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A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website
One of Germany's biggest ISPs changed how their DNS works, right after I exposed an organization that they’re part of.
Topics /
Networking & Internet
The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 140 posts.
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Tailscale is pretty useful
It's probably old news for most, but I've recently started using Tailscale and wanted to share my experience with it.
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When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
By examining the limits of reasonable user behavior and embracing imperfection for users who go beyond it, we can continue to provide service that meets the expectations of users without sacrificing scalability of the system.
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The “S” in MCP Stands for Security
Spoiler: it doesn’t. But it should.
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Unlocking free WiFi on British Airways
Personal website talking about some stuff I've made and technology
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Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers
So I was uh, downloading some linux isos, like usual. It was going slowly, so I opened up the Trackers tab in qBittorrent and saw the following:
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A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
The issues described in this article were resolved after this article was posted.
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Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
“Bro, ban me at the IP level if you don't like me!”
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Start your own Internet Resiliency Club
Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications. Unfortunately, the necessary changes are risky and expensive, which means they won’t do it…
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The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press
Most websites can't tell you about them. But I can.
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Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
The Netscape/Microsoft browser wars in the mid-90's were really vicious and competitive. They really had it out for each other. Netscape had...
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Hacking Subaru: Tracking and controlling cars via the admin panel
On November 20, 2024, Shubham Shah and I discovered a security vulnerability in Subaru’s STARLINK admin panel that gave us unrestricted access to all vehicles and customer accounts in the United States, Canada, and Japan.
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How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack
Released in June 1996, Quake had to ride three technological shock-waves during its lifetime. Besides the emergence of 3D hardware accelerator cards and the growth of the Internet, an operating system shift put game developers in a tough position.
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Imgur geo-blocked the UK, so I geo-unblocked my network
Imgur started blocking UK users. Rather than installing a VPN on every device, I set up a network-wide proxy that tunnels Imgur traffic through a VPN automatically.
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Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to
At the time of writing 12:43 UTC on Tue 18 Nov, Cloudflare has taken many sites down. I'm trying to browse the web, but about half of the sites show an error: cloudflare.webp Most of these sites are n...
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You can't cURL a Border
Building a state machine for travel - tracking Schengen days, the 183-day rule for tax residency across countries, and visa thresholds when governments won't expose state.
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Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength
Poking around in Android the other day I found this nugget in Carrier Config manager ; a flag (KEY_INFLATE_SIGNAL_STRENGTH_BOOL) to always report the signal strength to the user as one bar higher than it really is.
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BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of
I came to the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show this year with my Dad to learn more about time in broadcast and live production. I was expecting to learn more about grandmaster clocks, AV sync, timing in protocols like Dante, Livewire, AES67, and more—and I have. But then on the first day here I found…
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You might not need WebSockets
Websockets are powerful tools that have become a fan-favorite for building realtime applications, but you might be using them for all the wrong reasons. Let's explore the pitfalls of websockets and how we can use plain old HTTP to get the same job done.
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The Web Is Broken – Botnet Part 2
I guess you have all heard about the growing problem of AI companies trying to aggressively collect whatever data they can get their hands on to train their models. This has caused an explosive surge in web crawlers relentlessly hitting servers big and small. But who runs these crawlers? Turns out — it could be you!
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MCP overlooks hard-won lessons from distributed systems
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
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Using eSIMs with devices that only have a physical SIM slot via a 9eSIM SIM car
Do you have a phone, tablet, or laptop (or, well, any device…) which will only take a physical SIM, but with which you’d like to use eSIMs?
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Ubiquiti launches UniFi OS Server for self-hosting
Ubiquiti just released UniFi OS Server in Early Access, allowing you to self-host the complete UniFi network stack on your own hardware. Initially, it will support UniFi Network and Innerspace. Besides UniFi Network and InnerSpace,
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How to modify Starlink Mini to run without the built-in WiFi router
The Starlink Mini terminal is designed as a compact, all-in-one solution with an integrated Wi-Fi router. While this design is ideal for typical consumer use, certain applications—such as custom networking setups, embedded installations, or power-constrained environments—may benefit from removing the internal router…
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TCP, the workhorse of the internet
What is TCP? This post is an exploration of TCP, the workhorse of the internet. This deep dive includes detailed examples and a step-by-step walkthrough. A simple TCP explanation.
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RuBee
I have at least a few readers for which the sound of a man's voice saying "government cell phone detected" will elicit a palpable reaction. In Department of Energy facilities across the country, incidences of employees accidentally carrying phones into secure areas are reduced through a sort of automated nagging. A…
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Get the location of the ISS using DNS
I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish). Domain names, like www.example.com usually resolve to servers. As much as we think of "the cloud" as being some intangible morass of ethereal Turing-machines floating in probability…
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BGP handling bug causes widespread internet routing instability
At 7AM (UTC) on Tuesday May 20th 2025 a BGP message was propagated that triggered surprising (to many) behaviours with two major BGP implementations that are often used for carrying internet traffic.