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Networking & Internet
The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 1,615 posts.
“We're Shutting Down Our 3G Network”
This is a tale of first world problems, culminating in me being pissed off about getting a free phone--so I'll say up front: Yes, I know this is petty and silly, but also, I'm furious with how AT&T has handled their transition off 3G and I'm here to complain about it.
Decentralized Syndication – The Missing Internet Protocol
The Internet is decentralized by design. It came into being not at once, but in parts. New protocols were added on top of previous ones, but one crucial protocol is still missing.
ARM vs. Intel on Amazon’s Cloud: A URL Parsing Benchmark
Twitter user opdroid1234 remarked that they are getting more performance out of the ARM nodes than out of the Intel nodes on Amazon's cloud (AWS). I found previously that the Graviton 3 processors had less bandwidth than comparable Intel systems. However, I have not done much in terms of raw compute power. The Intel…
Transmitting data via ultrasound without any special equipment
There are secret messages flying all around you all the time, being transmitted via, most of the time, electromagnetic waves going from antenna to antenna. ELOs “Secret Messages” is a song about posting conspiracy theories via WiFi. But what if you need to get a few bytes from device A to device B (one of the hard…
HFT in my backyard – III
INTRO Last Friday evening, I received a tip via telephone, “You should go to the Houtem tower tomorrow morning. Jump may work on the network.” Unfortunately I couldn’t make it back to Houtem. But i…
So You Want to Define a Well-Known URI
When to reach for a well-known URI — and the traps that catch most protocol designers.
Anonymous Tor Phone
I was always curious about all that bad guys (criminals, drug dealers, hitman’s, thief’s etc.) using not very good and secure communication channels. Forgetting about whole OPSEC stuff. There is a lo
ESP32 WiFi Superstitions
The ESP32 is a popular microcontroller to use for do-it-yourself home automation, sensors, and a variety of other bits and bobs that you might want to take care of around the house. It’s the successor to the venerable ESP8266 which has found its way into many of our WiFi connected devices (seriously, open up a device…
Galileo's Ground Segment Problem
The European Global Navigation Satellite System Galileo has recently been suffering from frequent "almost disruptions", most likely partially due to Corona, and possibly also due to Brexit, but in any case due to some historical stinginess. Before I explain what is going on, I should hasten to say that most days of…
How to Kill a Decentralised Network
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
Why no curl 8
In this little piece I'll explain why there won't be any version 8 of curl and libcurl in a long time. I won't rule out that it might happen at some point in the future. Just that it won't happen anytime soon and explain the reasons why. Seven point twenty nine, really? We've done 29 … Continue reading Why no curl 8 →
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 “simple” 38 step journey to getting an RFC
The Internet is built on the mutual understanding of network protocols and practices, and most of those protocols are defined using Request For Comments (RFC) or Best Common Practices (BCP) documents.
Announcing DatHTTPD
Serve sites over Dat and HTTPS, with automatic certificate provision.
Signal Carnival
At Revision 2025, we released "Signal Carnival" ( csdb , YouTube ). This demo asks you to switch the audio and video cable of your C64:
ISP Advertisement Injection - CMA Communications
Apple Inc. endorsing H&R Block with a beautiful bright green banner ad, compliments of CMA Communications. Tired from the day’s ev...
IPFS and Their Gateways
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is according to the Wikipedia description: "a protocol, hypermedia and file sharing peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system.". It works a little like bittorrent and you typically access content on it using a very long hash in an ipfs:// URL…
Creating an Autonomous System for Fun and Profit
The thoughts and projects of an engineer who likes to convert solder, firmware, and wire into all sorts of different forms of entertainment.
gRPC Is Easy to Misconfigure
Google's gRPC is an RPC system that supports many languages, and is relatively widely used. I think its popularity is due to being used for parts of Docker and Kubernetes. I think gRPC is mostly fine, but it is surprisingly easy to screw up by misconfiguring it. Part of that is because RPC systems are challenging to…
How much traffic do I get from North Korea anyway?
While the president of the United States and the leader of North Korea were/are currently beefing on Twitter about who should destroy the world first, North Korea was also causing me some personal frustration on data quality.
How I learned about corporate firewalls
This is story about how I learned to be a little bit less naive about the web and how it works. But it's also a story of user experience and what we owe our users in terms of error handling - even when the problem isn't our fault.
A few HiDPI tricks for Linux
As part of that switch, I needed to configure parts of my Linux environment (which was originally stock Ubuntu, but is now i3 with a heavily customized userspace) to function correctly on HiDPI displays.