Topics /
Networking & Internet
The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 1,615 posts.
Own Your Identity
This paragraph in Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Why I’ll Never Redirect my Personal Blog to Google Plus scared me a bit:
Not all TLDs are Created Equal
In light of the recent cancellation of the queer.af domain registration by the Taliban , the fragile and difficult nature of country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) has once again been comprehensively demonstrated. Since many people may not be aware of the risks, I thought I’d give a solid explainer of the whole…
Was the Internet created to survive a nuclear strike? (2022)
Was the Internet Created for Nuclear War?
Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
Since a years we know, or might suspect, our chats are listend on, our uploaded files are sold for advertising or what purpose ever and the chance our social messengers leak our private data is incredibly high. It is about time to work against this.
Making RSS More Fun
I wrote a browser extension to try and make finding random, independent websites more fun.
Ghost in the ethernet optic
A few months ago I stumbled on a tweet pointing out a kind of SFP optic that claimed to be smart, made by a Russian company Plumspace . After going through their Smart SFP product listings I was on-board and decided I needed to have some of them.
Extremely Low Frequencies
The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early, primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the whole thing difficult. It is generally considered that the US Civil War was the first use…
Stupid certificate tricks
Sometimes I do things for no real reasons other than “because I can” and/or “it amuses me”. For example, embedding a snarky message into my HTTPS certificate.
No NAT November: My month without IPv4
Near the beginning of November, nixCraft posted this challenge on Mastodon, daring people to take the No NAT November challenge and disable IPv4 for the month, relying only on IPv6:
The 7-bit Internet
When I first started digging into the bowels of the Internet, I was fascinated by how many of its protocols—like HTTP and SMTP, for example—were entirely text based.
5Gbps Ethernet on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4
tl;dr: I successfully got the Intel I340-T4 4x Gigabit NIC working on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and combining all the interfaces (including the internal Pi interface), I could get up to 3.06 Gbps maximum sustained throughput. Update: I was able to boost things a bit to get 4.15 Gbps! Check out my video here…
Hunting down the stuck BGP routes
BGP is the glue between all of the thousands of border routers that make up the internet (you can find this post (battleships) and this post (EvE) as a crash course on how BGP works).
Inside the failed attempt to backdoor SSH globally that got caught by chance
Why the threat actor rushed deployment.
Going IPv6 Only
How would the current internet function when you're on a native IPv6 host without any IPv4 instead of using any of the IPv4 workarounds? Find out with a few firewall rules!
Can We Stop Pretending SMS Is Secure Now?
SMS text messages were already the weakest link securing just about anything online, mainly because there are tens of thousands of employees at mobile stores who can be tricked or bribed into swapping control over a mobile phone number to someone else. Now we’re learning about an entire ecosystem of companies that…
Twitter preconnects to the wrong domains
Twitter tried to reduce load times for external links, but made things slower instead. It mistakenly normalizes domains to a point where they’re no longer useful.
Plex vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild to drop a cryptominer
Intro: (No AI was involved in writing, research, etc...) If you see weird fonts and spacing, blame Blogger. Skip to "In the wild exploitati...
How Unreliable is UDP?
Unlike TCP, UDP doesn't provide any delivery or ordering guarantees. Put into practice, just how bad, or good, is UDP?
Microsoft Silently Dropping Emails – a Sad but True Story (2020)
From time to time Microsoft decides to block or even silently drop emails that are sent by my selfhosted email server. It’s always a pain and takes a lot of effort to deal with it. This time I decided to…Read more ›
A most elegant TCP hole punching algorithm
The algorithm in this post needs “double buckets” to be reliable. Otherwise, the two sides can split on bucket boundaries and fail to converge. If the first bucket fails, compute an additional bucket step for convergence. My algorithm trades slow startup for less infrastructure.
Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web
(Short form article, Short lecture , Long lecture , demo of a fraction of the idea of a distributed website (or paste this link in maelstrom ))
Linux kernel bug delivers corrupt TCP/IP data
(Edit: This article is now up on hacker news, feel free to discuss there)