The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 198 posts.
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…
Learn how to view areas of GPS jamming affecting aircraft around the world and how GPS jamming affects aviation.
Tunnelmole is a free and open-source alternative to ngrok. It works out of the box with no port forwarding or networking config needed.
Learn the unique benefits and pitfalls of each real-time tech. Make informed decisions on WebSockets, SSE, Polling, WebRTC, and WebTransport.
A staggering 12.6 million domains on TLDs controlled by Freenom (.tk, .cf and .gq) have been shut down and no longer resolve, leading to a significant reduc ...
Understand better how HTTP works in each version.
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…
Our fancy WireGuard setup was accumulating stale peers. Here's what we did about it.
With AI encroaching every open forum on the internet, the future of human discourse is bleak.
Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual
This 1.5 release is unlike any of the previous ones. It brings many new features that can improve quality and the general audio experience. That is achieved through machine learning. Although Opus has included machine learning — and even deep learning — before (e.g. for speech/music detection ), this is the first time…
We’re building an open source alternative to AWS. For IPv4 assignment and firewall rules, we use Linux’s Netfilter / Nftables. This subsystem provides a powerful way to handle packets addressed to the host. We recently came across flowtables - a network acceleration feature in the Linux kernel that works like a…
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…
Getting a fiber Internet connection to your home is a big deal! It’s probably the last physical connection you’ll ever need, due to the virtually unlimited bandwidth, stability, performance, and attainable speeds.
Revision 4 is the new version of the Starlink user terminal. As of February 2024, the new version is only available in the US. I decided to test the new hardware and compare it to the well-known REV3 (a.k.a. Gen2/V2 or “Standard Actuated”).
It's one of those anachronisms that is deeply embedded in modern technology. From cloud operator servers to embedded controllers in appliances, there must be uncountable devices that think they are connected to a TTY.
In the past (in fact two years ago, proof I have been doing this for a while now!) I wrote about the "inconvenient truth" that structural aspects of the Internet make truly decentralized systems infeasible, due to the lack of a means to perform broadcast discovery. As a result, most distributed systems rely on a set…
One of the reasons I am enthusiastic about BlueSky is because of the way that it works. So in this post, I am going to lay out some of the design and the…
We are introducing PQ3, a groundbreaking cryptographic protocol for iMessage that advances the state of the art of end-to-end secure messaging. With compromise-resilient encryption and extensive defenses against even highly sophisticated quantum attacks, PQ3 provides protocol protections that surpass those in all…
(But neither are any of the others)
Introduction Copying a file across devices is painful. You’re on your phone, but you want to access a file that’s on your laptop. How do you do it? What about the other way around? What about copying any file between any of your devices? I asked my dad how he copies a file from his phone to his computer, and he…
In light of the recent cancellation of the queer.af domain registration by the Taliban , the fragile and difficult nature of country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) has once again been comprehensively demonstrated. Since many people may not be aware of the risks, I thought I’d give a solid explainer of the whole…
Around last year this blog, a simple static site, was running on GitHub pages, together with Cloudflare in front of it due to (perceived) unreliability with GitHub’s SSL provisioning for custom domains. In order to simplify my stack, I tried running it on Cloudflare Pages .
Comparing typical one-way transfer latencies for a range of popular wireless communication modules and protocols
The SSH port is 22. This is the story of how it got that port number. And practical configuration instructions.
What is QUIC protocol and how does it work ?
While deploying Precision Time Protocol (PTP) at Meta, we’ve developed a simplified version of the protocol (Simple Precision Time Protocol – SPTP), that can offer the same level of clock syn…
