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Networking & Internet
The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 83 posts.
Curryfinger – Find the Server Behind the CDN
CURRYFINGER quickly and effectively identifies the real hosts behind CDN networks like CloudFlare - and outperforms existing tools. Find out how to use it.
The tech behind building an independent, internet radio station
Oscar is on the web
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.
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…
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…
GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening, But They’re Almost Done
This is week "1111111111" in the GPS system. Tomorrow morning it will roll over to week "0000000000". How well will various systems handle this change? Not well, judging by what we've seen so far!
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…
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…
DNS servers that offer privacy and filtering
If you’re a programmer, a systems administrator, or really any type of IT worker, you probably have your favorite go-to IP addresses for troubleshooting.
The Early History of Usenet, Part I: The Technological Setting
Usenet—Netnews—was conceived almost exactly 40 years ago this month. To understand where it came from and why certain decisions were made the way they were, it’s important to understand the technological constraints of the time.
Wireless attacks on aircraft instrument landing systems
Wireless attacks on aircraft instrument landing systems Sathaye et al., USENIX Security Symposium 2019 It’s been a while since we last looked at security attacks against connected real-world entiti…
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…
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…
Capturing PAL video with an SDR, and a few dead ends
A blog about signals, programming, music, and other stuff.
Apple knows 5G is about infrastructure, not mobile phones (2018)
5G is overkill for phones but that's okay because for carriers it is really about destroying broadcast and cable TV, ISPs, and telephone companies. One network to rule them all.
Flight stats, entertainment, and trying to crack Widevine
Investigating onboard flight entertainment APIs, flight telemetry, and Widevine-protected media.
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…