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IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district
This is the story of how I created a botnet of IPTVs to rickroll 10,000+ students for my senior prank.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 166 posts.
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All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
Last night I was listening to the latest Under the Radar , where Marco Arment dove into nerdy detail about his recent Overcast server issues. The discussion was great, and you should listen to it, but Marco's recent server troubles were pretty similar to my own server issues from last year, and so I figured I'd share…
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Don't start with microservices – monoliths are your friend
I’ve been having this thought on the back of my mind for a long time to write about why it’s often a bad idea to start with microservices for a brand new project.
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Screw it, I’ll host it myself
It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Likewise, it’s all fun and games until someone loses access to their private and/or business data because they trusted it to someone else.
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Extreme HTTP Performance Tuning
This post will walk you through the performance tuning steps that I took to serve 1.2 million JSON 'API' requests per second from a 4 vCPU AWS EC2 instance.
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Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
Let engineers learn cloud without jeopardizing their personal well-being.
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AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go
AWS is playing Chess. Cloudflare is playing Go.
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My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
This website is hosted on a very cheap (£4 a month) VPS. This server has 1 CPU and 2GB of RAM. The slowest part of this website can theoretically handle 4.2 million requests a day. I got these results by benchmarking by websites.
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Apt Encounters of the Third Kind
A few weeks ago an ordinary security assessment turned into an incident response whirlwind. It was definitely a first for me, and I was kindly granted permission to outline the events in this blog post. This investigation started scary but turned out be quite fun, and I hope reading it will be informative to you too…
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Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
Kevin Lin builds tools for humans and agents.
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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…
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Kubernetes is our generation's Multics
Yesterday's post enumerated # blog-topics related to understanding and using shell. Today's post started out as a "grab bag" of other topics, but is now centered around problems with # distributed-systems .
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Cloudflare's Disruption
Cloudflare’s new storage offering is potentially disruptive both economically and strategically.
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Self hosting is important
Computers are amazing tools and Internet is an amazing network, we can share everything we want with anyone connected. As for now, most of the Internet is neutral, meaning ISP have to give access to the Internet to their customer and don't make choices depending on the destination (like faster access for some…
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The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
When the term DevOps came up it was all about a simple idea:
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Issues with Cloudflare Images
Status: 5/9 fixed I’m a huge fan of the various Cloudflare offerings, and have been impressed time after time with the innovations and solutions offered by CF. This writeup therefore pains me, as I usually don’t have anything negative to say about CF, but after some months in production, and a severe lack of any…
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Best practices around creating production ready web apps with Docker Compose
Here's a few patterns I've picked up based on using Docker since 2014. I've extracted these from doing a bunch of freelance work.
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Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server
Over the years, I've accumulated quite a collection of websites, web applications, APIs, and other services that I've built and continue to host publicly. I've experimented with a lot of different hosting methods for them, switched between several different providers, and have finally arrived at something that I feel…
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Behind the scenes, AWS Lambda
How does AWS Lambda work under the hood? Let's find out together!
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Bye CUPS: Printing with Netcat
Turns out printing doesn't have to be hard
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My ISP Is Killing My Idle SSH Sessions
tl;dr: My ISP’s CGNAT session timeout is too short, meaning TCP keepalives gets dropped. Test if your own NAT, or your ISP’s CGN, violates RFC5382 ‘s REQ-5 using this tool: https://github.com/AndersTrier/NAT-TCP-test .
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Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure
As of April/2021 for people planning on integrating deeply with a Cloud provider services (not going for cloud-agnostic-solutions) choosing to depend on Google Cloud instead of AWS or Azure will more often than not prove to be an expensive mistake.
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Flatpak Is Not the Future
Deploying apps for the Linux desktop is hard. A major problem has historically been library compatibility. Different Linux distributions, and even different versions of the same distribution, have had incompatible libraries. Unfortunately, there hasn’t always been a culture of backwards compatibility on the Linux…
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NixOS on Framework Laptop
The time has come to replace the work laptop (thanks, Mozilla!). Here is an adventure of setting up NixOS on a Framework laptop. I’m writing this on it right...
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It's tough being an Azure fan
Azure has never been the #1 cloud provider - that spot continues to belong to AWS, which is the category leader. However, in most people’s minds, it has been a pretty reasonable #2, and while not necessarily vastly differentiated from AWS there are enough things to write home about. However, even as a user and…
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AWS Lambda Cold Start Times
Let’s compare the performance of all supported runtimes + 2 custom runtimes (Rust and GraalVM).
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Operations is not Developer IT
My code doesn't compile. Why? The number of times in my career I have been asked a variation on "why doesn't my application work" is shocking. When you meet up with Operations people for drinks, you'll hear endless variations on it. Application teams attempting to assign ownership