Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,616 posts.

Networking & Internet
Any year
1501

TOFU: Do You Check?

Let’s say you’re on a fresh machine. Maybe you’ve just started a new job or you’ve wiped your machine. You’re about to push some code you’ve written and you get this: $ git push The authenticity of host 'github.com (140.82.121.4)' can't be established. ED25519 key fingerprint is…

1502

Simplicity of IRC (2022)

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…

1513

Comparing TCP and QUIC

There is a common view out there that the QUIC transport protocol (RFC 9000) is just another refinement to the original TCP transport protocol [ 1 ] [ 2 ]. I find it hard to agree with this sentiment, and for me QUIC represents a significant shift in the set of transport capabilities available to applications in terms…

1524

Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

Few weeks ago, the German political magazine Panorama and STRG_F reported that law enforcement agencies infiltrated the Tor network in order to expose criminals. The reporters had access to documents showing four successful deanonymizations. I was given the chance to review some documents. In this post, I am…