Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 198 posts.

Networking & Internet
2024
166

Modern Wardriving (2023)

Let’s start by defining the word Wardriving: it is the search for WIFI wireless networks from a vehicle equipped with a computer. This would be the classic definition. I define modern wardriving as the search for WIFI networks, Bluetooth devices … Continue reading →

173

Where is all of the Fediverse?

Spurred on by the problems at Twitter, a lot of my social media timeline has “moved out” of Twitter/“X” on to what people mostly describe as mastodon or the “fediverse”. The fediverse being the collection of decentralised “instances” (aka servers) sometimes using different software but speaking a common protocol…

176

The Public Interest Internet

What if the internet were public interest technology? Is that too wildly speculative? I think not. I am not talking about a utopian project here — a public interest internet would be a glorious imperfect mess and it would be far from problem-free. But while there is a lot of solid thinking about various digital issues…

178

Making Your Connection Bad

This is directly inspired by Engineering for Slow Internet. I figured I’d give running with dogshit internet on my desktop and phone a go to see how poorly (or well!) specific applications behave. This is not an in-depth review of the behavior, but just my general impressions running for a few hours on 200kbit…