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Networking & Internet
The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 1,615 posts.
Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses
Amazon owns almost 110M IPV4 addresses. At the lower end of the market price this is over $2B.
How does Apple privately find offline devices?
At Monday’s WWDC conference, Apple announced a cool new feature called “Find My”. Unlike Apple’s “Find my iPhone”, which uses cellular communication and the lost…
RuBee
I have at least a few readers for which the sound of a man's voice saying "government cell phone detected" will elicit a palpable reaction. In Department of Energy facilities across the country, incidences of employees accidentally carrying phones into secure areas are reduced through a sort of automated nagging. A…
Starlink Is a Big Deal
Today, I watched a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket leave Cape Canaveral and deliver 60 small Starlink satellites to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) on the Starlink L3 mission.…
Lockheed is now tracking phones and walkie-talkies from space
Space-based phone location-tracking firm HawkEye 360 announced its partnership with U.S. weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin this morning. The UAE military is allegedly a "strong" customer.
The C10M problem
It's time for servers to handle 10 million simultaneous connections, don't you think? After all, computers now have 1000 times the memory as...
Let’s Encrypt to transition to ISRG root
Let's Encrypt have announced that on July 8th, 2019 they will begin issuing new certificates from their own intermediate CA and not their current cross-signed intermediate. Here's what that means and what action, if any, site operators need to take…
Get the location of the ISS using DNS
I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish). Domain names, like www.example.com usually resolve to servers. As much as we think of "the cloud" as being some intangible morass of ethereal Turing-machines floating in probability…
Mitigating the Hetzner/Linode XMPP.ru MitM interception incident
(If you just want some recommendations for what to do, skip down to the Recommendations section below .)
IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)
An article on why IRC is still the only chat protocol worth using, and a positive look at the surprisingly autistic-friendly Microsoft Comic Chat IRC client.
Still Love Telnet
How to use the telnet command on the bash command line to debug network problems.
BGP handling bug causes widespread internet routing instability
At 7AM (UTC) on Tuesday May 20th 2025 a BGP message was propagated that triggered surprising (to many) behaviours with two major BGP implementations that are often used for carrying internet traffic.
Email is not broken: It’s a framework, not an application
I've been seeing a lot of posts on the webz lately about how we can fix email. I have to say, I think it's a bit short-sighted.People are saying it has outgr...
Quake 3 Source Code Review: Network Model (2012)
The network model of Quake3 is with no doubt the most elegant part of the engine. At the lower level Quake III still abstract communications with the NetChannel module that first appeared in Quake World . The most important thing to understand is: In a fast paced environment any information that is not received on…
NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut
If you were 5 microseconds late today, blame it on NIST. Their facility in Boulder Colorado just had its power cut for multiple days. After a backup generator failed, their main ensemble clock lost track of UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated. But even if you used the NTP timing servers they run, they were never off by…
There isn't much point to HTTP/2 past the load balancer
I want to write a post about Pitchfork, explaining where it comes from, why it is like it is, and how I see its future. But before I can get to that, I think I need to share my mental model on a few things, in this case, HTTP/2.
I made 50k calls to explore the telephone network
Post describing my research wardialing Finnish freephones.
Splitting the Web
Splitting the Web par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
Should you use www or not in your domain? (2017)
For 20 years or so, there has been the debate over whether you should use www or not in your web site’s canonical hostname. So should you use www or not?
What went wrong with wireless USB
(Hat tip to the late Bill Strauss and The Capitol Steps' Lirty Dies.) A few moons ago I was thinking of ways to take my Palm OS Fossil Wr...
The Nintendo Switch Switch
Yesterday I had the idea that it would be cool if I turned a Nintendo Switch (will be referred to as NX to avoid confusion as NX is the code name for the Nintendo Switch ) console into an actual network switch. I thought about it a bit and realized that it would be doable in hardware at least, since the NX docking…
Finger: the 1971 social network that never died
It will surprise more than a few of you to hear that the first social network dates back to 1971. No accounts, no algorithm, no central server. Your…
How does Linux NAT a ping?
A few months ago, I found myself wondering how a command like ping 1.1.1.1 works from within a private network. In most private networks, multiple hosts connect to the Internet through a router. For IPv4, the router performs network address translation (NAT) by rewriting the original host’s source address to the…
Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted “to prevent immoral activities.” No additional explanation was given. The timing…