Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,615 posts.
Outlook.com is silently discarding email messages (2015)
Outlook.com and hotmail.com is silently discarding email messages from our SMTP server.
"Dead Drops" is an anonymous, offline, p2p file-sharing network in public space
I am pleased to preview 'Dead Drops' a new project which I started off as part of my ongoing EYEBEAM residency in NYC the last couple weeks. 'Dead Drops' is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space.
System design implications of declining network latency vs. disk latency
Hardware performance “obviously” affects software performance and affects how software is optimized. For example, the fact that caches are multiple orders of magnitude faster than RAM means that blocked array accesses give better performance than repeatedly striding through an array.
Jailbreak firmware turns cheap digital walkie-talkie into DMR scanning receiver
In the last years, DMR and MOTOTRBO (a.k.a. TRBO a Motorola Solutions branded DMR Radios ) has become a very popular digital voice mode on the UHF and VHF bands and the MD380 radio is the latest cheap DMR walkie-talkie to come out of China. The question is, is it any good? The longer answer is…
Why not use DNS over HTTPS (DoH)?
DoH is not about protecting your DNS queries from peepers. That is a big lie. It is about making sure only one peeper can see all of your queries.
Cool URIs can be ugly (2023)
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 .
Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches
EDIT 2026-07-08: Gizmohub, despite the announcements, did not stop working on the 7th. Instead, a Verizon tech called me, and told me that they were not going to take Gizmohub down until they'd resolved these issues. They also walked me through getting set up, including getting me the 2FA code that was not coming…
What are the differences between OpenBSD and Linux?
Maybe you have been reading recently about the release of OpenBSD 6.5 and wonder, 'What are the differences between Linux and OpenBSD?' I've also been there at some point in the past and these are my conclusions. They also apply, to some extent,
It's TCP vs. RPC All over Again
We’ve written previously about the fact that the Internet seems to be missing a standard protocol for the request/response paradigm, with repeated attempts to force-fit TCP leading to inevitable mismatches. Sometimes we feel that we are the only people who think this way, with our networking
Why is it so hard to be a good domain registrar?
I recently moved all of my domains away from GoDaddy, because they’re terrible. 1
Top Sites to Receive SMS Online Without a Phone
Many websites these days ask you to provide some form of verification when you want to sign up to a service. This includes most things like shopping sites, email accounts, discussion forums, gaming services, blogs, social media and etc. Basic forms of verification are just supplying an email address or perhaps solving…
A look at Chang’e 5 telemetry
Chang’e 5 is a Chinese lunar sample return mission. It was launched a few days ago on 2020-11-23 from Wenchang and is estimated to perform lunar orbit injection on Saturday. Since then, a number of Amateurs such as USA Satcom , Paul Marsh M0EYT , Scott Tilley VE7TIL , Fer IW1DTU and others have been receiving the…
I revoked $1M worth of EV certificates
Personal like or dislike of EV aside for a moment, we can all agree on what the name of EV certs implies. Organisations get their company details in the certificate and CAs have to do some extended validation of that data compared to a normal certificate. Turns out, that doesn'
Xerox Alto's 3 Mb/s Ethernet: Building a Gateway with a BeagleBone
The Alto was a revolutionary computer designed at Xerox PARC in 1973. It introduced the GUI, high-resolution bitmapped displays, the optic...
Wifi: “beamforming” only begins to describe it
[Note to the impatient: to try out my beamforming simulation, which produced the above image, visit my beamlab test page - ideally in a brow...
Unraveling NSA's TURBULENCE Programs
The NSA TURBULENCE program was first revealed in 2007 by the Baltimore Sun for being over-budget and poorly-managed 1 2 . Many documents from the Snowden trove from the past two years reference parts of this program, but no coherent story or overview of how these programs operate together has been described. This is…
IPv6 zones in URLs are a mistake
Run away while you still can, it's not too late for you to avoid the curse of knowledge.
The day I was DoSed by Google
I launched my startup this week. On a very modest scale, no debauched parties or penthouse offices on scads of VC money, just me and ...
I/O Multiplexing (select vs. poll vs. epoll/kqueue)
Problems and Algorithms
Beginners guide to gateways and proxies
Have you heard of gateways, proxies, load balancer, API gateways? This article explains what gateways are, what is their purpose and how they work with pract...
Fun with Kermit and ZMODEM over SSH
Fun with Kermit and ZMODEM file transfers over SSH using Qodem
Decentralize Messaging
Twitter is funding a team to decentralize social media. I think they should start with messaging.
Geolocation and Starlink
"Where are you?" is not an easy question to answer on the Internet. The telephone system's address plan embedded a certain amount of physical location information in the fixed line network, and a full E.164 telephone number indicated your location in terms of your country, and your area within that country. The…
CloudFlair: Bypassing CloudFlare using Internet-wide scan data
Cloudflare is a service that acts as a middleman between a website and its end users, protecting it from various attacks. Unfortunately, those websites are often poorly configured, allowing an attacker to entirely bypass Cloudflare and run DDoS attacks or exploit web-based vulnerabilities that would otherwise be…