31
Building a legacy search engine for a legacy protocol
Most users who use the internet today, are mostly focused on three protocols, HTTP, TLS, and DNS.
Ben Cox
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Visit blog.benjojo.co.uk → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jun 2015 – Sep 2025
Networking & Internet 25Systems & Performance 15Security & Privacy 11Hardware & Electronics 9Software Engineering 8Society, Policy & Culture 4
32
One of these JPEGs is not like the other
“JPEG” or the image encoding specification by the “Joint Photographic Experts Group” (JPEG) is a truly universal format at this stage. You really cannot go very far on the internet without seeing a JPEG file. The amount of content encoded in JPEGs must be surely biblical by now. If there is one thing that is going to…
33
TOTP SSH port fluxing
Some people change their SSH port on their servers so that it is slightly harder to find for bots or other nasties and while that is generally viewed as an action of security through obscurity it does work very well at killing a lot of the automated logins you always see in /var/log/auth.log .
34
The browser's biggest TLS mistake
Much like a previous talk of mine at Chaos Computer Congress this blog post is a direct write-up of a talk, if you prefer to consume this kind of content in video form you can watch the video here:
35
Splitting the Ping
Ping is one of the fundamental pillars of networking. It’s simple, universally supported, and is normally one of the few things that is shipped with all network stacks.
36
Where is all of the Fediverse?
Spurred on by the problems at Twitter, a lot of my social media timeline has “moved out” of Twitter/“X” on to what people mostly describe as mastodon or the “fediverse”. The fediverse being the collection of decentralised “instances” (aka servers) sometimes using different software but speaking a common protocol…
37
Going multipath without Multipath TCP
Gigabit ethernet has been around for a long time, it’s so ubiquitous that there is a very strong chance that if you have a RJ-45 port on your computer, it’s going to be a gigabit ethernet network interface.
38
Making art with SSH key randomart
SSH is everywhere in the development or operations world now. For development it’s what allows you to push to GitHub. For operations it’s what allows you to reasonably securely log into Linux servers.
39
The speed of BGP network propagation
At the end of March 2019 I did a talk at the INEX’s (Ireland’s biggest internet exchange point) Annual General Meeting. I was supposed to record it, however in a brief panic due to HDMI not working on my laptop I forgot to start a recording of it. Since people found it interesting I figured I would turn it into a blog…
40
A dive into the world of MS-DOS viruses
This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 35th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2018. You can watch the talk that was recorded by the wonderful C3VOC team below if that’s your preferred medium: