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Networking & Internet

The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 83 posts.

2019
65

5G: if you build it, we will fill it

What is 5G? Why do we care? How much faster does the pipe get? What can we do with a fatter pipe?  How does this relate to VR? Cars? Broadband? What’s the killer app?  Really, unless you work in a few very narrow niches, you shouldn’t spend much time thinking about it.

66

Starlink is a big deal

Part of my series countering misconceptions in space journalism. Now available in audio form. Starlink, SpaceX’s plan to serve internet via tens of thousands of satellites, is a staple in the…

67

DNS Security: Threat Modeling DNSSEC, DoT, and DoH

There's been a lot of talk about DNS-over-HTTPS aka DoH lately, primarily due to Mozilla's and Google's respective plans to move forward with enabling it in their browsers. There's also a lot of misunderstanding and conflation of speculated plans for world domination with practical benefits of the technology; it…

70

The Great $50M African IP Address Heist

A top executive at the nonprofit entity responsible for doling out chunks of Internet addresses to businesses and other organizations in Africa has resigned his post following accusations that he secretly operated several companies which sold tens of millions of dollars worth of the increasingly scarce resource to…

71

Building an LTE Access Point with OpenWRT Rooter

My LTE internet connection (70 Mbit downstream, 15 MBit upstream) came with a combined Huawei B315s LTE modem/access point. As I was using it for the last two to three years a couple of problems did arise: the internet connection was often shaky, oftentimes the uplink connection got lost and I had to power-cycle the…

77

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…

78

Howto: Block Amazon and any site using Amazon Web Services

I've recently read about a couple of boycotts trying to call attention to Amazon's bad labor practices. The most recent of these boycotts hopes to lead a boycott on Amazon's induced buying holiday "Prime Day", in solidarity with striking workers in several fulfillment centers in Spain. I support anyone fighting for a…

83

The speed of BGP network propagation

At the end of March 2019 I did a talk at the INEX’s (Ireland’s biggest internet exchange point) Annual General Meeting. I was supposed to record it, however in a brief panic due to HDMI not working on my laptop I forgot to start a recording of it. Since people found it interesting I figured I would turn it into a blog…