Extended Berkeley Packet Filter is the new “little engine that could.”

The sandboxed virtual machine, which lives in the Linux kernel, has a tiny footprint but is mighty in impact.

Cisco plans to use eBPF technology as a replacement for iptables, enabling a “distributed security model” that can embed protection directly into the OS of every device, TNS Senior Editor Joab Jackson reports.

Goodbye, network choke points; eBPF enables high-speed, kernel-level “miniature firewalls.”

Joab says this isn’t just an upgrade, it’s a fundamental rethink of how applications can be secured. Read the full report to find out the implications for both networks and devices.

Other technical reads of interest today:

• Keep up with our series by Anshul Gupta, a staff engineer at Meta, that explores async in Rust. In part 2, Anshul demystifies pinning, the secret sauce of async Rust.
• Recently, I saw an interesting prediction: The future won’t be about running AI in apps, but about running apps in AI. Apparently, that future is here: TNS Senior Editor for AI Frederic Lardinois reports that Anthropic plans to turn Claude into an app platform, with interactive widgets from Slack, Figma, Asana, and others.

If you’ve seen a new crop of data about ops lately, you may have noticed this new category coming up: AI agents that promise to take charge of incident intervention, diagnose the root cause, and even solve problems themselves. AWS announced one. Microsoft has one. A dozen startups are creating them. And...

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