Internet History Initiative: Preserving our Collective Data Legacy
APRICOT 2026 (Jakarta, February 2026)
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DNS Without Borders: Uncovering Regional Hubs and Dependencies in K-Root Traffic (CAPIF4)
Central Asian Peering and Interconnection Forum, Bishkek, 24-25 September 2024
Contemplating Internet History: Where Do We Go Next?
ZANOG 2025 (Durban, April 2025)
Assessing the Internet in the Southeastern European Region
RIPE Southeast European Regional Meeting (Sofia, April 2025)
Joke Scoring in five minutes with Deepseek-R1
Since Deepseek has released distilled Qwen models under a generous MIT license, it’s simpler than you might expect to create a quick assistant for small reasoning tasks on your own hardware. I could see a researcher spinning up an instance of this to sort through and classify documents, for example, without worrying about uploading them to a 3rd party or having an AI vendor monitor your…
Deepseek-R1: implications
The following prompt was supplied to a distilled instance of Deepseek-R1:32B , running on my desktop machine with a single GPU (an NVIDIA RTX A4500 with 20GB of VRAM). Its response (including the <think> prelude) follows. –jim
Nomic: Playing Self-Modifying Games with LLMs
In the summer of 2024, preparing to spend time at the Berkman Klein Center as a new fellow, I spent some time thinking about AI and law. I started doing research for a piece (never finished) about encouraging ChatGPT to play Nomic , a classic pen-and-paper game that explores the underpinnings of democracy and law made famous by Douglas Hofstatder’s Scientific American column in 1982 .
Internet History Initiative: Overview and Exhortation
IETF121 / IRTF Global Access to the Internet for All (GAIA RG) (Dublin, 6 November 2024)
Measuring and Visualizing DNS Watersheds
RIPE89 Measurement and Tools Working Group (Prague, 29 October 2024)
The Central Asian Internet: Recursive Resolvers and Regional Latencies (CAPIF3)
Central Asian Peering and Interconnection Forum, Bishkek, 24-25 September 2024
Internet History: Next Steps
Thanks to everyone who responded to my earlier post about the need to preserve and curate the history of Internet measurement for future historians.
Thinking About Internet History
I could have happily been a librarian. I spent the glorious summer of 1988 as an intern in my university’s library system, learning what it was like to work in the various departments. I got to sample it all: the patient craft of the book restorers, the voices of the dead in Manuscripts and Archives, the exotic tastes of the special collections managers, the ever-present fear of halon…
Inference and the Unreliable Narrator
When you said ‘AI’ in the 1990s, you meant symbolic AI .. and decades of work and many millions of dollars went into the construction of the ontological foundations atop which edifices of symbolic reasoning would one day be built. There were elaborate projects like Cyc , which grew to include millions of pieces of hand-curated information about the world, and ‘heuristic level…
ChatGPT on Internet Measurement
An unedited dialogue with ChatGPT . Please generate a compelling and exciting first paragraph for a blog about Internet measurement, and describe the specific measurements that the blog is based on.
Internet Infrastructure Predictions for 2023 (Part 2)
In part 1 , I gave two predictions: that the Ukrainian Internet would prove resilient as Russia’s attacks on infrastructure continue, and that Central Asian connectivity could become more diverse in response. In this post, I’ll look at how conflict could affect the broader Internet, and predict how that may change the conversation around Internet infrastructure centralization.
Internet Infrastructure Predictions for 2023 (Part 1)
Looking back, I suspect 2022 will be remembered as a year in which conflicts and crises shaped our collective attitudes toward infrastructure and the Internet in interesting ways.
Overview of Central Asian Internet Connectivity (CAPIF1)
Central Asian Peering and Interconnection Forum, Astana, 17 Nov 2022
Thirty Years Later: Surveying the Internet of the Former Soviet Union
Internet Society Tech Talk Series (11 May 2022)
About
About Jim Cowie
New collection, old presentations
I finally found a quiet afternoon to pull together a set of my old presentations from the Renesys and Dyn Research days, and reconstruct the timeline. Thank goodness for the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine . I’ve also embedded videos when they exist, so if you start at the beginning, you can watch me gain weight as the years pass.
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Local Hosting in the Middle East
MENOG 16 (Istanbul, 23 March 2016)
Global Routing Incidents (And the Need for Good MANRS)
ENOG 10 (Odessa, 13 October 2015)
Internet Around the Black Sea
ENOG 10 (Odessa, 13 October 2015)
Internet Performance Impacts of Canadian Content Hosting
DNS-OARC meeting (Montreal, 2015)
IPv4: Mining Strategic Reserves
APNIC 40 (Jakarta, 10 Sep 2015)
Evolution of the Georgian Internet
RIPE Regional Forum (Tbilisi, 19 May 2015)
Central Asia: Internet Structure and Trends
Central Asian Internet Symposium, Bishkek (Dec 2014)
Evolution of the Russian IP transit market
Moscow Internet Exchange Peering Forum (Moscow, 2014)
512k IPv4 Routes: The New Normal
NANOG 62 (Baltimore, 7 Oct 2014)
Mapping the Digital Silk Road
Eurasian Network Operators Group 8 (Baku, 14 Sep 2014)
Mapping the Middle East's Financial Industry
MENOG 14 (Manama, 30 March 2014)
Who Are the Anycasters?
NANOG 59 (Phoenix, 9 Oct 2013)
Internet Infrastructure: Virtual meets Reality
EPF8 (Rekjavik, 11 September 2013)
Measuring the Development of Regional Connectivity in Central Europe
Capacity (Prague, 27 June 2013)
Measure Twice, Cut Once: Data challenges of Internet Governance
CITI (NYC, 20 June 2013)
Key Russian Wholesale Providers
Eurasian Network Operators Group 5 (St Petersburg, 27 May 2013)
Outline of the Maghrebi Internet (Tunix IXP Workshop)
Tunis IXP Workshop (Tunis, 29 April 2013)
Middle Eastern Regional Connectivity Update
MENOG 12 (Dubai, 6 March 2013)
Hurricane Sandy: Impacts on Global Connectivity
EuroIX Forum (Stockholm, 13 November 2012)
Türkiye’nin Internet’i ve Bölgedeki Yeni Gelişmeler
TRNOG2 (Istanbul, 1 June 2012)
Eurasian Regional Internet Growth Trends
ENOG3 (Odessa, 23 May 2012)
IPv6 Growth in the Middle East
MENOG 12 (Dubai, 30 April 2012)
The Curious Incident of 7 Nov 2011
NANOG 54 (San Diego, 6 Feb 2012)
The Geopolitics of Internet Infrastructure (Berkman Center Luncheon Series)
Harvard Berkman Center Luncheon Series (Cambridge, 1 Nov 2011)
Middle Eastern Internet Trends: 2011
MENOG 9 (Muscat, 3 October 2011)
Russian Internet Transit and Regional Markets
Eurasian Network Operators Group 1 (Moscow, 6 June 2011)
Middle Eastern Internet Update
MENOG 8 (Al Khobar, 14 May 2011)
Egypt Leaves the Internet
NANOG 51 (Miami, 1 Feb 2011)
Middle Eastern Internet Trends
MENOG 7 (Istanbul, 22 October 2010)