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Networking & Internet

The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 136 posts.

2021
64

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…

68

WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem

Shall I migrate to Signal, Threema or Telegram? No, because they all have — WhatsApp included — the same problem: They are walled gardens. Imagine a world where for each mail recipient using a separate domain, I would need separate mail client? Or in other words: Gmail users can only communicate with Gmail users…

69

How Does FaceTime Work?

As an ex-pat living in Denmark, I use FaceTime audio a lot. Not only is it simple to use and reliable, but the sound quality is incredible. For those of you old enough to remember landlines, it reminds me of those but if you had a good headset. When

72

Plain Text Protocols

If you haven't noticed already I really love plain text so I thought I would find some plain text protocols that are used in different software systems. The Redis Protocol specification states it best by describing its own protocol, but this applies to all of the plain text protocols I will cover.

74

The Rise of One-Time Password Interception Bots

In February, KrebsOnSecurity wrote about a novel cybercrime service that helped attackers intercept the one-time passwords (OTPs) that many websites require as a second authentication factor in addition to passwords. That service quickly went offline, but new research reveals a number of competitors have since…

82

DIY Mail

I have another post about half-written that I will finish up and publish soon, but in the mean time I have been thinking today about something that perennially comes up in certain orange-tinted online communities: running your own mail server.

83

Raspberry Pi WiFi to ethernet bridge

The goal is to connect a non-WiFi computer to a WiFi network using a Raspberry Pi. We will use a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B as a bridge between the non-WiFi computer and the WiFi network. The Raspberry Pi connects to WiFi and shares its connection with other computers over Ethernet. These instructions were only tested and…

86

Anatomy of a Linux DNS Lookup

Since I work a lot with clustered VMs , I’ve ended up spending a lot of time trying to figure out how DNS lookups work. I applied ‘fixes’ to my problems from StackOverflow without really understanding why they work (or don’t work) for some time.

87

The Drunken Bishop Algorithm

There’s a tradition in my family that everyone takes a turn stirring a secret wish into the yearly christmas pudding . It’s important that the wishes remain secret to the wisher or the pudding magics wont work so since moving to America I’ve implemented a new way of hashing my wish so it can be stirred in via text…

90

Imaging Cygnus a at 8.45 GHz with ATA

Earlier this year, I published a post showing our results of the interferometric imaging of Cassiopeia A and Cygnus A at 4.9 GHz with the Allen Telescope Array . Near the end of July, I decided to perform more interferometric observations of Cygnus A at a higher frequency, in order to obtain better resolution. I chose…