Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 255 posts.
Two days ago, through its communications regulator, Uganda's government ordered the "Suspension Of The Operation Of Internet Gateways" hours before the country's general election. This action was confirmed by several users and journalists who got access to the letter sent to Internet providers.
For years, people have been asking us to create a true multi-device experience that allows people to use WhatsApp on other devices without requiring a smartphone connection. Today, we’re announcing…
Cinia agreed to start a project to build a new subsea cable in the Arctic with Alaskan company Far North Digital.
There are four types of mobile internet connection: 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G. We compare the real-world impact in terms of speeds and download times.
We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change. Here's a rundown of what happened, why, and what we're doing about it.
The Find My network accessory program enables users to keep track of their belongings in the new Items tab within the Find My app
It has been a while since the last time I wrote an update about Tianwen-1’s attitude . In that post I showed that Tianwen-1 had changed to a sun angle of 0 degrees with respect to the spacecraft’s X axis on 2020-10-22. Since then, nothing changed, even after the spacecraft arrived to Mars orbit on February 2021, so I…
To prevent cheating in exams many countries restrict or even shut down Internet access during critical exam hours. For most of June Syria is having planned Internet shutdowns during critical exam periods.
There is a significant difference between developing and promoting a protocol (such as XMPP) and a product (such as Signal). Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. This post details how and why Snikket aims to strike a balance between the two.
My team writes a lot of command line tools, and we like to assume that people aren’t using a literal VT100 (meaning: we liberally use colours, italics, and basically every other terminal feature available to us). This tends to result in strings in our code that look a little like this:
Discover the latest in networking and IT innovation. Stay updated with product launches, expert insights, and tutorials from UniFi’s official blog.
There are requirements that make software engineers sweat. Massive distribution to thousands of nodes. High reliability and availability. Multiple distinct platforms. Rapid network growth. This is the world SpaceX’s Starlink program, which has set a goal to provide high-speed broadband internet to locations where…
A weblog about Signals Intelligence, Communications Security and top level telecommunications equipment
This is a tale of first world problems, culminating in me being pissed off about getting a free phone--so I'll say up front: Yes, I know this is petty and silly, but also, I'm furious with how AT&T has handled their transition off 3G and I'm here to complain about it.
When a browser connects to websites over HTTPS (vs. HTTP), eavesdroppers and attackers on the network can't intercept or alter the data that...
Google's gRPC is an RPC system that supports many languages, and is relatively widely used. I think its popularity is due to being used for parts of Docker and Kubernetes. I think gRPC is mostly fine, but it is surprisingly easy to screw up by misconfiguring it. Part of that is because RPC systems are challenging to…
As part of that switch, I needed to configure parts of my Linux environment (which was originally stock Ubuntu, but is now i3 with a heavily customized userspace) to function correctly on HiDPI displays.
Useful old technologies: ASN.1
Zerotier - Multiple vulnerabilities leading to identity hijacking and unauthorised private network access.
Cache strategies that don't trade-off correctness for speed
Honestly, I love the design of this thing. It reminds me of something from the good old sci-fi.
On September 30th 2021, Slack had an outage that impacted less than 1% of our online user base, and lasted for 24 hours. This outage was the result of our attempt to enable DNSSEC — an extension intended to secure the DNS protocol, required for FedRAMP Moderate — but which ultimately led to a series of…
Everyone knows that on most systems you can specify IPv4 addresses just 4 decimal numbers separated with periods (dots). Example: 192.168.0.1 Useful when you for example want to ping your local wifi router and similar. "ping 192.168.0.1" Other bases The IPv4 string is usually parsed by the inet_addr() function or at…
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
Using RP2040 to create a USB audio microphone.
In Linux 5.13 ethtool gains an interface for querying IEEE and IETF statistics. This removes the need to parse vendor specific strings in...
