This July 2026 issue contains three technical papers. The first paper, The Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol: An Algorithmic (and Light-hearted) Perspective by Matthias Bentert, Shay Kutten, Darya Melnyk, Tijana Milentijević, and Stefan Schmid is an amusing read that investigates protocols and complexities of communication networks based on carrier pigeons. While lighthearted in nature, the paper is technically grounded in classic mathematical techniques used to analyze modern computer networks. This creative paper is both entertaining and informative—in fact, the paper proposes follow-up work that I'd love to see.
We present a large-scale measurement of emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI)-oriented web permission and descriptor mechanisms across approximately 4M domains. Beyond traditional robots.txt files, we analyze the adoption, structure, and interactions of newer files, including the permission-oriented ai.txt and the descriptor-oriented llms.txt and llms-full.txt. While robots.txt remains the dominant mechanism for signaling crawler permissions, adoption of AI-specific permission files is emerging, especially among technology-focused domains. Directive usage shows a strong emphasis on restricting AI agents, with prevalent disallow rules and relatively few AI-specific permission controls. Crossfile comparisons reveal that conflicts between robots.txt and ai.txt are infrequent, while some llms.txt link targets point to content blocked by access-control files.
An artifact is a resource essential to the complete understanding of a scientific article, extending beyond the manuscript itself. As more conferences allow authors to submit artifacts alongside their articles, different review processes, badge types are emerging, and badge-acquisition requirements. In this paper, we describe the process for conducting artifact evaluation that has been implemented in the Brazilian community. Our discussion focuses on the two largest Brazilian networking and security venues, where we discuss the challenges we encountered during our interactions and the solutions we ultimately adopted to improve the review process.
On April 28th, 2025, a major power outage caused a disruption of electric service across Spain and Portugal, lasting about ten hours in most regions and even longer in some areas. We analyze the impact of the power outage, showing how it led to a near-instantaneous 33–70% drop in traffic at 4 major Iberian IXPs, while core infrastructure remained largely functional. We show that the Internet was impacted by a second event: a partial outage in a data center that resulted in a second drop of traffic and BGP sessions.
