Geekery on Brian Trammell

from Vienna to Landeck

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:00:00 +0000

In the late winter of 2006, I realized, on a train from somewhere between Freilassing and Rosenheim, after an interop in Salzburg leading up to IETF 65 in Dallas, that I was probably going to have to move to Central Europe.

A bit more than twenty years later, I’m sitting on a Railjet on the way to Landeck – a train that did not exist at the time – waiting at the platform in Freilassing – an occurrence more frequent now that Germany is reaping the rewards of running its rail network as a Volkswagen ad for the past two decades. This gives me time to reflect a long week at IETF 126 in Vienna before I disappear into the mountains for a bit.

In addition to joining the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society, on which more after I’ve understood the assignment, a couple of things of note happened that warrant talking about here.

State of the Blog, 2026

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

And welcome, once again to my blog, the last seven years of which seem dominated by me talking about the technical aspects of keeping my blog up to date. As I sat back and watched Claude migrate my Blogger and Wordpress content from a bitrotted Hugo template to one with an apparent present, it occurred to me that this most recent migration provides a pretty good excuse to explore what works about the Internet in 2026, and what doesn’t.

Down the Rabbit Hole, Part One

Sun, 19 Dec 2021 13:00:00 +0000

That people “disappear” into Google after joining (especially from academia) is a complaint so often told that it’s nearly a cliche… says the Googler whose last blog post, about joining Google, was over two and a half years ago.

I didn’t just go down the rabbit hole of compute infrastructure at Google in the intervening quarter-decade. I also picked up a synth or six, and, as a bonus, some actual rabbits.

Noogling

Sun, 17 Mar 2019 09:00:00 +0000

A couple of months ago, I posted about leaving academia. Two weeks ago, I joined Google as a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) manager. I’ll be working to keep bits of Google’s technical infrastructure running smoothly, at least once I’ve learned enough about how it works and what all the various switches and levers do to be dangerous. The past two weeks have been a deluge of new things to learn, but I’ve finally got my head far enough above water to reflect on things a bit.

Hitting DNS with a Sledgehammer (for Fun and Profit)

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 14:45:00 +0000

About three years ago I started working part-time (20%) on SCION, a secure, available future Internet architecture. Since I wasn’t around much, I was given a nice easy project that wasn’t on anyone’s critical path: desigining the naming system for SCION (as to that time it was assumed SCION would just use DNS with new RRTYPEs to handle the new address families it introduces).

m11y and o11y

Fri, 25 Jan 2019 14:00:00 +0000

Looking back over the arc of my career in pseudoacademia, especially over the last three years of digging into transport stack evolution with the MAMI project, there are a few bits of work I’m especially happy to have been a part of. One of these is the inclusion of the spin bit into the QUIC transport protocol. The spin bit was conceived as the minimum useful explicit signal one could add to a transport protocol to improve measurability, the benefit for the overhead is IMO quite worth it. Though it exposes “just” RTT, latency (together with data rate, which is available simply by counting packets and bytes on the wire in any transport protocol that is not hardened against traffic analysis to the point of uselessness) is the most important metric for understanding transport layer performance diagnosing all matter of transport-relevant network problems, and the spin signal itself can also be observed to infer loss and other issues with network treatment of a packet stream. The definition and deployment of the spin bit will therefore make network protocols more measurable while preserving privacy gains from encryption, and is a clear win for network operations and management.

On the Security Ratchet

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 09:00:00 +0000

The IETF uses Jabber for instant messaging during working group meetings, as does the IAB for its own teleconferences and meetings. Since I didn’t really feel like shopping around for a Jabber account, and XMPP integration with Google Talk shut down in the middle of the decade, I decided a few years ago to run my own server, which I pretty much only use for connecting to IETF conference rooms and for chatting with IETF folks as a backchannel during meetings. Prosody is a pretty nice piece of software, so after a little work to get it up and running (IIRC, most of this was getting used to the fact that the configuration files are written in Lua) it’s basically stayed up flawlessly since then.

Leaving Academia

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 21:00:00 +0000

I always love going to Schloss Dagstuhl, a retreat for computer scientists in the middle of nowhere in Saarland, Germany. It’s a little difficult to get to, but the train ride (Wallisellen to Saarbrücken via Zürich and Mannheim) is a nice, slow way to step back from whatever context-switching overhead is dominating my days at the moment and start thinking about the theme of the workshop.

And yet, it spins

Thu, 29 Mar 2018 09:00:00 +0000

I’m writing today from Berlin, after an excellent Passive and Active Measurement conference and a very long but fruitful week in London for IETF 101, which, for me, came to be dominated by the The Spin Bit.

The spin bit is an explicit signal for passive measurability of round-trip time, currently possible in TCP but not in QUIC due to lack of acknowlegment and timestamp information in the clear. It’s an example of a facility designed to fulfill the principles for measurement as a first class function of the network stack we laid out in an article published last year. I won’t go into the details of how it works or why it matters here; read the draft or watch the presentation for that.

What does it mean to trust the Internet?

Mon, 08 May 2017 08:00:00 +0000

Tomorrow, I’ll take part in a panel discussion at ETH Zürich, entitled “Internet and Trust”. From the flyer for the discussion: “The Internet relies on so many layers of trust that one is sometimes surprised that [it] actually works”. This is true, but I suppose that’s a property of any system of sufficient complexity, when viewed by someone who understands it well enough to know how much bubble gum and duct tape is used to hold it together.

Live, via Internet, from the hammock

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 15:00:00 +0000

Internet architecture and Internet-centered research being a global enterprise, I spend between four and seven weeks a year on the road, depending on which year, your definition of road and your definition of week, and a fair amount of time in teleconferences in various timezones in the time in between. One of the fixtures in my calendar is the thrice-annual meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), taking place right now in Chicago. I’ve only missed three such meetings in the past dozen years, and each time I do I attempt to take part via Internet as best I can. Here are my reflections about well it’s working this time around, how it’s improved, and how it could improve further. For in a world where those who steadfastly believe in borders and walls seem to be gaining the upper hand, it seems prudent to prepare to do the work of Internet architecture, engineering, and standardization without the benefit of free movement of the people doing it.

Making the Internet Safe for ECN

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 20:21:03 +0000

I’m off to New York in a couple of weeks to present a paper at PAM (which I mentioned here, though sadly the flashy automated demo I was hoping to build was a bit optimistic). The question: “is it safe to turn on ECN on client machines by default, completing the end to end deployment of a simple fifteen year old protocol to give us a better way to signal network congestion than simply dropping packets on the floor?” The answer is: “define safe.” Our key findings:

On Repeatable Internet Measurement: Part Two

Wed, 07 Jan 2015 10:00:23 +0000

The issues identified in of part one of this post led to yet another search for solutions to the problem of making (especially passive) measurement repeatable. Of course, this has been done before, but I took as an initial principle that the social aspects of the problem must be solved socially, and worked from there. What emerged was a set of requirements and an architecture for a computing environment and set of associated administrative processes which allows analysis of network traffic data while minimizing risk to the privacy of the network’s end users as well as ensuring spatial and temporal repeatability of the experiment. For lack of a better name I decided to call an instance of a collection of data using this architecture an analysis vault.

The key principle behind this architecture is if data can be open, it should be; if not, then everything else must be.

On Repeatable Internet Measurement: Interlude

Fri, 02 Jan 2015 15:44:04 +0000

Part one of this post painted a somewhat bleak picture of the state of Internet measurement as a science. The dreariness will continue later this month in part two. And yet there seems to be quite a lot of measuring the Internet going on. It can’t all be that bad, can it?

A Tiny Rant on Mail

Fri, 02 Jan 2015 14:49:49 +0000

Mail is broken.

This is nothing new. RFC 822, after all, wasn’t the beginning of Internet e-mail, merely an attempt to fix it, which admittedly worked reasonably well for a while. But even with all the brokenness of mail, I wasn’t expecting to dig into my Postfix logs today to find that USENIX couldn’t send me mail because the firm they’ve outsourced to was too lazy to create IN PTR records for their nodes in the cloud.

On Repeatable Internet Measurement: Part One

Sun, 21 Dec 2014 21:50:10 +0000

I spent quite a lot of time in 2014 thinking about the following problem: if I hand you a paper that claims something about the Internet, based on data I cannot show you because I am bound by a nondisclosure agreement due to corporate confidentiality or user privacy issues, generated by code which is ostensibly available under an open-source license but which is neither intended to run outside my environment, nor tested to ensure it will produce correct results in all cases, nor maintained to ensure it is compatible with newer versions of the compiler, interpreter, or libraries it requires, what reason have I given you to believe what I say?

A Degenerate Binary Tree

Sun, 31 Aug 2014 09:27:50 +0000

Shamelessly inspired by Alexander Calder, who I followed from Atlanta to Pittsburgh to Zürich, and inexpertly crafted from stuff I found at Migros, I present my first attempt at a mobile.

(And for those of you who have not yet heard, yes, this commission has a customer: we’re expecting a daughter in a few weeks. We won’t be boring the Internet at large with piles of baby pictures, though.)

A quick introduction to IPFIX

Tue, 08 Jul 2014 13:55:52 +0000

I recently gave a full-day course on flow measurement at the University of Zürich’s IfI summer school. The course itself was more or less a stack of my current research interests stapled together; one product was a nice summary version of a tutorial on the IPFIX protocol (on which I’ve worked on and off for the past nine years), together with an iPython notebook on the subject.

Joining the IAB

Sun, 16 Feb 2014 14:29:07 +0000

Well, it’s official. I’ll be joining the Internet Architecture Board for a two-year term starting at IETF 89 in March. Among other things, the IAB provides architectural oversight of IETF protocols, which are surprisingly coherent given the nearly perfectly bottom-up nature of the process that produces them. I look forward to the challenge in meta-cat-herding.

Is Traffic Traffic?

Thu, 19 Dec 2013 08:53:35 +0000

One can debate the usefulness of the traffic-traffic metaphor in network engineering. On the one hand, speed limits make a nice illustration of fairness in the network neutrality debate. On the other hand, motorway congestion and the effect of queueing in network congestion control look nothing like each other, at least until we develop motorways that change their length during rush hour, and we decide we’re okay with cars that take too long to get to their destinations being crushed and disposed of en route. One must carefully consider how well the metaphor fits reality before using it to explain or reason about anything important.

A Media Policy for the 17th Century

Wed, 11 Dec 2013 14:59:31 +0000

I’ve been reading Tom Standage’s “Writing on the Wall” of late, which I can heartily recommend. It’s less subtle than “The Victorian Internet”, which counts among my favorite books of all time, but that was written before Twitter, and Twitter’s made us all less subtle, I think. What strikes me about his new book is not his thesis — that the “social media revolution” is nothing really new, just the application of new technology to our apparently instinctive love of gossip — but how well it illustrates that much of the present public policy debate over new media technology is very, very old.

QoF 0.9.0 (“Albula”) released

Mon, 04 Nov 2013 15:09:31 +0000

The QoF TCP-performance-aware IPFIX flow meter I’ve been working on, on and off, for about a year, now seems to produce halfway plausible results and hardly crashes at all anymore, which means it’s time to follow the path of real artists immemorial and ship it already: see here, or if you’re really serious about it, just track master on github.

Active Resistance against Passive Surveillance

Fri, 06 Sep 2013 12:24:44 +0000

So I complain about a lull in the news about the more-or-less complete compromise of the Internet by the National Security Agency et al, and then this goes and happens.

One of my old standard interview questions for people applying for jobs with some responsibility for information security was “are you paranoid”? When the lighting was good, and my eyes bugged out just right, this could be a little scary. It’s time to retire this question, I think, because the answer would seem to be “no, I am clearly not paranoid enough”, unless the applicant shows up to the interview in a tin-foil hat.

The Freedom Panopticon

Thu, 29 Aug 2013 14:37:09 +0000

This is the fourth post I’ve started on the pervasive, indiscriminate, uncontrolled surveillance of electronic communications by the ministries of state security of the North Atlantic world. I stopped writing each of the last three either because the rant got too paranoid, or further revelations showed that the rant was not yet too paranoid enough.

But the stream of new information seems to have dried up a bit, as the news cycle has distracted itself with something called a Miley Cyrus, whatever that is, so I’ve had a chance to catch up a bit. And as a researcher in network measurement who left a job funded by security-academic-industrial-complex money to move to Europe to work on a project seeking to apply technical privacy guarantees to network monitoring systems (which ironically was named PRISM, and which I must forevermore footnote on my CV as “no, not that PRISM”), I feel I should make some statement on all of this. So here it is, predictable and unoriginal though it may be:

Pervasive surveillance is anathema to a functioning democratic society, and nations which do not exercise effective civilian oversight of their state security apparati end up being controlled by them.

An Afternoon In Bern: Network Neutrality Redux

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 10:34:25 +0000

Last Thursday, I sat on a panel with Swiss Telecommunications Association President Peter Grütter, Swisscom CEO Carsten Schloter, and Green National Councilor Balthasar Glättli, on the subject of network neutrality, and whether legal protection therefor is necessary in Switzerland. Not surprisingly, the panel was of different opinions on this matter. Swisscom and the telecom industry group support self-regulation, making the very good point that laws change too slowly with respect to Internet technology too quickly to be effective; and Glättli making the equally good point that as several obvious violations of neutrality can already be observed in Switzerland, trusting the industry to regulate itself has so far had dubious results.

Coverage (in German) of the event can be found at computerworld.ch and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and if you’ve got 55 minutes to kill, video of the event itself (also in German) is available at the website of the Parliamentary Group on Digital Sustainability.

On Network Neutrality

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 14:11:13 +0000

The National Council of Switzerland¹ is considering the addition of a guarantee of network neutrality into a forthcoming revision of Swiss telecommunications law. This is generally a Good Thing. We all like the Internet. This being Switzerland, we all like neutrality. So network neutrality must be great.

More seriously, the Internet has largely replaced the public switched telephone network and the postal system as the basic communications infrastructure of our society; just as with these systems, the “last mile” is a natural monopoly, so guaranteeing equal access to it is important. However, the results that legislation of network neutrality will lead to may vary widely based on how, precisely, it is defined.

An evening in Bern

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:38:06 +0000

The Internet Society Switzerland Chapter’s inaugural national event was last night at the Käfigturm in Bern; in my talk, “The Open Internet under Threat” (which, as it turns out, was unwittingly inspired in part by a much earlier post on this blog; slides are here), I accomplished what I set out to do, I think — start a conversation about the present state of the Internet, and threats to its openness, to figure out where we ISOC people as politically-interested network geeks can make a difference. Balthasar Glättli’s talk on Internet politics in Switzerland, and the conversations that followed both talks, were eye-opening, ranging from the education of politicians on even the most basic technical realities of the Internet through framing Internet freedom issues for random people off the street to exactly how much regulation is necessary or desirable to guarantee the fundamental rights behind network neutrality. Thanks to ISOC, the sponsors, the organizers, and all who attended, for an interesting evening in Bern!

Talk: The Open Internet Under Threat

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 08:16:44 +0000

I’ll be giving a talk to the Internet Society (ISOC) Switzerland Chapter at a meeting in Bern, at 18:30 on Tuesday 27 November, entitled “The Open Internet under Threat”. After my talk, Green National Councillor Balthasar Glättli will speak on Internet-related topics in Swiss national politics, so it promises to be a really interesting evening for Internet geeks and policy wonks alike!

Sixty-eight, eighty-nine, eleven, or: Why Protocol Design Matters

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 17:49:50 +0000

It is not yet completely clear the extent to which the Revolutions of 2011 were run on Facebook and Twitter, but to say they have not been instrumental would, I think, be disingenuous. Like Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs, the body counts in Vietnam, or CNN in Kuwait, from the American standpoint the social networking protocols have removed one more layer of separation between the reality of these revolutions, and those watching them. The key here is that they are also used as a primary communications medium for those taking part.

Now is perhaps not the time to point out that they’re doing it wrong.

Transit Art

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 12:56:58 +0000

When the Glattalbahn Line 12 opened in December, it turned the VBZ/VBG tram network into a big circle with a few branches, which made this (admittedly somewhat abstract) representation possible.

See if you can figure out where you live.

The End of the Free Pool

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 08:17:50 +0000

ICANN will hold a press conference in Miami on Thursday, presumably announcing the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 address pool. This is when 102/8, 103/8, 104/8, 179/8, and 185/8 — each a block of 16 million addresses — will be handed out to the regional registries (RIRs), thereby ending the allocation of IPv4 address space at the first level of delegation.

I’m going to go ahead and predict right now that almost every journalist covering this event will get something subtle but essential wrong, and that the result will be fifteen minutes of panic followed by business as usual for everyone except those who understand the minutia of IP address allocation policy until we start seeing pressure at the lower levels of delegation.

As a disclaimer, I’m not actually one of those people who understands the minutia of IP address allocation policy, but you’re reading this on the Internet, so you’ve already proven yourself willing to believe things you read from random people who have no credibility whatsoever, and you certainly can’t do any worse with me than with the thirty-second blurb you might hear about this on your favorite cable news noisebox. So with that in mind, here’s what this actually means:

Unicode jokes

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:37:00 +0000

U+1DE7 COMBINING STACK OF DIAERESIS FALLING RIGHT, used primarily for native English speakers trying to pronounce Swiss German.

(Yes, I know it's been forever. Stand by.)