Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,021 posts.
2020 has seen its fair number of challenges and changes. We’ve all adapted to new ways of staying in touch, getting work done, celebrating birthdays and weddings, and even exercising. As more and more of our critical and personal moments move online, we want to continue to provide you with new wa...
Yesterday I had the idea that it would be cool if I turned a Nintendo Switch (will be referred to as NX to avoid confusion as NX is the code name for the Nintendo Switch ) console into an actual network switch. I thought about it a bit and realized that it would be doable in hardware at least, since the NX docking…
Groups are inherently social, and Signal is a social app. Whether you’re planning a surprise party, discussing last night’s book club meeting, exchanging photos with your family, or organizing something important, group messaging has always been a key feature of Signal. Signal provides private gr...
It will surprise more than a few of you to hear that the first social network dates back to 1971. No accounts, no algorithm, no central server. Your…
A few months ago, I found myself wondering how a command like ping 1.1.1.1 works from within a private network. In most private networks, multiple hosts connect to the Internet through a router. For IPv4, the router performs network address translation (NAT) by rewriting the original host’s source address to the…
For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted “to prevent immoral activities.” No additional explanation was given. The timing…
Akamai provides a global CDN that serves visitors inside and outside of China via the Akamai global network and strategic in-country partners.
Today, we gave a keynote presentation at the Open Networking Summit, where we shared details about Espresso, Google’s peering edge architecture—the latest offering in ou…
An interactive world map where every country is resized by how many IPv4 addresses it holds instead of its land area. Flip between real land and IPv4 land, zoom in, and compare countries.
TL;DR: Firefox Nightly now supports encrypting the TLS Server Name Indication (SNI) extension, which helps prevent attackers on your network from learning your browsing history. You can enable encrypted SNI ...
( These are my notes from the first half of my talk at HOPE9 last weekend. I write notes like these not as a script, but so that I have at least some words ready in my head when I'm speaking. They are more conversational and less organised than a usual blog post, so please forgive me the rough edges. )
Last week I wanted to replace my OpenVPN setup with WireGuard. The basics were well-documented, going beyond the basics was a bit trickier. Let me teach you want I learned. The basics But first, let’s summarize the basics. I have a server with a hosting provider that I want to use as a VPN server. I won’t delve into…
Personal Blog of Christian Haschek
With the new year upon us, I decided it was time to do something ambitious for my Open Source project. This is where I normally quip about never mentioning my project before, even though I literall…
Why Pi-hole, the Raspberry Pi DNS sinkhole, is worth running at home to block trackers, ads, and analytics endpoints across every device on the network.
I've been following WisdPi's development of various 5 Gbps and 10 Gbps Ethernet adapters for the past couple years. They use newer Realtek Ethernet chips, which sometimes have performance quirks—most frequently encountered under Linux. In today's video, I tested the new WisdPi 10G Ethernet Expansion Card for Framework…
A confusing letter from HSBC informed me that I've not been receiving their emails, and I have to change the email address they use to contact me. Except I've been receiving all of their emails just fine! The problem, it turns out, is that surveillance capitalism is now so-widespread that the bank cannot conceive that…
Accenture has entered into an agreement to acquire Ookla, a global leader in network intelligence, competitive benchmarking and customer experience analytics.
Linux TCP Tracepoints, and using them via bcc/eBPF.
I recently picked up a Starlink Mini to use as a backup connection for my home network. The underlying technology is fascinating - thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit delivering broadband almost anywhere. With the new £4.50 standby plan, it's an excellent way to keep things online.
[If USB2.0 is too boring, learn about the details of 50 different Thunderbolt-4 docks – yep you read that right, there are 50 different models – find out which ones are identical inside…
Announcement that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) believes there is an ongoing and significant risk to key parts of the Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure and is calling for the full deployment of the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) across all unsecured domain names.
gRPC comes up occasionally on the Orange Site , often with a redress of grievences in the comment section. One of the major complaints people have with gRPC is that it requires HTTP trailers. This one misstep has caused so much heartache and trouble, I think it probably is the reason gRPC failed to achieve its goal…
In May last year, a new attack on the Diffie Hellman algorithm was released, called Logjam . At the time, I was working on a security team, so it was our responsiblity to check that none of our servers would be affected. We ran through our TLS config and decided it was safe, but also needed to check that our SSH…
