1981
The Day We Fought Back: By The Numbers
96,000 calls, 555,000 emails, 245,000 signatures and more. Find out what happened this Tuesday.
Topics /
Networking & Internet
The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 3,019 posts.
1982
QUIC at Snapchat
At Snapchat, our goal is to make our Camera the fastest way to share a moment. We do not want Snapchatters to face any delays when they are in the moment and want to share with their real friends.
1983
System design implications of declining network latency vs. disk latency
Hardware performance “obviously” affects software performance and affects how software is optimized. For example, the fact that caches are multiple orders of magnitude faster than RAM means that blocked array accesses give better performance than repeatedly striding through an array.
1984
1985
Jailbreak firmware turns cheap digital walkie-talkie into DMR scanning receiver
In the last years, DMR and MOTOTRBO (a.k.a. TRBO a Motorola Solutions branded DMR Radios ) has become a very popular digital voice mode on the UHF and VHF bands and the MD380 radio is the latest cheap DMR walkie-talkie to come out of China. The question is, is it any good? The longer answer is…
1986
Why not use DNS over HTTPS (DoH)?
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.
1987
Cool URIs can be ugly (2023)
Around last year this blog, a simple static site, was running on GitHub pages, together with Cloudflare in front of it due to (perceived) unreliability with GitHub’s SSL provisioning for custom domains. In order to simplify my stack, I tried running it on Cloudflare Pages .
1988
1989
Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches
EDIT 2026-07-08: Gizmohub, despite the announcements, did not stop working on the 7th. Instead, a Verizon tech called me, and told me that they were not going to take Gizmohub down until they'd resolved these issues. They also walked me through getting set up, including getting me the 2FA code that was not coming…
1990
What are the differences between OpenBSD and Linux?
Maybe you have been reading recently about the release of OpenBSD 6.5 and wonder, 'What are the differences between Linux and OpenBSD?' I've also been there at some point in the past and these are my conclusions. They also apply, to some extent,
1991
It's TCP vs. RPC All over Again
We’ve written previously about the fact that the Internet seems to be missing a standard protocol for the request/response paradigm, with repeated attempts to force-fit TCP leading to inevitable mismatches. Sometimes we feel that we are the only people who think this way, with our networking
1992
Why is it so hard to be a good domain registrar?
I recently moved all of my domains away from GoDaddy, because they’re terrible. 1
1993
1994
Investigating the impact of HTTP3 on network latency for search
Dropbox is well known for storing users’ files—but it’s equally important we can retrieve content quickly when our users need it most. For the Retrieval Experiences team, that means building a search experience that is as fast, simple, and powerful as possible. But when we conducted a research study in July 2022, one…
1995
Cloudflare is now powering Microsoft Edge Secure Network
This integration will allow Microsoft Edge users who opt in to browse the Internet more privately, without being tracked across websites
1996
Top Sites to Receive SMS Online Without a Phone
Many websites these days ask you to provide some form of verification when you want to sign up to a service. This includes most things like shopping sites, email accounts, discussion forums, gaming services, blogs, social media and etc. Basic forms of verification are just supplying an email address or perhaps solving…
1997
1998
A look at Chang’e 5 telemetry
Chang’e 5 is a Chinese lunar sample return mission. It was launched a few days ago on 2020-11-23 from Wenchang and is estimated to perform lunar orbit injection on Saturday. Since then, a number of Amateurs such as USA Satcom , Paul Marsh M0EYT , Scott Tilley VE7TIL , Fer IW1DTU and others have been receiving the…
1999
Understanding the Stellar Consensus Protocol
What’s an agreement system? What makes one “Byzantine”? What makes a Byzantine one “federated”?
2000
Encrypted Client Hello: The Future of ESNI in Firefox
Background Two years ago, we announced experimental support for the privacy-protecting Encrypted Server Name Indication (ESNI) extension in Firefox Nightly. The Server Name Indication (SNI) TLS extension enables server and ...
2001
2002
Did AS8003 just disappear?
There has been a new development in The Mystery of AS8003. As you may recall, this was the AS number registered to a defunct company in Florida that appeared earlier this year in the global routing table announcing over 175 million IPv4 addresses belonging to the US Department of Defense. Well, that just changed.
2003
I revoked $1M worth of EV certificates
Personal like or dislike of EV aside for a moment, we can all agree on what the name of EV certs implies. Organisations get their company details in the certificate and CAs have to do some extended validation of that data compared to a normal certificate. Turns out, that doesn'
2004
IPv6 Support for Amazon S3
Update October 1, 2021 – This post has been edited to remove outdated S3 buckets. As you probably know, every server and device that is connected to the Internet must have a unique IP address. Way back in 1981, RFC 791 (“Internet Protocol”) defined an IP address as a 32-bit entity, with three distinct network […]
2005
Xerox Alto's 3 Mb/s Ethernet: Building a Gateway with a BeagleBone
The Alto was a revolutionary computer designed at Xerox PARC in 1973. It introduced the GUI, high-resolution bitmapped displays, the optic...
2006
Wifi: “beamforming” only begins to describe it
[Note to the impatient: to try out my beamforming simulation, which produced the above image, visit my beamlab test page - ideally in a brow...
2007
Europe's Internet resilience mitigates impact of submarine cable cuts
Two recent cable cuts that occurred in the Baltic Sea resulted in little-to-no observable impact to the affected countries, in large part because of the significant redundancy and resilience of Internet infrastructure in Europe.
2008
Unraveling NSA's TURBULENCE Programs
The NSA TURBULENCE program was first revealed in 2007 by the Baltimore Sun for being over-budget and poorly-managed 1 2 . Many documents from the Snowden trove from the past two years reference parts of this program, but no coherent story or overview of how these programs operate together has been described. This is…
2009
WHOIS blackout period likely starting in May
What do you do when you want to look up the owner of a domain name? You probably perform a "WHOIS search" to find out the owner's name and contact information. The WHOIS system, which makes certain domain registration data publicly available, is an invaluable research tool for trademark owners a...
2010
IPv6 zones in URLs are a mistake
Run away while you still can, it's not too late for you to avoid the curse of knowledge.