Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,021 posts.

Networking & Internet
Any year
2625

Helping to secure internet routing

The internet works reliably, in large part, on the basis of a key technology called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP is a means by which all junction points on the internet (routers) communicate with each other to dynamically establish the correct (and correctly weighted) paths that network packets should follow to…

2628

Bits on the Wire

Exactly 100% of everything on the Internet involves exchanging messages which represent items of interest to humans. These items can be classified into three baskets: One for “media” (images, sound, video), one for text (HTML, PDF, XML), and one for “objects” (chat messages, payments, love poems, order statuses). This…

2629

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…

2630

Go HTTPS Servers with TLS

This post is a basic introduction to running HTTPS servers and clients in Go using TLS. It assumes some familiarity with public-key crypto. Feel free to check out my earlier posts about RSA and the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange ; TLS uses the elliptic-curve version of Diffie-Hellman. I won't be covering how the protocol…

2632

Goodbye, OpenStack

I just removed myself from every OpenStack mailing list and meetup. I’m sure I’ll still use it, but I don’t see myself as part of that community any longer. When I was at DreamHost, I really felt like part of that community and that I could help make it better. However, in the three years since I’ve left DreamHost, I…

2635

AWS VPC Traffic Mirroring

Running a complex network is not an easy job. In addition to simply keeping it up and running, you need to keep an ever-watchful eye out for unusual traffic patterns or content that could signify a network intrusion, a compromised instance, or some other anomaly. VPC Traffic Mirroring Today we are launching VPC…