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The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 3,019 posts.
A Beginner's Two-Component Crystal-Style Wi-Fi Detector
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…
Transponder Landing System enables precision approaches at McMurdo in Antarctica
The ANPC transponder landing system at McMurdo station allows aircraft to land on the moving ice runway in poor weather or low visibility.
Listening to Satellites: A Journey with My RTL-SDR V3
How I received the signal of MANY satellites with an RTL-SDR V3
Interesting double-poly latches inside AMD's vintage LANCE Ethernet chip
I've studied a lot of chips from the 1970s and 1980s, so I usually know what to expect. But an Ethernet chip from 1982 had something new: a ...
NSA and IETF: Fairness
Secret NSA documents showed that NSA pushed DES in the 1970s to "drive out competitors" while knowing that DES was "weak enough" to break; meanwhile NSA publicly claimed that it would use DES . NSA used export-law exceptions in the 1990s to entrench RC4 and RSA-512, causing security problems for decades . NSA in the…
Why Zoom Chose Oracle
This post analyzes why Zoom chose Oracle as its new cloud infrastructure provider.
How to use FIDO2 USB keys with SSH
I recently installed Ubuntu Wacky Whatever, the latest version, and I’m very excited about it shipping with SSH 8.2, which means that I can finally use hardware USB keys for secure, easy to use authentication. If securing your devices has been something you’ve wanted to easily do yourself, read on, because it’s…
455 Tb of live streaming were transferred during the Olympic Games Rio 2016
TL;DR Motivated by a friend, we’ll share bits of our experience during the Olympic Games Rio 2016. Before starting, I would like to clarify that Globo.com only had rights for streaming the content …
Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS
Finger from 1971, Gopher from 1991, and Gemini from 2019. These protocols offer decentralized, terminal-based alternatives to the modern web. The small web…
Re: Proposed Statement on "HTTPS everywhere for the IETF"
Search IETF mail list archives
Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences
The Find My network accessory program enables users to keep track of their belongings in the new Items tab within the Find My app
Making aerial fiber deployment faster and more efficient
Globally, more than 3.5 billion people are still not connected to the internet. With average data usage per person growing 20 to 30 percent annually, legacy bandwidth-limited technologies have been…
VP8 and H.264 to both become mandatory for WebRTC
WebRTC is one of the most exciting things to happen to the Web in years: it has the potential to bring instant voice and video calling to anyone with a browser, finally unshackling us from propriet…
Tailscale Authentication for Nginx
Use Tailscale's nginx-auth for secure Single Sign-On (SSO) to internal services, reducing the need for internal account systems.
SirTunnel, a personal ngrok alternative
From time to time I need to expose a development web site or web service to the world. In the past, I’ve used ngrok for that, and of course long ago I built ReverseHTTP which is somewhere in the same ballpark, but I recently got fed up with the state of affairs and decided to see whether there was something simple I…
Tianwen-1 attitude in Mars orbit
It has been a while since the last time I wrote an update about Tianwen-1’s attitude . In that post I showed that Tianwen-1 had changed to a sun angle of 0 degrees with respect to the spacecraft’s X axis on 2020-10-22. Since then, nothing changed, even after the spacecraft arrived to Mars orbit on February 2021, so I…
When volcanoes go bang, submarine cables do what?
Guest Post: Insights and lessons from Tonga in the last five weeks.
Starlink terminal revision 4: overview and tests
Revision 4 is the new version of the Starlink user terminal. As of February 2024, the new version is only available in the US. I decided to test the new hardware and compare it to the well-known REV3 (a.k.a. Gen2/V2 or “Standard Actuated”).
Syria’s exam-related Internet shutdowns
To prevent cheating in exams many countries restrict or even shut down Internet access during critical exam hours. For most of June Syria is having planned Internet shutdowns during critical exam periods.
The shady world of IP leasing
The IPv4 "exhaustion" is not real. The addresses got hoarded and the market devolved into a wild sub-leasing economy where anyone can choose where their IPs appear from, who owns them on paper, and scrub them clean of any history.