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The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 130 posts.
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…
Intro: (No AI was involved in writing, research, etc...) If you see weird fonts and spacing, blame Blogger. Skip to "In the wild exploitati...
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.
Four billion phones ask one text file what time it is, kept by a UCLA lecturer in his spare time. We counted who maintains the code under your phone.
Technical report on Android VPN lockdown bypass via NAT-T keepalive offload.
For the past several months, I’ve been receiving and then ignoring a steady stream of concerning emails from Sendgrid, the popular email delivery service owned by Twilio that I use for sendin…
How electricity, light, and radio move data across independently operated networks.
No extra software to install: OpenSSH remote forwarding and nginx's secure_link module give you a shareable HTTPS URL with an expiring token.
Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs1. It came with an AirPort card—a $99 add-on Apple made that ushered in the Wi-Fi era. The iBook G3 was the first consumer laptop with built-in Wi-Fi antennas, and by far the cheapest way to get a computer onto an 802.11…
How I obtained my own AS number and IPv6 prefix, set up a FreeBSD BGP router with FRR, and built a tunnel overlay to bring globally routable addresses to servers that already have provider-assigned...
It's possible to just connect two computers together with Ethernet and do a bit of IP configuration:
Let's design the successor to email on top of HTTP, fixing the design flaws SMTP has been dragging along for 40 years. Piece by piece. The goal is…
As predicted by several people, one of my Marvell-based SFP+ modules had overheating problems. I've switched it over to a Broadcom-based one, and it looks better, though I can't be certain.
It's time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.
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.
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…
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…
How Counter-Strike map credits led to my email address being harvested by worms, and why I had to ask my ISP to blackhole it.
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I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter. So when Twitter was accidentally
I never understood how traceroute discovers each hop. Turns out it's a clever TTL trick, and about 80 lines of Rust.
Learn how to get a free .arpa domain by abusing IPv6 reverse DNS delegations on Hurricane Electric, configuring deSEC, and hosting a live website.
Learn how DNS works: hierarchy, records, TTL caching, and the full resolution process with diagrams.
Setting up WireGuard VPN on FreeBSD 14.3: PF firewall, routing between networks, and peer-to-peer VPN between FreeBSD and Arch Linux
I've been fascinated by the idea of attaching multiple mice to one computer, and then having multiple mouse cursors inside of one desktop environment!
Here is a fun thought: if we ask Claude Code to act as a user space IP stack, how quickly will it be able to respond to a ping?
If you look at the table of contents for my book, Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, you’ll see that entries on networks before/outside the internet are arranged first by underl…
Dotted around London, there are a number of private hotels that aren’t the sort of hotel you might expect – they’re needed to make mobile phones work on the London Underground.
