Mike Dank

Website | Twitter

Mike Dank is a developer and writer who builds and participates in hobbyist networks to both learn their underlying technologies and create templates for others to do the same. Mike's work follows the DIY punk ethic, showing how to approach complex technologies in a simplified way with materials you may already have or are otherwise inexpensive/easy to obtain.

Mike is currently editor of the N-O-D-E Zine, an independent publication promoting decentralization and P2P technologies, open source, do-it-yourself tutorials and hardware design, cutting edge technology, and more. Additionally, Mike runs Networks of Philly, an online resource that makes sense of Philadelphia's hidden network infrastructure, and Philly Mesh, a community-focused mesh network.

Presenting

BGP: The Internet's Fragile Beast

BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) manages how all of our packets are routed across the Internet. It is one of the most powerful and important protocols currently deployed on the 'net, but it is also incredibly fragile. Devised as a quick fix 30 years ago (without concern for security), BGP is constantly blamed in the news as Internet outages occur worldwide due to misconfigurations by multinational telecommunications conglomerates or hijackings by government actors.

This talk will demystify the misunderstood protocol that is BGP, and explain how entities exchange giant flows of data across the Internet, highlight past misuses, and consider what we may be able to expect in the future.