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Networking & Internet
The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 3,019 posts.
Spying on HTTPS
When I launched Chrome on Thursday, I saw something unexpected: While most users probably would have no idea what to make of this, I happened to know what it means– Chrome is warning me that …
Regulatory Capture at ICANN
This investigates the connections between organizations and people involved with policy making at ICANN focused around the effort to remove price caps from the .ORG domain registry
When “Dumb Pipes” Get Too Smart
I wrote this in 2012, when CloudFlare (an almost awkwardly popular CDN) introduced a bug into websites they hosted using some of their "advanced features" via injected JavaScript that managed to not just break the website but lock up entire web browers by tickling a scheduler starvation bug in WebCore. This issue was…
There’s more than one way to write an IP address (2019)
There's more than one way to write an IP address: decimal, hex, octal, overflowed octets and omitted zeroes all resolve to the same host. A fun trick to mess …
Why not “Why not WireGuard?” (2020)
An article by Michael Tremer titled Why not WireGuard is sometimes shared in VPN discussions. Unfortunately that article contains several misconceptions and some out-of-date information that deserves to be addressed.
Yahoo breaks every mailing list in the world including the IETF's
Search IETF mail list archives
Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System
How dare you!
Serverless Sync in Web Apps Using Bit Torrent
This post explores using WebTorrent for serverless data synchronization in web apps, demonstrated by modifying the Voice Memos PWA. The goal was to enable data sharing between devices without a backend server. The solution involves generating magnet URLs that allow peer-to-peer data transfer via WebTorrent. The demo…
How to copy a file between devices? (2022)
Introduction Copying a file across devices is painful. You’re on your phone, but you want to access a file that’s on your laptop. How do you do it? What about the other way around? What about copying any file between any of your devices? I asked my dad how he copies a file from his phone to his computer, and he…
Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
After about a decade of dealing with this madness, surely it's been worthwhile? No, not really.
Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless
When an ISP decides to exempt certain applications or services from cutting into a user's data cap, that's zero rating. And the evidence is in that it conclusively makes broadband more expensive. A comprehensive multi-year study by the non-profit Epicenter.works, comparing the 30 member countries...
A technical look at Iran's internet shutdowns
This post is written by a human being (me).
IPv6 Support for EC2 Instances in Virtual Private Clouds
Update (7/13/2017): Since this post was published, IPv6 supported has been extended and now supports 15 Regions and Multiple AWS Services. The continued growth of the Internet, particularly in the areas of mobile applications, connected devices, and IoT, has spurred an industry-wide move to IPv6. In accord with a…
What happens when you update your DNS
What happens when you update your DNS?
Mozilla and NSF offer $2M prize to decentralize the web
We’re fueling a healthy Internet by supporting big ideas that keep the web accessible, decentralized and resilient. What will you build? Mozilla and t
Iran forged the wrong SSL certificate
If you want to be really evil, however, *.google.com is the wrong SSL certificate to forge. The right one? ssl.google-analytics.com .
Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS
New APIs, capabilities, bugs, and challenges for Safari and PWAs running in iOS 15.4 and iPadOS 15.4, including Web Push Notifications, WebXR
Why we use the Linux kernel's TCP stack
A recent blog post posed the question Why do we use the Linux kernel's TCP stack?. It triggered a very interesting discussion on Hacker News.
Increasing QUIC and UDP Throughput over Tailscale
Recent optimizations in Tailscale improve UDP throughput, boosting performance for QUIC, HTTP/3, and other UDP-based applications on Linux.
Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors
Vendor attribution study of 19,450 European company websites. Cloudflare is the largest internet-facing infrastructure vendor in every one of seven EU markets.
The Confusing World of USB
For decades, my perception of USB was that of a technology both simple and reliable. You plug it and it works. The two first iterations [1] [2] freed PCs from a badly fragmented connector world made of RJ-45 (Ethernet), DA-15 (Joystick), DE-9 (Serial), DIN (PS/2), SCSI, and DB-25 (Parallel). When USB-3.0 came out…
Rethinking the D-Bus Message Bus
Later this year, on November 21, 2017, D-Bus will see its 15th birthday. An impressive age, only shy of the KDE and GNOME projects, whose collaboration inspired the creation of this independent IPC system. While still relied upon by the most recent KDE and GNOME releases, D-Bus is not free of criticism. Despite its…
Every Mastodon user has an RSS feed
The distributed social network Mastodon has grown to 12.8 million user accounts, supporting itself through user