TCP

Communications of the ACM has published a feature examining lessons learned from decades of developing internet protocols. The piece reflects on how early design decisions in protocols like TCP and IP shaped today's internet, and what those experiences teach engineers building new networking standards. It comes as the technical community debates protocol design for emerging areas such as the next generation of internet architecture.

A new approach applies TCP-style congestion control to route large language model requests across multiple inference providers, adjusting traffic dynamically based on how each provider is performing. The technique treats provider capacity like network bandwidth, backing off when providers slow down and routing more requests to those responding quickly. The idea is drawing attention from developers interested in more reliable, cost-efficient LLM infrastructure.

A new vulnerability, CVE-2026-42542 with a CVSS score of 7.5, has been disclosed in TDengine, an open-source time-series database used in OT and IoT deployments. The flaw is an integer underflow in pre-authentication RPC message parsing: a single crafted packet sent to TCP port 6030 can crash unauthenticated servers. Versions 3.4.0.0 through 3.4.1.5 are affected, with a fix released in version 3.4.1.6. No exploitation in the wild has been reported so far, and a proof-of-concept has been withheld.