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  On Friday, we finished up the manuscript for the 7th edition of Computer Networks: a Systems Approach and sent it to the publisher. While sending the files to the publisher is something of a milestone, the work is never finished, because we continue to collect improvements and bugfixes from the community as we run this book as an open source project. The latest edition is the biggest refactoring of the book that we have done since our first edition came out in 1996, reflecting the changes in o...

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  While our primary focus is getting our various book projects out the door, it's been impossible to avoid reading about various developments in the world of LLMs. Two stories in the last couple of weeks prompted our latest newsletter, which is all about how we choose (or don't choose) tasks for an LLM to tackle: https://systemsapproach.org/2026/09/21/robot-overlords/ 🧵 1/n

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  A few weeks ago we published the draft of Computer Networks: A Systems Approach (7th edition) and asked for feedback. One of the most helpful responses was from a networking practitioner who commented on our treatment of network operations. His point was that we had focused too much on the perspective of large cloud operators and not enough on the "real world" of traditional network operators. In this week's newsletter we wrote about the difference, which has a lot to do with how m...

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  We occasionally hear that writing textbooks is no longer worthwhile when everyone can get their information from large language models (LLMs). We engage with this viewpoint rather than just writing books as we have for the last 30 years. In this post we lay out what we think our value proposition is: a big-picture view and systems thinking. https://systemsapproach.org/2026/06/01/textbooks-in-tokenland/

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  RE: https://aus.social/@Drbruced/116434240365971699 Here's a funny story about creating the images for this week's newsletter. How generative AI fails to understand what "transparent background" means.

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  Seems like a good day to revisit our "DNSSEC is a failed experiment" post: https://systemsapproach.org/2025/07/14/does-dns-security-matter/

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  Our latest piece on QUIC has appeared in The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/16/quic_explained/?td=rt-3a

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  Last week I was working on yet another chapter for our new edition, on the topic of Virtual Networks. Having spent much of my career focused on various flavors of virtualization, I decided to pick up that topic and run with it. Virtual networking has at least one thing in common with our last post: debate about terminology. https://systemsapproach.org/2026/05/04/literally-virtualized/

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  We had a spirited debate in recent weeks regarding the right way to refer to modern networking devices, particularly those found in datacenters. One of us (Bruce) argued that, if it forwards IP packets, it's a router. Larry pushed back: shouldn't a router interconnect heterogeneous networks, or sit on the border between different autonomous systems? Further confounding the discussion is conflicting usage by industry players: most networking devices in datacenters, even those for...