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The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 223 posts.
During a one hour period today, my computer contacted 63 different Apple domains while i was not logged on and using it. I have been trying to minimize to the extent possible the reach of big tech into my life. A full 25% of the DNS queries from one of my computers (M2 MBA with macOS 15.4) are to Apple owned domains …
Yes, you read that right. Without the need for Faraday cages or signal-blocking measures, you can build a legal LTE network at home (in the US) for around $100, capable of transmitting continuously 24/7.
How mobile push notifications currently bring centralization to decentralized services, and how we can avoid it, even for mainstream configurations. Published the 31/01/2025 This post will focus on Android. We all know decentralized applications: emails, Mastodon (and the Fediverse), Nextcloud and other clouds, Git…
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.
[BROKEN LINK: blog/google-cloud-s-outage-should-not-have-happened-and-they-seem-to-be-missing-the-point-on-how-to-avoid-it-in-the-future.pre-processed.org], another global IT outage happened (dèjá vu strikes again in our industry). This time at cloudflare(Prince 2025). Again, taking down large swaths of the internet…
Mostly to make use of an animation I made for a different blog post that hasn't materialised, let me take a moment to explain to you the fundamental technical difference between 'streaming' and 'downloading'. Which won't take long... because there isn't one!
O bviously there have been many editorial changes at the formerly venerable Washington Post, a tawdry saga which I don’t intend to recap here.
These days the internet as a whole is mostly constructed out of point to point ethernet circuits, meaning an ethernet interface (mostly optical) attached directly from one routing device to another routing device.
DoH is not about protecting your DNS queries from peepers. That is a big lie. It is about making sure only one peeper can see all of your queries.
Problems and Algorithms
"Where are you?" is not an easy question to answer on the Internet. The telephone system's address plan embedded a certain amount of physical location information in the fixed line network, and a full E.164 telephone number indicated your location in terms of your country, and your area within that country. The…
The SSL landscape has shifted dramatically. In this paper, we examine OpenSSL 3.x, BoringSSL, LibreSSL, WolfSSL, and AWS-LC with HAProxy.
This is another post that started after several toots on mastodon. Most of the things presented here were already tooted by other people, but I think this is a good chance to write a mini tutorial about what to look at. We’ll use DNS, whois, BGP and your favourite search engine. What is DNS4EU? To quote the web page…
Many products at Cloudflare aren’t possible without pushing the limits of network hardware and software to deliver improved performance, increased efficiency, or novel capabilities such as soft-unicast, our method for sharing IP subnets across data centers. Happily, most people do not need to know the intricacies of…
I recently migrated my self-hosted services from a VPS (virtual private server) at a remote data center to a physical server at home. This change was motivated by wanting to be in control of the hardware and network where said services run, while trying to keep things as simple as possible. What follows is a…
Crystal radios are famous for doing something almost magical: picking up broadcast signals with nothing more than a diode, an antenna, and a pair of headphones. They’re the simplest RF receivers yo…
ACME, a brief history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet Security Changelog 03 December 2025: article announced on Mastodon, LinkedIn and X. 03 December 2025: J.C. Jones published his reflections about 10 years of Let’s Encrypt. A must read! 03 December 2025: J.C. has also been kind enough to…
Executive Summary On 2 December 2025, an IPv4 block 23.150.164.0/24, correctly allocated to the Original Customer, was inadvertently removed and reissued to the …
One little used type of DNS record is the LOC (or location). It allows you to specify a physical location. CloudFlare handles millions of DNS records; of those just 743 are LOCs. Nevertheless, it's possible to set up a LOC record in the CloudFlare DNS editor.
The Internet is decentralized by design. It came into being not at once, but in parts. New protocols were added on top of previous ones, but one crucial protocol is still missing.
There are secret messages flying all around you all the time, being transmitted via, most of the time, electromagnetic waves going from antenna to antenna. ELOs “Secret Messages” is a song about posting conspiracy theories via WiFi. But what if you need to get a few bytes from device A to device B (one of the hard…
The ESP32 is a popular microcontroller to use for do-it-yourself home automation, sensors, and a variety of other bits and bobs that you might want to take care of around the house. It’s the successor to the venerable ESP8266 which has found its way into many of our WiFi connected devices (seriously, open up a device…
At Revision 2025, we released "Signal Carnival" ( csdb , YouTube ). This demo asks you to switch the audio and video cable of your C64:
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen Long rumored and eagerly anticipated by some, the fourth edition of The Book of PF is now available for ...
For the last month, I’ve been using XMPP (using Snikket) for every call and chat between me and my wife Sandra, at least.
A technical investigation into information uncovered in a class action lawsuit that Facebook had intercepted encrypted traffic from user's devices running the Onavo Protect app in order to gain competitive insights.
In Ukraine suicide drones strike critical infrastructure regularly. Some outages are caused directly by the attacks - destroyed power plants, substations, transformers, power lines, some are scheduled in advance - power grid wasn’t designed to work while some of its power plants and transformers are destroyed and are…
