331
Building the Bell System
If someone was making a list of the most important American companies today, it’s unlikely AT&T would be anywhere near the top.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,615 posts.
332
PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights
The plane reached 10,000ft. I took out my laptop, planning to peruse the internet and maybe do a little work if I got really desperate.
333
"Out of Band" network management is not trivial
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
334
Wcurl: a curl wrapper to download files
My personal website
335
Making a Linux-managed network switch
Sometimes the custom 5-port gigabit switch _is_ the solution.
336
337
gRPC: The Bad Parts
gRPC isn't perfect but who is?
338
The Public Interest Internet
What if the internet were public interest technology? Is that too wildly speculative? I think not. I am not talking about a utopian project here — a public interest internet would be a glorious imperfect mess and it would be far from problem-free. But while there is a lot of solid thinking about various digital issues…
339
First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini
I've owned Starlink Mini for about 6 months, using it for camping, backup internet, and in motion inside my car. Here is my honest review.
340
What You Get After Running an SSH Honeypot for 30 Days
Discover what 11,599 SSH login attempts reveal after running a honeypot for 30 days. Learn key cybersecurity insights—read now to protect your systems!
341
Hacking millions of modems and investigating who hacked my modem
Two years ago, something very strange happened to me while working from my home network. I was exploiting a blind XXE vulnerability that required an external HTTP server to smuggle out files, so I spun up an AWS box and ran a simple Python webserver to receive the traffic from the vulnerable server.
342
Engineering for Slow Internet
How to minimize user frustration in Antarctica.
343
API Shouldn't Redirect HTTP to HTTPS
Instead of redirecting API calls from HTTP to HTTPS, make the failure visible. Unfortunately, many well-known API providers don't currently do so.
344
Reclaiming IPv4 Class E's 240.0.0.0/4
Ever since the supply of fresh IPv4 address blocks was depleted there has been a number of interesting market changes, mostly around the costs to either acquire or lease IPv4 address blocks. Since the demand for IPv4 addressing has not changed that much, prices have gone up, and more providers like AWS, Hetzner, OVH…
345
346
A transport protocol's view of Starlink
Digital communications systems always represent a collection of design trade-offs. Maximising one characteristic of a system may impair others, and various communications services may chose to optimise different performance parameters based on the intersection these design decisions with the physical characteristics…
347
It's always TCP_NODELAY
The first thing I check when debugging latency issues in distributed systems is whether TCP_NODELAY is enabled. And it’s not just me. Every distributed system builder I know has lost hours to latency issues quickly fixed by enabling this simple socket option, suggesting that the default behavior is wrong, and perhaps…
348
Passkeys: A shattered dream
Firstyear's blog
349
Sysadmin friendly high speed Ethernet switching
I’ve been on the lookout for a ethernet switch that I don’t hate, the problem with a lot of higher speed (10G and above) ethernet switches is that they are quite expensive new and if you buy the used then they rarely have many years left ( or none at all ) of software patches.
350
Some Fritz!Box modems might have been hijacked
TL;DR: Fritz!Box devices using custom DNS resolution services like Pihole or Adguard might have been compromised by DNS hijacking and using those Fritz!Box devices might be unsafe, especially for Windows users. Update: I updated the article to downscale the severity of the situation. After posting the article on HN, I…
351
352
Why can't my mom email me?
Proton email keeps sending my non-Proton email accounts encrypted emails. I figure out why and show you how to turn it off.
353
HTTP/2 Continuation Flood: Technical Details
Preface In October 2023 I learned about HTTP/2 Rapid Reset attack, dubbed “the largest DDoS attack to date”. I didn’t have deep knowledge of HTTP/2 back then. I knew its basics like frames or HPACK but I was focusing more on HTTP/1.1 protocol and programming languages vulnerabilities. I decided to dedicate time to…
354
The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
The strangest hardware problem I've ever had to debug.
355
Inside the failed attempt to backdoor SSH globally that got caught by chance
Why the threat actor rushed deployment.
356
TCP connection timeout mystery
For over a year, I’ve been investigating a strange issue with the internet in my apartment. I’m posting the details here in case someone more knowledgeable than me can solve the mystery. I live in graduate student housing with internet provided by the university campus. Usually things work reasonably well, with one…
357
Tunnelmole, an ngrok alternative (open source)
Tunnelmole is a free and open-source alternative to ngrok. It works out of the box with no port forwarding or networking config needed.
358
HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 explained
Understand better how HTTP works in each version.
359
Simplicity of IRC (2022)
During discussions with my friends and colleagues, whenever the topic of chat protocols comes up, I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how this simplicity has fostered creativity in the lives of many young computer hobbyists growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For many of…
360
The internet is slipping out of our reach
With AI encroaching every open forum on the internet, the future of human discourse is bleak.