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Email: Explained from first principles
Modern email is a patchwork of protocols and extensions. Here is one article to understand them all.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 197 posts.
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How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
A guide to self-hosting your email on FreeBSD using Postfix, Dovecot, Rspamd, and LDAP.
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Modeling Starlink Capacity
Prior attempts to calculate Starlink’s potential for service have been theoretical. We simulate based on the actual constellation.
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Can We Stop Pretending SMS Is Secure Now?
SMS text messages were already the weakest link securing just about anything online, mainly because there are tens of thousands of employees at mobile stores who can be tricked or bribed into swapping control over a mobile phone number to someone else. Now we’re learning about an entire ecosystem of companies that…
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Set up an email server in two hours
You may be concerned that the NSA is reading your e-mail. Is there really anything you can do about it though? After all, you don’t really want to move off of GMail / Google Apps. And no plac…
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How to botch TLS forward secrecy
There's been some discussion about forward secret TLS recently, spurred, I think, by this piece from Declan McCullagh on CNET.
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The internet was designed with a narrow waist
When you hear the term, you should picture an hourglass with M things on one side, N on the other, and an important concept in the middle.
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The Sad State of Mobile XMPP in 2014
blog about networking, cameras, old gear, and xmpp
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Total Nightmare: USB-C and Thunderbolt 3
Did you buy the new MacBook or MacBook Pro? Maybe the Google Pixel? You're about to enter a world of confusion thanks to those new "USB-C" ports. See, that simple-looking port hides a world of complexity, and the (thankful) backward-compatibility uses different kinds of cables for different tasks. Shoppers have to be…
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72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings
Welcome Hacker News readers!• Thank you to M. Hammad Mazhar for his research that inspired this guide.• @healyio made some great additional suggestions in th...
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Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server
Let’s lead with the punchline: the question of what comes after IRC, for Mozilla, is now on my desk.
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The C10M problem
It's time for servers to handle 10 million simultaneous connections, don't you think? After all, computers now have 1000 times the memory as...
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My url isn't your url
When I started the precursor to the curl project, httpget, back in 1996, I wrote my first URL parser. Back then, the universal address was still called URL: Uniform Resource Locators. That spec was published by the IETF in 1994. The term "URL" was then used as source for inspiration when naming the tool and … Continue…
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It’s time to stop using SMS for security
By now most infosec professionals are aware of various ways SMS text messaging can be hijacked. For example so-called “SIM Swap” attacks…
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What happens when DNS in China is poisoned and pointed at your server
I’ve been using the Internet in one form or another since the mid-80’s. In that time, I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff happening on our global network. On Tuesday, I experienced something extraordinary. It all started with a text message from my partner Ged at 8:30 AM: Mail server down. Please take a look […]
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Attack of the Week: Apple iMessage
Today’s Washington Post has a story entitled “Johns Hopkins researchers poke a hole in Apple’s encryption”, which describes the results of some research my students and I have bee…
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How to use FIDO2 USB keys with SSH
I recently installed Ubuntu Wacky Whatever, the latest version, and I’m very excited about it shipping with SSH 8.2, which means that I can finally use hardware USB keys for secure, easy to use authentication. If securing your devices has been something you’ve wanted to easily do yourself, read on, because it’s…
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Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks
A design pattern to reduce centralized control and change incentives in social networks.
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The browser bugs and edge cases of HTTP/2 push
There are lots of edge cases I hadn't considered, and it's very inconsistent between browsers. Here's what I found…
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US telcos appear to be selling non-anonymized access to consumer telephone data
https://bit.ly/crazymobiledemo
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An off-grid social network
Open Source Freelancer
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Engineering for Slow Internet
How to minimize user frustration in Antarctica.
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How fast are Linux pipes anyway?
Pipes are ubiquitous in Unix --- but how fast can they go on Linux? In this post we'll iteratively improve a simple pipe-writing benchmark from 3.5GiB/s to 65GiB/s, guided by Linux `perf`.