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Networking & Internet

The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 1,615 posts.

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1112

How to use FIDO2 USB keys with SSH

I recently installed Ubuntu Wacky Whatever, the latest version, and I’m very excited about it shipping with SSH 8.2, which means that I can finally use hardware USB keys for secure, easy to use authentication. If securing your devices has been something you’ve wanted to easily do yourself, read on, because it’s…

1118

SirTunnel, a personal ngrok alternative

From time to time I need to expose a development web site or web service to the world. In the past, I’ve used ngrok for that, and of course long ago I built ReverseHTTP which is somewhere in the same ballpark, but I recently got fed up with the state of affairs and decided to see whether there was something simple I…

1119

Tianwen-1 attitude in Mars orbit

It has been a while since the last time I wrote an update about Tianwen-1’s attitude . In that post I showed that Tianwen-1 had changed to a sun angle of 0 degrees with respect to the spacecraft’s X axis on 2020-10-22. Since then, nothing changed, even after the spacecraft arrived to Mars orbit on February 2021, so I…

1123

The shady world of IP leasing

The IPv4 "exhaustion" is not real. The addresses got hoarded and the market devolved into a wild sub-leasing economy where anyone can choose where their IPs appear from, who owns them on paper, and scrub them clean of any history.

1126

How Verizon's Advertising Header Works

Over the past couple of days, there’s been an outpouring of concern about Verizon’s advertising practices. Verizon Wireless is injecting a unique identifier into web requests, as data transits the network. On my phone, for example, here’s the extra HTTP header. 1

1130

ANSI escape codes (2019)

My team writes a lot of command line tools, and we like to assume that people aren’t using a literal VT100 (meaning: we liberally use colours, italics, and basically every other terminal feature available to us). This tends to result in strings in our code that look a little like this:

1131

Using Gmail with Mutt

A tutorial on using gmail with mutt, a console-based email client, along with some advanced concepts such as encrypting your account password and sending emails from a different <code>From</code> address.

1132

Review: A Dive into Mikrotik's Weird SmartNIC (2022)

an addendum has been posted, read it here 2023/12/02 - Hello, Hacker News! Check out these pictures of my cat: https://emma.pet Back in February, Mikrotik announced the CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe, a peculiar 25gbps NIC. They’ve thrown an entire router into a PCIe NIC. But why? Wait, why? Mikrotik’s product listing has…

1133

Wi-Wi is wireless time sync at 1 nanosecond

At NAB, I found a demo of Wi-Wi STAMP, a wireless time synchronization protocol that came out of Japan's NICT. Wi-Wi stands for Wireless 2Way interferometry, and it uses the 900 MHz band for picosecond-level time sync, and mm-level distance accuracy, in a tiny box, currently the size of a smartphone. The system is…

1134

Hacking Ethernet out of Fibre Channel cards

This story, like another in the past , started as an eBay purchase that I would soon regret. I was scrolling through my favorite eBay supplier when I found a listing titled Job Lot Of Roughly 350 Various Network Cards . This of course piqued my interest. Some close photo inspection identified a whole load of cards in…

1136

Extracting TLS keys from an unwilling application (2020)

I want to be able to inspect the traffic of programs running on my computer. I don’t really trust those programs and ideally I’d like to put nearly all of them into a high security jail. One of those programs is Oculus software. There are a few reasons why I want to be cautious about Oculus software.

1137

The German Problem with Tor

EAs of the 5th July 2020, there are 1357 Tor bridges available for users in countries who censor the Tor network to use. Having just over 1,000 IP addresses is not a lot for such a big privacy network as Tor is, especially considering that the number of Tor Bridges peaked at 4,227 on the 4th January 2015. That means…