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ADSL works over wet string (2017)
Broadband services are a wonderful innovation of our time, using multiple frequency bands (hence the name) to carry signals over wires (us...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 19 posts.
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Why Isn’t Telegram End-to-End Encrypted by Default (2017)
telegra.ph/why-isnt-telegram-end-to-end-encrypted-by-default-08-142021127 points145 commentscited by 11Security & Privacy details
I've been getting this question more often this year. It's based on the wrong assumption that some other popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp are "end-to-end encrypted by default", while Telegram is not. This post is intended to disprove this myth that has been so carefully crafted by Facebook/WhatsApp marketing…
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5G: The outsourced elephant in the room
This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. In a break from the usual GPS/Galileo, DNA and C++ posts, here is a bit on 5G and national security. It turns out that through PowerDNS and its parent company Open-Xchange, we know a lot about how large scale European communication service…
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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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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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The Actual OSI Model
I have said before that I believe that teaching modern students the OSI model as an approach to networking is a fundamental mistake that makes the concepts less clear rather than more. The major reason for this is simple: the OSI model was prescriptive of a specific network stack designed alongside it, and that…
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There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
It took a while, but I finally managed to create my own Game Boy cartridge. With WiFi! At this point, it can only demo a simple telnet-style communication and access Wikipedia articles, but I am confident that I will showcase more in the future. For now, the interesting and surprisingly tricky part is how the thing…
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25 Gigabit Linux internet router PC build
init7 recently announced that with their FTTH fiber offering Fiber7, they will now sell and connect you with 25 Gbit/s (Fiber7-X2) or 10 Gbit/s (Fiber7-X) fiber optics, if you want more than 1 Gbit/s. While this offer will only become available at my location late this year (or possibly later due to the supply chain…
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Let's code a TCP/IP stack (2016)
Writing your own TCP/IP stack may seem like a daunting task. Indeed, TCP has accumulated many specifications over its lifetime of more than thirty years. The core specification, however, is seemingly compact[^tcp-roadmap] - the important parts being TCP header parsing, the state machine, congestion control and…
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Tracking One Year of Malicious Tor Exit Relay Activities (Part II)
>25% of the Tor network’s exit capacity has been attacking Tor users
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Sign arbitrary data with your SSH keys
ssh-keygen can sign and verify signatures, and it's way better than PGP
14
Bye CUPS: Printing with Netcat
Turns out printing doesn't have to be hard
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There are six internet links on my office on wheels—seven when Starlink arrives
If you are going to work remotely anywhere in Australia from a van, you need damn good internet. Here's how I put together a vehicle with the best internet connectivity in Australia.
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Anatomy of a Linux DNS Lookup
Since I work a lot with clustered VMs , I’ve ended up spending a lot of time trying to figure out how DNS lookups work. I applied ‘fixes’ to my problems from StackOverflow without really understanding why they work (or don’t work) for some time.
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URLs: It's Complicated
Let's play silly games with URLs...
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Curl those funny IPv4 addresses
Everyone knows that on most systems you can specify IPv4 addresses just 4 decimal numbers separated with periods (dots). Example: 192.168.0.1 Useful when you for example want to ping your local wifi router and similar. "ping 192.168.0.1" Other bases The IPv4 string is usually parsed by the inet_addr() function or at…