November 2016 Summaries

On November 30, 2016, a ship accidentally broke three undersea cables serving the island of Jersey in the English Channel, causing disruption for telecom operators like JT Global. Fortunately, Cloudflare's Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing protocol ensured that traffic from London to Jersey was rerouted through Paris as a backup path. This incident highlights the importance of having fallback systems in place when dealing with unpredictable events affecting critical infrastructure like undersea cables.

The blog post discusses the implementation and benefits of HPACK, a new header compression algorithm used in HTTP/2 connections. Unlike previous algorithms like DEFLATE, HPACK is resilient to attacks such as CRIME due to its use of static and dynamic dictionaries, along with Huffman encoding. The blog post provides detailed explanations on how HPACK works for both request and response headers, demonstrating significant compression rates that lead to reduced bandwidth usage and improved performance.

This article discusses using TypeScript to generate documentation from source code alone. It explains how TypeScript can help developers catch errors early on and provides a comparison between JSDoc and TypeScript annotations. The author also shares their experience with using TypeDoc, a tool for generating documentation from TypeScript projects, and demonstrates how it can be used to create reference material that is always in sync with the codebase. Additionally, the article suggests that TypeScript can do more than just API references and provides an example of linking source code within getting-started documentation. The author plans to open-source their tools for generating documentation and theme in the near future.

In 2016, almost every site using Cloudflare (over 4 million) had enabled IPv6, leading to significant global IPv6 traffic where networks have enabled it for consumers. Top IPv6 networks include Orange Polska, China Next Generation Internet CERNET2, and HiNet IPv6 (Taiwan). The adoption of IPv6 is driven by its faster internet capabilities compared to IPv4. Countries like Belgium, Ireland, Greece, Germany, Ecuador, Luxembourg, Portugal, Estonia, India, and Peru have shown significant growth in IPv6 connectivity. Major networks responsible for the majority of IPv6 traffic through Cloudflare include T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Microsoft, AIS Fibre (Thailand), Google Fiber, Sky (UK), Alentus, EGIHosting, and Facebook.

Cloudflare has expanded its global network with a new data center in Barcelona, Spain. This marks the company's 101st data center worldwide and the third in the Iberian Peninsula after Madrid and Lisbon. The expansion provides better performance for users in Catalonia and Spain, as well as additional redundancy for European data centers. Cloudflare has also connected to the Catalunya Neutral Internet Exchange (CATNIX), raising the number of exchanges it participates in to over 150.

The text discusses how Cloudflare has been adding resilience to its network by monitoring the quality of the Internet, detecting issues, and implementing automatic mitigation mechanisms. It explains that while Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the cornerstone of internet routing, it does not provide first-class mechanisms to automatically deal with events causing brownouts. To address this issue, Cloudflare has deployed its own mechanisms to react to unpredictable events and improve network performance for its customers. The company uses a combination of open-source software and tools to monitor the Internet's infrastructure, detect issues, and take necessary actions. By enhancing the reliability and resilience of the complex network of networks, Cloudflare aims to build a better internet.

Cloudflare is hosting another cryptography meetup at their San Francisco headquarters on November 22, starting at 6:00 PM with networking and short talks by experts beginning at 6:30 PM. Pizza and beer will be provided. Confirmed speakers include Emily Stark from Google Chrome security team discussing HTTPS errors, Jon McLachlan from Symphony explaining their unique approach to secure communications, and a special guest, Eric Rescorla from Mozilla, who will speak about TLS 1.3.