Topics /

Networking & Internet

The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 17 posts.

2009
5

The problems with url shorteners

URL shortening services have been around for a number of years . Their original purpose was to prevent cumbersome URLs from getting fragmented by broken email clients that felt the need to wrap everything to an 80 column screen. Addendum: They're useful in print , too. But it's 2009 now, and this problem no longer…

7

Advanced SSH Techniques

At one site where I provide technical assistance, access to the network is all done via ssh over the Internet. However, one can't get access to the machines directly; one must first make an ssh connection to a gateway box I'll call martha. martha doesn't allow one to use regular passwords or keys, though. We're all…

9

Http-https transitions and relative URLs

When building a web site with HTTPS pages, one of the annoying tasks is to ensure that those pages make no references to HTTP resources. If they do, then Internet Explorer will pop up alarming messages about mixing secure and insecure content, and do you want to display the insecure content.

12

Why HTTP?

The world doesn’t need another arbitrary binary protocol. Just use HTTP. Your life will be simpler. Originally this came up when scaling a gaggle of MySQL machines. I would have killed for a reliable proxy. It’s with this in mind that I’ve come up with my list of things that HTTP has that an arbitrary protocol will…

17

Why GPSes suck, and what to do about it

I’m the lead of the GPSD project , a service daemon that monitors GPS receivers on serial or USB ports and provides TPV (time-position-velocity) reports in a simple format on on a well-known Internet port. GPSD makes this job looks easy. But it’s not — oh, it’s decidedly not — and thereby hangs an entertaining tale of…