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IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district
This is the story of how I created a botnet of IPTVs to rickroll 10,000+ students for my senior prank.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 341 posts.
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All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
Last night I was listening to the latest Under the Radar , where Marco Arment dove into nerdy detail about his recent Overcast server issues. The discussion was great, and you should listen to it, but Marco's recent server troubles were pretty similar to my own server issues from last year, and so I figured I'd share…
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Don't start with microservices – monoliths are your friend
I’ve been having this thought on the back of my mind for a long time to write about why it’s often a bad idea to start with microservices for a brand new project.
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Screw it, I’ll host it myself
It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Likewise, it’s all fun and games until someone loses access to their private and/or business data because they trusted it to someone else.
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Extreme HTTP Performance Tuning
This post will walk you through the performance tuning steps that I took to serve 1.2 million JSON 'API' requests per second from a 4 vCPU AWS EC2 instance.
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Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
Let engineers learn cloud without jeopardizing their personal well-being.
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AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go
AWS is playing Chess. Cloudflare is playing Go.
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My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
This website is hosted on a very cheap (£4 a month) VPS. This server has 1 CPU and 2GB of RAM. The slowest part of this website can theoretically handle 4.2 million requests a day. I got these results by benchmarking by websites.
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AWS's Egregious Egress
Amazon’s says: “We strive to offer our customers the lowest possible prices, the best available selection, and the utmost convenience.” When it comes to egress, their prices are far from the lowest.
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Why I Built Litestream
Despite an exponential increase in computing power, our applications require more machines than ever because of architectural decisions made 25 years ago. You can eliminate much of your complexity and cost by using SQLite & Litestream for your production applications.
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Apt Encounters of the Third Kind
A few weeks ago an ordinary security assessment turned into an incident response whirlwind. It was definitely a first for me, and I was kindly granted permission to outline the events in this blog post. This investigation started scary but turned out be quite fun, and I hope reading it will be informative to you too…
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Docker without Docker
Our users deliver software to us as Docker containers, but we don’t use Docker to run them. We transmogrify container images into Firecracker micro-VMs. Here's how.
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Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
Kevin Lin builds tools for humans and agents.
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Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees
Introducing Cloudflare’s S3-compatible Object Storage service, with zero egress bandwidth charges and automatic migration from S3-compatible services.
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Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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We saved millions in SSD costs by upgrading our filesystem
During COVID we experienced rapid growth in the amount of data we ingest. This post details some of the problems this caused us and how we solved them.
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Kubernetes is our generation's Multics
Yesterday's post enumerated # blog-topics related to understanding and using shell. Today's post started out as a "grab bag" of other topics, but is now centered around problems with # distributed-systems .
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Cloudflare's Disruption
Cloudflare’s new storage offering is potentially disruptive both economically and strategically.
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MangaDex infrastructure overview
Your browser lacks modern WebAssembly support, so verification is running a slower fallback. Consider updating your browser.
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Self hosting is important
Computers are amazing tools and Internet is an amazing network, we can share everything we want with anyone connected. As for now, most of the Internet is neutral, meaning ISP have to give access to the Internet to their customer and don't make choices depending on the destination (like faster access for some…
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The S in IoT is for Security
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
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Debunking Cloudflare’s recent performance tests
A couple of weeks ago Cloudflare, one of our competitors, claimed that their edge compute platform is roughly three times as fast as Compute@Edge. The false claim is a great example of how statistics can be used to mislead.
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The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
When the term DevOps came up it was all about a simple idea:
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Issues with Cloudflare Images
Status: 5/9 fixed I’m a huge fan of the various Cloudflare offerings, and have been impressed time after time with the innovations and solutions offered by CF. This writeup therefore pains me, as I usually don’t have anything negative to say about CF, but after some months in production, and a severe lack of any…
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Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0
MySQL, an open source database developed by Oracle, powers some of Facebook’s most important workloads. We actively develop new features in MySQL to support our evolving requirements. These feature…
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Best practices around creating production ready web apps with Docker Compose
Here's a few patterns I've picked up based on using Docker since 2014. I've extracted these from doing a bunch of freelance work.
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Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications and Services on a Single Server
Over the years, I've accumulated quite a collection of websites, web applications, APIs, and other services that I've built and continue to host publicly. I've experimented with a lot of different hosting methods for them, switched between several different providers, and have finally arrived at something that I feel…