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Networking & Internet

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

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1501

Simplicity of IRC (2022)

During discussions with my friends and colleagues, whenever the topic of chat protocols comes up, I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how this simplicity has fostered creativity in the lives of many young computer hobbyists growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For many of…

1504

How both TCP and Ethernet checksums fail (2015)

At Twitter, a team had a unusual failure where corrupt data ended up in memcache. The root cause appears to have been a switch that was corrupting packets. Most packets were being dropped and the throughput was much lower than normal, but some were still making it through. The hypothesis is that occasionally the…

1512

Comparing TCP and QUIC

There is a common view out there that the QUIC transport protocol (RFC 9000) is just another refinement to the original TCP transport protocol [ 1 ] [ 2 ]. I find it hard to agree with this sentiment, and for me QUIC represents a significant shift in the set of transport capabilities available to applications in terms…

1516

Towards Interplanetary QUIC Traffic

Have you ever asked yourself which protocols get used when downloading pictures from the Perseverance Mars rover to Earth? I hadn’t thought about that either, until I came across an intriguing message on the internet, back in April 2024: I’m looking for someone knowledgeable of quic/quinn to help us out for our deep…

1523

Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

Few weeks ago, the German political magazine Panorama and STRG_F reported that law enforcement agencies infiltrated the Tor network in order to expose criminals. The reporters had access to documents showing four successful deanonymizations. I was given the chance to review some documents. In this post, I am…

1527

LLM Networking with MikroTik

I’ve been refraining from saying ‘vibe networking’ or ‘vibkrotik’ or some other abomination, but it is true - I have been using LLMs to setup a few networks these last few months, and things have generally gone over swimmingly.

1530

Curl and http/2 on Mac

$ curl ‐‐http2 https://daniel.haxx.se/ curl: (1) Unsupported protocol curl on mac curl has been shipped by default on Mac OS X since many years - I actually couldn't even manage to figure out exactly how many. It is built and bundled with the operating system by Apple itself and on Apple's own terms and even ……