, computing and AI, given that this month it's the 111 anniversary of his birth (June 23, 1912).

At the end, we have in our new “Around NET” short segment Matthew Bullock, based in London, from the Product team, to talk directly from our London office about some of the products announced during Speed Week.

You can check the blog posts:

And the Speed Week Hub (https://www.cloudflare.com/speed-week)

Welcome to our weekly review of stories from our blog and other sources, covering a range of topics from product announcements, tools and features to disruptions on the Internet. João Tomé is joined by our CTO, John Graham-Cumming.

In this week's program, we cover some of the announcements, metrics, and deep dives from our innovation week, Speed Week. It's all about how Cloudflare likes to be very fast, the advantages of that performance focus in different products, from Zero Trust to Workers, APIs and Pages, and how we like to prove that we're fast. We benchmark ourselves against our competitors and our previous metrics.

There's something for everyone's taste, from our global network growth — we're in 300 cities and getting closer to end users with connections to 12,000 networks (in 122 unique countries) — to how we use scalable machine learning to reduce the processing time for each HTTP request.

We introduce new tools (Cloudflare Observatory and Cloudflare Snippets), explore new architectures (rethinking cache purge), and even talk about our step-by-step guide to transferring domains to Cloudflare, now that Google Domains is shutting down.

Lastly, we present a world map predominantly orange, highlighting that Cloudflare is the fastest provider based on TCP Connection Time. We also delve into Cloudflare Radar's new Internet and Connection Quality index, which offers comprehensive metrics worldwide, categorized by country and ASN.

For all the blog posts and Cloudflare TV related segments, don’t miss the Speed Week Hub (https://www.cloudflare.com/speed-week)

Welcome to our weekly review of stories from our blog and other sources, covering a range of topics from product announcements, tools and features to disruptions on the Internet. João Tomé is joined by our CTO, John Graham-Cumming.

In this week's program, we give you a teaser of what to expect from our Speed Week 2023. It’s our next innovation week, which is coming after this Sunday, full of announcements, new tools (that include AI and machine learning), and performance metrics. We also discuss the importance of Cloudflare API Gateway and of API-driven applications in general — given that now our service can protect GraphQL APIs against malicious requests. We also explain how exam-related Internet shutdowns in Iraq and Algeria put connectivity to the test, and are recurrent in several countries.

Our fun fact of the week is related to the 40 years of the American science fiction techno-thriller film, WarGames — it was released in June 1983.

At the end, we have in our "Around NET" short segment, Mark Steyn, a Scottish Web Engineer, based in London, from our Product Experience team. He shares how he is doing a “50,000 steps for 50 days” challenge for his 50th birthday that also includes giving money to charity that offers support to children who have been bereaved.

You can check the blog posts:

Follow the Speed Week 2023 hub for updates: cloudflare.com/speed-week/

Welcome to our weekly review of stories from our blog and other sources, covering a range of topics from product announcements, tools and features to disruptions on the Internet. João Tomé is joined by our CTO, John Graham-Cumming.

In this week's program, we delve into spatial computing, and Apple’s new Vision Pro headsets. Then, we go over the nine years of Project Galileo, which since 2014 has been helping journalists, human rights defenders, civil rights activists, and other humanitarian organizations. In 2023, this project is protecting more than 2,271 organizations in 111 countries. Next, we talk about the launch of Waiting Room Analytics, a game-changing feature for those services so successful that they need a waiting room. There’s a deep dive about HTTP/3 (the most recent HTTP protocol version) usage this last year, where bots are still not convinced. We also announce that Cloudflare Area 1, our email protection service, earned a SOC 2 report, related to safekeeping sensitive information.

Last but not least, we share a computing fun fact and delve into history. 190 years ago, Ada Lovelace, often credited as the world's first computer programmer, met Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Analytical Engine, a machine designed to be a general-purpose computer (“The greatest machine that never was” — TED talk). You can check here a 2018 conversation with Doron Swade and Sydney Padua about it.

At the end, we have in our new "Around NET" short segment, Patrick Day (usually based in Washington DC and from our Policy and Trust Team), sharing some insights directly from the RightsCon summit, in Costa Rica.

You can check the blog posts: