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Networking & Internet

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

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1384

RFCs: Blueprints of the Internet

Think about it for a second: could the internet exist without standards and protocols? Of course not! Computers need shared rules and agreements to communicate with one another. Even human languages, like English, work much the same way. They function as a kind of communication protocol because we’ve all agreed on…

1393

"Out of Band" network management is not trivial

You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…

1396

ESR: Cisco provides a lesson

In my last blog post, I made a public stink about language in a so-called Declaration of Internet Freedom , which turned out to be some libertarians attempting to expand and develop the ideas in this Declaration of Internet Freedom . Mostly they did pretty well, except for one sentence they got completely wrong: “Open…

1397

Usenet over NNCP

Usenet, of course, originally ran over UUCP in quite a few cases. Since NNCP is quite similar to UUCP – in fact, you can map UUCP commands to NNCP ones – it is quite possible, and not all that hard, to run Usenet over NNCP. In fact, in a number of ways, it works better than Usenet over UUCP! Introduction to NNCP…

1409

Bits on the Wire

Exactly 100% of everything on the Internet involves exchanging messages which represent items of interest to humans. These items can be classified into three baskets: One for “media” (images, sound, video), one for text (HTML, PDF, XML), and one for “objects” (chat messages, payments, love poems, order statuses). This…

1410

Where is all of the Fediverse?

Spurred on by the problems at Twitter, a lot of my social media timeline has “moved out” of Twitter/“X” on to what people mostly describe as mastodon or the “fediverse”. The fediverse being the collection of decentralised “instances” (aka servers) sometimes using different software but speaking a common protocol…