This Week in NET

Host João Tomé is joined by Reagan Russell, Senior Manager of Project Management, who shares what it’s like to organize and plan an innovation week where Cloudflare announces numerous products and features.

We discuss how teams across the company — from technical groups to marketing and communications — collaborate to put together a week where Cloudflare aims to give back to the Internet. We also talk about the need for established processes and how new ideas can sometimes change plans.

Check our Birthday Week Hub here: cloudflare.com/birthday-week/

In this week’s episode, we look at the behind-the-scenes of our main innovation week of the year, Birthday Week.

Host João Tomé is joined by Kari Linder, Principal Visual Communications Design Lead and she shares about the inspiration and creation process behind innovation weeks. Discover the creative process and artistry that brings Cloudflare's iconic celebration to life.

Check our Birthday Week Hub here:

In this week’s episode, we recap our main innovation week of the year, Birthday Week, and its many announcements.

Host João Tomé is joined by Brendan Irvine-Broque (Group Product Manager) and Kelly May Johnston (Director, Product Management). We dive into some of the key announcements of the week, including the AI audit and major improvements in security, performance, and AI/ML support, such as enhanced threat detection and analytics, faster navigation with Speed Brain, and expanded free tools for all users.

Check our Birthday Week Hub here:

Join host João Tomé and Cloudflare Field CTO, John Engates for a comprehensive episode of "This Week in NET". As Cloudflare's annual Birthday Week approaches, get an exclusive preview of the upcoming innovation announcements and how the company continues to evolve its services for the AI era.

The episode explores critical cybersecurity developments, examining Cloudflare's expanded global connectivity, advancements in SSL/TLS security, and the implementation of post-quantum encryption standards. Learn about the latest White House initiatives in routing security and discover how Cloudflare is revolutionizing API protection through sophisticated machine learning techniques, including sequence learning and variable order Markov chains.

In this week’s episode, we go a bit technical in our segment “Let’s //Get\ Technical,” featuring our CTO, John Graham-Cumming. We discuss AI bot and crawlers, elections and more.

Host João Tomé and John Graham-Cumming begin by explaining how Cloudflare recently launched a new “easy button” to block all AI bots, scrapers, and crawlers to help maintain a safe Internet for content creators. It’s available to all customers, including those on our free tier. We demonstrate how to activate this button on the Cloudflare dashboard. We also explain the purpose of the robots.txt file—it resides at the root of your domain and contains directives for search engine crawlers on how to index pages on a website.

Next, we discuss how we recently replaced links to polyfill.io with Cloudflare’s mirror to ensure a safer Internet—polyfill.io is a popular JavaScript library service that can no longer be trusted and should be removed from websites.

We also analyze recent election trends in the UK and France, as well as the Biden vs. Trump US election debate. We were surprised to find that so many websites related to political parties were the targets of DDoS attacks blocked by Cloudflare around the election (or debate) days.

Also mentioned is Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 incident on June 27, 2024. The root cause was a combination of BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) hijacking and a route leak.

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In this week’s episode, we explore the realm of passwords, leaked passwords, two-factor authentication (2FA), and also AI generated captions for video.

Host João Tomé is joined by Garrett Galow, Director of Product at Cloudflare, to discuss a recent blog post on how we help keep customers safe through leaked password notifications accessible via our dashboard. We also discuss the use of passwords in 2024, the importance of 2FA or multi-factor authentication like hardware keys, offer suggestions, and explore how passwords might become less common in the future.

Lastly, Mickie Betz, Senior Systems Engineer of our Stream video product, discusses Stream Generated Captions. With just one click, users can effortlessly generate video captions using Stream’s latest feature: AI-generated captions for on-demand videos and live stream recordings. Mickie explains how the Stream engineering team developed this feature using our own Workers AI and the Whisper model—an open-source Automatic Speech Recognition model—with just a single API call.

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In this week’s episode, we explore how Cloudflare handles application security, current trends, vulnerabilities, and future expectations.

Host João Tomé is joined by Michael Tremante, Director of Product from our Application Security team. We discuss the evolution of application security and its increasing relevance today. We also go into specific use cases, covering firewall security, malware, supply chain risks, and the critical task of monitoring various vulnerabilities, including zero-day threats.

Additionally, we analyze the growing importance of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), which serve as the essential plumbing that powers technology, now accounting for over half of the dynamic traffic on Cloudflare’s network.

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This is a special feature that celebrates the 50 years of the “TCP paper.” We asked a few questions to three of our team members who are experts in protocols about why the TCP protocol is important for what the Internet has become, its evolution over the years with new additions, and also its future.

Participating are Mark Nottingham, our Standards Lead, based in Australia; Marwan Fayed, a Systems Engineer from our Research team, usually in the UK but here in Lisbon, Portugal; and Lucas Pardue, a senior software engineer specializing in Internet and web protocols such as HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and QUIC — Lucas is Co-Chair within the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) Working Group.

Some context: In May 1974, the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Transactions on Communications scientific journal published “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.” Authored by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, that was the paper that described the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that supported the interconnection of multiple packet-switched networks into a network of networks. Split later into TCP and an Internet Protocol (IP), TCP and IP became core components of the Internet that DARPA launched operationally in 1983. The rest, as they say, is history.

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This week, host João Tomé heads to San Francisco for the cybersecurity RSA Conference (May 6-9, 2024). First, we gather insights from attendees, ranging from a cybersecurity student on the brink of graduation to seasoned managers and experts.

We also feature Emily Hancock, Cloudflare’s Chief Privacy Officer, discussing the nexus of security and privacy. Plus, insights from Carlos Alberto Silva, a Portuguese venture capitalist with extensive experience in cybersecurity investments.

Last but not least, we hear from Dani Grant, a former Cloudflare employee and co-founder of jam.dev, a company dedicated to fixing software bugs and built on Cloudflare's platform.

In the coming weeks, we will host additional security-related conversations.

In this week's episode, we discuss Internet disruptions.

Host João Tomé (based in Lisbon, Portugal) is joined by our Head of Data Insights, David Belson, based in Boston. We discuss our recent Q1 2024 Internet disruption summary blog post. There were submarine cable failures that impacted 13 countries in Africa. We also address technical issues with RPKI, DNS, and DNSSEC that disrupted connectivity for subscribers across multiple network providers.

Additionally, we give you a teaser from Ranee Bray, Chief of Staff from our Security team, about Cloudflare's presence at the cybersecurity-related RSA Conference next week in San Francisco.

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