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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 255 posts.
A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet
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…
Decoding James Webb Space Telescope
The James Webb Space Telescope probably needs no introduction, since it is perhaps the most important and well-known mission of the last years. It was launched on Christmas day from Kourou, French Guiana , into a direct transfer orbit to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point . JWST uses S-band at 2270.5 MHz to transmit…
DIY Mail
I have another post about half-written that I will finish up and publish soon, but in the mean time I have been thinking today about something that perennially comes up in certain orange-tinted online communities: running your own mail server.
Superhighway84 – a Usenet-inspired decentralized internet discussion system
Superhighway84 is a USENET-inspired decentralized internet discussion system, featuring a retro text user interface and powered by IPFS and OrbitDB.
37% of the world’s population have still never used the internet
New data from ITU suggest a ‘COVID connectivity boost’ – but the world’s poorest are still being left far behind, with 2.9 billion people still offline.
Mico: A PDM to USB Microphone Based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040
Using RP2040 to create a USB audio microphone.
Analysis and reverse-engineering of the original Starlink router
Honestly, I love the design of this thing. It reminds me of something from the good old sci-fi.
Useful Old Technologies: ASN.1 (2013)
Useful old technologies: ASN.1
Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
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…
Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic
Cinia agreed to start a project to build a new subsea cable in the Arctic with Alaskan company Far North Digital.
This Year in Matrix
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
Faster Linux 2.5G Networking with Realtek RTL8125B
Since the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 was introduced last year, I've been testing a variety of PCI Express NICs with it. One of the main types of NIC I'm interested in is cheap 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet adapters. 2.5 Gigabits is about the highest reasonable bandwidth you can get through the PCI Express Gen 2.0 x1 lane on…
Hidden Networks in TP-Link Routers
I was debugging my WiFi settings this week when I noticed something strange. WiFi Analyzer was showing two hidden networks coming from my router, one for each frequency: 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Networks which I haven't configured and didn't appear in my router's admin interface. WTF?
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…
How to build large-scale end-to-end encrypted group video calls
Signal released end-to-end encrypted group calls a year ago, and since then we’ve scaled from support for 5 participants all the way to 40. There is no off the shelf software that would allow us to support calls of that size while ensuring that all communication is end-to-end encrypted, so we bui...
Mess with DNS
New tool: Mess with DNS!
HTTP/3 Is Fast
HTTP/3 promises speed and efficiency, but does it actually deliver? In our latest article, we put HTTP/3 to the test,comparing it against HTTP/2 in real-worl...
Coaxial Goes to War
Last time we perambulated on telephones, we discussed open-wire long-distance telephone carriers and touched on carriers intended for cables. Recall that, in the telephone industry, cable refers to an assembly of multiple copper twisted pairs (often hundreds) in a single jacket. There is a surprising amount of…
Internet uptake has accelerated during the pandemic
ITU’s Measuring digital development: Facts and figures 2021 offers a snapshot of the most important ICT indicators, including estimates for the current year.
Debunking Cloudflare’s recent performance tests
A couple of weeks ago Cloudflare, one of our competitors, claimed that their edge compute platform is roughly three times as fast as Compute@Edge. The false claim is a great example of how statistics can be used to mislead.
DNS doesn't “propagate”
DNS "propagation" is actually caches expiring
The utilization of 44/8: the reason I mapped IPv4 and IPv6
In the early days, when the Internet was just beginning, back in 1981, radio amateurs were allocated, by what is now known as IANA , an IPv4 block for usage and experimentation by all members of this hobby, internationally. This block was 44.0.0.0/8, which is a huge amount of address space by today’s standards, but…
Simple Raspberry Pi Powered SMS Gateway
Personal Blog of Christian Haschek
Re-thinking electronic mail
There are many problems with the existing Internet email system, such as spam, scam, surveillance, insecurity, centralization, and complexity. The problems are starting to outweigh the benefits of the system. Fixing the problems by evolving the current system seems overwhelmingly difficult. This essay examines some…