Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,615 posts.
In iOS 26.3, Apple introduced a new privacy feature which limits “precise location” data made available to cellular networks via cell towers. The feature is only available to devices with Apple’s in-house modem introduced in 2025. The announcement1 says https://support.apple.com/en-us/126101 ↩
A real-world production migration from DigitalOcean to Hetzner dedicated, handling 248 GB of MySQL data across 30 databases, 34 Nginx sites, GitLab EE, Neo4j, and live mobile app traffic — with zero downtime.
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…
A couple of months ago I did a performance comparison between some of the top free DNS Resolvers available. It was just after Quad9 had…
This story explores some concepts in computer networking, inspired by Michael Nielsen’s idea of discovery fiction . Code samples can also be found in this repo . Excerpts use openbsd-flavoured netcat on Debian Linux; behviour and IPv6 support may vary by version.
This week I was in Rotterdam for a RIPE meeting . On Friday morning I gave a lightning talk called where does my computer get the time from? The RIPE meeting website has a copy of my slides and a video of the talk; this is a blogified low-res version of the slides with a rough and inexact transcript.
We've all experienced frustration with the internet going down. Now imagine how frustrated you'd be if you found out that your ISP intentionally blocked your internet access for the purpose of advertising their software; and better yet, your ISP claimed that state legislators required them to do it!...
You and your good buddy, Steve Steveington, are in training for an arduous charity walk. You signed up together on the spur of the moment and pledged to hold each other accountable whilst you got in shape for the big day. However, you have developed reason to suspect that Steve Steveington is losing his commitment to…
Did you buy the new MacBook or MacBook Pro? Maybe the Google Pixel? You're about to enter a world of confusion thanks to those new "USB-C" ports. See, that simple-looking port hides a world of complexity, and the (thankful) backward-compatibility uses different kinds of cables for different tasks. Shoppers have to be…
I’m sharing the story of a bad situation I had ordering a new phone through Google Fi. It turned into a two month long ordeal where the service got worse and worse. At every turn the Google Fi team was presented with a chance to make things better and every time they blew it. I’m sharing this because I hope a long…
One of Germany's biggest ISPs changed how their DNS works, right after I exposed an organization that they’re part of.
It's probably old news for most, but I've recently started using Tailscale and wanted to share my experience with it.
One of my favorite books is 2013 "High Performance Browser Networking" by Ilya Grigorik. Besides a wealth of actionable advice, the book is illustrated with captivating real life stories.
Personal Blog of Christian Haschek
By examining the limits of reasonable user behavior and embracing imperfection for users who go beyond it, we can continue to provide service that meets the expectations of users without sacrificing scalability of the system.
Some major ISPs appear to be attempting to extort money in exchange for peering with Level3
I don’t like to cover “current events” very much, but the American government just revealed a truly bewildering policy effectively banning import of new consumer router models. This is ridiculous for many reasons, but if this does indeed come to pass it may be beneficial to learn how to “homebrew” a router…
My favorite internet service provider, init7, is rolling out faster speeds with their infrastructure upgrade. Last week, the point of presence (POP) that my apartment’s fiber connection terminates in was upgraded, so now I am enjoying a 25 Gbit/s fiber internet connection!
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:
Let's Encrypt is an amazing organisation doing an amazing thing by providing certificates at scale, for free. The problem though was that they were the only such organisation for a long time, but I'm glad to say that the ecosystem is changing. It's always a good idea
TL;DR: we have discovered XMPP (Jabber) instant messaging protocol encrypted TLS connection wiretapping (Man-in-the-Middle attack) of jabber.ru (aka xmpp.ru) service’s servers on Hetzner and Linode hosting providers in Germany. The attacker has issued several new TLS certificates using Let’s Encrypt service which were…
Spoiler: it doesn’t. But it should.
Modern email is a patchwork of protocols and extensions. Here is one article to understand them all.
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…
