Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,615 posts.
Twitter bug causes self-DDoS, related to Musk’s emergency blocks, rate limits
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.
Jetstream: Shrinking the AT Protocol Firehose by >99%
Jetstream is a streaming service that consumes an AT Proto Sync Firehose and converts it into lightweight, filterable, friendly JSON, allowing us to live tail all posts on Bluesky for as little as ~850 MB/day
A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks (2024)
If you look at the table of contents for my book, Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, you’ll see that entries on networks before/outside the internet are arranged first by underl…
Fixing bufferbloat on your home network with OpenBSD 6.2 or newer
My home network (which is also my work network) is a standard-issue Comcast cable hookup. In spite of a tolerable 120 megabits down, my experience of daily Internet use is regularly frustrating. Video streams and video chats drop in quality...
IDN is crazy
IDN, International Domain Names, is the concept that lets us register and use international characters in domain names, and by international we of course mean characters outside of the ASCII range. Recently I have fought some battles against IDN and IDN decoding so I felt this urge to write a lot of words about it ……
Leakage paths for the Apple / Google Bluetooth tracing system
Plus general overview
DNS: Basic Concepts (2013)
Dig through the DNS and learn how and why it all works.
IP addresses through 2024
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.
Wiretapping the Internet
On Monday, The New York Times reported that President Obama will seek sweeping laws enabling law enforcement to more easily eavesdrop on the internet. Technologies are changing, the administration argues, and modern digital systems aren’t as easy to monitor as traditional telephones. The government wants to force…
HTTPS in the real world
In cryptography, trust is mathematically provable. Everything else is just faith.
Cloudflare outage should not have happened
[BROKEN LINK: blog/google-cloud-s-outage-should-not-have-happened-and-they-seem-to-be-missing-the-point-on-how-to-avoid-it-in-the-future.pre-processed.org], another global IT outage happened (dèjá vu strikes again in our industry). This time at cloudflare(Prince 2025). Again, taking down large swaths of the internet…
Don't send to Gmail over IPv6
Yes, some people do it, and yes, for some people, it works fine. But..... If you're standing up a new server and it has an IPv6 IP address, ...
The sorry state of OpenSSL usability (2017)
OpenSSL's inadequate documentation, confusing key formats, and deprecated interfaces make it difficult to use, despite its importance.
Dropbear SSH, a lightweight alternative to OpenSSH
Dropbear is a small and lightweight SSH server and client that can replace OpenSSH on any POSIX platform such as GNU / Linux, * BSD, Cygwin … Dropbear is free software since it is released under MIT-style licenses.
IRC technology news from the second half of 2021
Technical summaries of developments in IRC software and protocol specifications during the second half of 2021.
Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)
Daniel Kulesz's personal website
I'm back into the grind of FreeBSD's wireless stack and 802.11ac
hi! Yes, it's been a while since I posted here and yes, it's been a while since I was actively working on FreeBSD's wireless stack. Life's...
TP-Link Archer VR1600V V2 Super User Password Cracked
Well the news is out, I won’t explain the method for reasons, but our code warriors have a new fight. After requesting the SU password, they were told flat out it doesn’t exist and refe…
The Difference Between Downloading and Streaming
Mostly to make use of an animation I made for a different blog post that hasn't materialised, let me take a moment to explain to you the fundamental technical difference between 'streaming' and 'downloading'. Which won't take long... because there isn't one!
Who controls the Internet? And should they? (2021)
This is a lightly edited transcript of my keynote over at NANOG 83, so please accept my apologies if some of the wording is not (yet) as clear as it should be! The original video, including Q&A can be found on NANOG’s Youtube channel Hello, and welcome to this presentation on who controls the internet, and if they…
Attack of the Week: Group Messaging in WhatsApp and Signal
If you’ve read this blog before, you know that secure messaging is one of my favorite topics. However, recently I’ve been a bit disappointed. My sadness comes from the fact that lately …
How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground
Dotted around London, there are a number of private hotels that aren’t the sort of hotel you might expect – they’re needed to make mobile phones work on the London Underground.