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Networking & Internet
The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 1,615 posts.
Are We Watching the Internet Die?
Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual
MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution
Why this post? Because there are rumours spreading about a presumed “MPEG-Video collapse” and Brownian motion-like initiatives trying to remedy – in some cases by the very people who have contributed to creating the “crisis”. Who is the author of this post? Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder and chairman of MPEG, but…
Firewall rules: not as secure as you think
A post outlining tricks for firewall privilege escalation
Exploring Mastodon
With the current uncertainty over Twitter, I'm starting to explore using Mastodon
Closing a stale SSH connection
Suppose you’re connected to a remote host with SSH and after a while the SSH session goes stale. The terminal is unresponsive and no keypress seem to take effect. There might be something with the network, the remote host is restarting or maybe your machine has been in hibernation, there could be multiple reasons for…
A Terminal Protocol for Program Status (OSC 7501)
I wrote a specification for a new terminal escape sequence: OSC 7501, the Program Status Protocol . It lets any program tell the terminal what it's doing: idle, working, waiting on the user, finished, or failed, and why.
My other email client is a daemon
I have a slight problem wherein every time I start up a game of NetHack, I completely lose touch with my surroundings for hours on end. Thankfully The DevTeam Thinks Of Everything and there’s a solution that allows communication with the outside world without breaking immersion: the mail daemon!
Rediscovering CardDAV
I can no longer sync iOS’ Contacts with my macOS Catalina’s Finder (the iOS sync portion of iTunes is now built into the Finder in macOS Catalina); the OS insists I’ve iCloud configured for Contact...
Against DNSSEC
10 years later and still unrebutted: DNSSEC is pageantry, it's not security, which is why so few security teams deploy it.
How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things
New radios that combine miles of range with years of battery life are changing the way we build and use connected devices. Here’s how.
Google’s QUIC protocol: moving the web from TCP to UDP
QUIC replaces TCP with UDP for faster connections, eliminating head-of-line blocking and reducing latency. Learn how it works and why it matters.
The July Galileo Outage: What happened and why
By bert hubert / bert@hubertnet.nl This post is an excerpt of a far longer post on Galileo, its structures and the cause of the outage. Here we’ll only focus on the outage - the potential underlying reasons behind it are described in the full article. Since the week-long outage in July I’ve been fascinated by Galileo…
Memories of .us
How much do you remember from elementary school? I remember vinyl tile floors, the playground, the teacher sentencing me to standing in the hallway. I had a teacher who was a chess fanatic; he painted a huge chess board in the paved schoolyard and got someone to fabricate big wooden chess pieces. It was enough of an…
DDoS-Guard to forfeit internet space occupied by Parler
Parler , the beleaguered social network advertised as a “free speech” alternative to Facebook and Twitter, has had a tough month. Apple and Google removed the Parler app from their stores, and Amazon blocked the platform from using its hosting services. Parler has since found a home in DDoS-Guard , a Russian digital…
OpenSSH versus SSH
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…
TLS 1.2 Session Tickets
Session Tickets, specified in RFC 5077 , are a technique to resume TLS sessions by storing key material encrypted on the clients. In TLS 1.2 they speed up the handshake from two to one round-trips.
IP and DNS Leaks in WebKit Affecting Proxy Browsers and iCloud Private Relay
WebKit-based browsers on iOS and macOS can be configured to route all web traffic through proxy servers, which is how Tor browsers on iOS and our own Psylo work. We found three WebKit features — DNS prefetching, WebAuthn Related Origin Requests, and WebTransport — that bypass the configured proxy and send traffic…
Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
These candidates were assessed on a variety of axes, most importantly Community Participation Guideline enforcement and accessibility, but also including team requirements from engineering, organizational-values alignment, usability, utility and cost. To close out, I’ll talk about the options we haven’t chosen and…
I was right about ATProto key management
Note: this post has been revised to be split into two sections: a description of what happened, and my analysis. I hope to make it clear that, while I do not like ATProto in general, I am trying to make good-faith critcisms of specific design decisions and outcomes, and in fact, this post getting updoots on HackerNews…
Twitter cuts off “find friends” access to Tumblr
As with Instagram, the change does not seem to have affected sharing outwards, but will impede users’ ability to follow friends that they may know from Twitter. This is part of Twitter turning the screws on sharing information about the users of its network out to other services like Instagram (and by extension…