What Topic in Networks Should I Research?

"Why Erlang?" by John-Paul Bader
http://smyck.net/2012/04/22/why-erlang/
Among the many difficulties that Systems engineers face, concurrency is an increasingly important issue.  While languages like Java, Python and Ruby provide multithreading facilities, they face difficulties as object-oriented languages because they are "typically executed sequentially," which leads to nastiness such as deadlocks and race conditions.  The Actor Model addresses this by eliminating the "need of managing access to information with mutexes, locks or semaphores" and the like.  Erlang lends itself to highly concurrent applications as a functional language with immutable types.  Additionally, it's hot swappable, supported with a build pack on Heroku, (supposedly) easy to distribute over many nodes, and capable of providing lots of dashboard data without REST interfaces.



"Your acts on social media can be tracked" on the San Francisco Gate
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/editorials/article/Your-acts-on-social-media-can-be-tracked-4277080.php

It should raise scary alarms and opens numerous troubling issues to learn that Raytheon is stalking you, but, in fact, it is doing so.  While the SFGate article has some shortcomings, it says brings up a host of pressing concerns.  Networked devices enable mass surveillance both in and outside of the Web.  The privacy dimensions are complicated and often shocking.  Few people realize what a big trail they leave on the web.  Browser uniqueness and its entropy can be analyzed whenever an HTTP request hits the server, and in many cases reveals a unique user.  Fortunately, there are blocking tools against many of the bugs and scripts that track and graph online activity.  The NSA warrantless surveillance controversy and all manner of data collection continues.  Whistleblowers number the intercepted transmissions in the trillions. 



"Running a Hostile Network" by Dragorn
2600: The Hacker Quarterly,vol. 29.3, p. 12, (c)2012

At HOPE, a long-running yearly hacker's convention, lots of mischief on the network is ensured, intended or not.  Wi-Fi, as a shared media, causes accidental denial-of-service attacks "all on their own."  One major concern is addressable.  We learn techniques to drop broadcast and multicast packets, limit the number of users, and learn to address the instabilities introduced by these techniques.  These methods "allow the network to function at a usable level," raising the number of simultaneous users considerably.  Forcing users to roam between access points can annoy them individually, but ultimately serves them as well as the whole group.