Top posts

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

Networking & Internet
2024
187

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…

190

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…

194

Pwned Certificates on the Fediverse

As well as the collection and distribution of compromised keys , the pwnedkeys project also matches those pwned keys against issued SSL certificates. I’m excited to announce that, as of the beginning of 2024, all matched certificates are now being published on the Fediverse , thanks to the botsin.space Mastodon server.

198

New UUID formats have been approved

This document presents new time-based UUID formats which are suited for use as a database key. A common case for modern applications is to create a unique identifier for use as a primary key in a database table. This identifier usually implements an embedded timestamp that is sortable using the monotonic creation time…