The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,615 posts.
On 26 Nov 2019 at 14:55 UTC, I logged into my server that hosts my website to perform a simple maintenance activity. Merely three minutes later, at 14:58 UTC, the domain name susam.in used to host this website was transferred to another registrant without any authorisation by me or without any notification sent to me…
Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
An "amateur hour" Javascript bug is self-DDOSing Twitter, sending infinite requests from users related to — or possibly even causing — Elon Musk's "temporary emergency measures" to stop web scraping.
Using latency measurements to infer when a globally used application is served only from us-east-1.
Reverse engineering an Android app for a Bluetooth connected car battery monitor with some startling discoveries ...
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
How I detected that Let's Encrypt issued 645 non-compliant certificates
Federated applications have a few problems. And I really wish it weren’t the case, I love the idea and philosophy of these applications. But I can’t see them being mass adopted.
A distributed hash table with unusually strong security properties
tldr: Swing VPN is using its user base to DDOS sites using its users as a an attack botnet. Introduction It all started with a friend of mine complaining that his phone was doing a request to a specific app every few seconds. Initial assumption was that the phone was infected with a virus but a 2 minute investigation…
Almost every year a joke RFC is made on April 1st (these have caught on so well, that it’s now common to see more than one of these every year), or April Fool’s Day, and some of them are pretty great. Here are some of my favourites:
How to run your own VPN in the cloud for less than a penny per hour ( $0.007 / hr )
This is annecdata - not a serious academic study. Adjust your expectations accordingly. When I first got online, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy - so CompuServe was my gateway to the Internet. I loved their well organised chat room. A couple of clicks and I could be discussing Babylon 5 with people in…
How to use the telnet command on the bash command line to debug network problems.
I’m calling time on DNSSEC. Last week, prompted by a change in my DNS hosting setup, I began removing it from the few personal zones I had signed. Then this Monday the .nz ccTLD experienced a multi-day availability incident triggered by the annual DNSSEC key rotation process. This incident broke several of my unsigned…
Usenet, of course, originally ran over UUCP in quite a few cases. Since NNCP is quite similar to UUCP – in fact, you can map UUCP commands to NNCP ones – it is quite possible, and not all that hard, to run Usenet over NNCP. In fact, in a number of ways, it works better than Usenet over UUCP! Introduction to NNCP…
There is again a pull-request submitted to the curl project to bring support for the Gemini protocol. It seems like a worthwhile effort that I support, even if it is also a lot of work involved and it might take some time before it reaches the state in which it can be merged. A previous … Continue reading The Gemini…
Take control of your telephony with Asterisk!
Update on 2023/05/19: ASUS has publicly acknowledged the issue and provided an explanation and workaround of their own (rebooting, or a hard reset if the reboot doesn’t fix it). The original post is below:
Getting Started with networkQuality The networkQuality tool is a built-in tool released in macOS Monterey that can help diagnose network issues and measure network performance. In this post, we'll go over how to use the networkQuality tool and some of its key features. Running the Default Tests To
Many years ago, Google applied for the .zip Top Level Domain. ICANN, in its infinite wisdom, granted it. And now, I think, bad things are going to happen. You see computers try to be helpful. They see you wrote "visit example.com" and autolink the thing which looks like a domain name. That's handy - especially as most…
This page provides a single entry point to all the posts in the story of how the world got online. Now available as a book, buy here. The Backbone: Introduction One System, Universal Service? The U…
The thoughts and projects of an engineer who likes to convert solder, firmware, and wire into all sorts of different forms of entertainment.
New talk: Learning DNS in 10 years
I am frequently away from home (whether on family vacation, a business trip, or out around town), but I have a number of important resources on my home network—as any homelabber does. There are services I like to access remotely like my NAS with my giant media library, my edit server with all my active projects, and…
The objective for this project was to implement a UDP transmitter for use on the RP2040 that would consume zero CPU time. The system described on this webpage is implemented with 3 PIO state machines, 12 DMA channels, and 1 PWM channel. It generates an NLP, performs packet checksum calculations, and performs packet…
Whenever you enter a URL into a system, it must be parsed and validated. It is a surprisingly challenging task: it may require hundreds of nanoseconds and possibly over a thousand cycles to parse a typical URL. We can use URL parsing as a reasonable benchmark of a system performance. Of course, no single measure ……
I was always curious about all that bad guys (criminals, drug dealers, hitman’s, thief’s etc.) using not very good and secure communication channels. Forgetting about whole OPSEC stuff. There is a lo
