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The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 140 posts.
A “distrust” is when a certification authority (CA) that issues HTTPS certificates to websites is removed from a root store because it is no longer trusted to issue certificates. This means certificates issued by that CA will be treated as invalid, likely causing certificate error interstitials in any browser that…
Yes, you read that right. Without the need for Faraday cages or signal-blocking measures, you can build a legal LTE network at home (in the US) for around $100, capable of transmitting continuously 24/7.
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.
[BROKEN LINK: blog/google-cloud-s-outage-should-not-have-happened-and-they-seem-to-be-missing-the-point-on-how-to-avoid-it-in-the-future.pre-processed.org], another global IT outage happened (dèjá vu strikes again in our industry). This time at cloudflare(Prince 2025). Again, taking down large swaths of the internet…
Mostly to make use of an animation I made for a different blog post that hasn't materialised, let me take a moment to explain to you the fundamental technical difference between 'streaming' and 'downloading'. Which won't take long... because there isn't one!
O bviously there have been many editorial changes at the formerly venerable Washington Post, a tawdry saga which I don’t intend to recap here.
These days the internet as a whole is mostly constructed out of point to point ethernet circuits, meaning an ethernet interface (mostly optical) attached directly from one routing device to another routing device.
DoH is not about protecting your DNS queries from peepers. That is a big lie. It is about making sure only one peeper can see all of your queries.
Problems and Algorithms
"Where are you?" is not an easy question to answer on the Internet. The telephone system's address plan embedded a certain amount of physical location information in the fixed line network, and a full E.164 telephone number indicated your location in terms of your country, and your area within that country. The…
This is another post that started after several toots on mastodon. Most of the things presented here were already tooted by other people, but I think this is a good chance to write a mini tutorial about what to look at. We’ll use DNS, whois, BGP and your favourite search engine. What is DNS4EU? To quote the web page…
I recently migrated my self-hosted services from a VPS (virtual private server) at a remote data center to a physical server at home. This change was motivated by wanting to be in control of the hardware and network where said services run, while trying to keep things as simple as possible. What follows is a…
Crystal radios are famous for doing something almost magical: picking up broadcast signals with nothing more than a diode, an antenna, and a pair of headphones. They’re the simplest RF receivers yo…
ACME, a brief history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet Security Changelog 03 December 2025: article announced on Mastodon, LinkedIn and X. 03 December 2025: J.C. Jones published his reflections about 10 years of Let’s Encrypt. A must read! 03 December 2025: J.C. has also been kind enough to…
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.
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…
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…
At Revision 2025, we released "Signal Carnival" ( csdb , YouTube ). This demo asks you to switch the audio and video cable of your C64:
© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen Long rumored and eagerly anticipated by some, the fourth edition of The Book of PF is now available for ...
For the last month, I’ve been using XMPP (using Snikket) for every call and chat between me and my wife Sandra, at least.
A technical investigation into information uncovered in a class action lawsuit that Facebook had intercepted encrypted traffic from user's devices running the Onavo Protect app in order to gain competitive insights.
In Ukraine suicide drones strike critical infrastructure regularly. Some outages are caused directly by the attacks - destroyed power plants, substations, transformers, power lines, some are scheduled in advance - power grid wasn’t designed to work while some of its power plants and transformers are destroyed and are…
Four years after my post on doing network captures on macOS with Process ID, Wireshark 4.6.0 has been released which includes support for parsing this…
This post could’ve been titled “Nostr vs ATProto”, but that really isn’t what I wanted to do here. While I will be comparing and contrasting them a lot, and that’s kind of even the point of writing this, I didn’t want to really pit the two against each other at all, and especially not with the title. I also want to…
Update 6/10: Based on a short conversation with an engineering lead at X, some of the devices used at X are claimed to be using HSMs. See more further below. Matthew Garrett has a nice post about T…
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My standard "everyday" solution when it comes to connecting computers into a single network is Wireguard. Wireguard is good, supports p2p, and generally has no downsides.
Chrome Returns 206 when the Server Returns 403 Postmortem It is a feature not a bug! I got detailed explanation from chrome developers which is very helpful. You may find the complete response in the bug ticket. Also this blog post draws a lot of attention after I post it on Hackers News. You may find comments here…
Let's explore and deobfuscate the input stack on Linux. Our aim is to understand its components and what each does. Input handling can be divided into two parts, separated by a common layer. We’ll try to make sense of all this, one thing at a time, with a logical and coherent approach.
