HFT in My Backyard
INTRO As soon as the summer sun returns to Belgium, there is a natural human migration from Francophone Wallonia to the west coast sea in the Flemish part of the country. Here, à la mer du Nord, pe…
IPv6 privacy addresses crashed the MIT CSAIL network
A few hours ago, I sent the following “dear colleagues” email (lightly edited to remove some private details) to all my users at work: This has been a very trying week. For those of you…
RFC 2616 is dead
Don’t use RFC 2616. Delete it from your hard drives, bookmarks, and burn (or responsibly recycle) any copies that are printed out.
Building My Own Home Router
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TCP is harder than it looks
It's easy to write a TCP stack that works with most traffic. It's harder to write one that interoperates properly with every strange or buggy device that's out there.
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...
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…
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…
How Verizon's Advertising Header Works
Over the past couple of days, there’s been an outpouring of concern about Verizon’s advertising practices. Verizon Wireless is injecting a unique identifier into web requests, as data transits the network. On my phone, for example, here’s the extra HTTP header. 1
HFT in my backyard – III
INTRO Last Friday evening, I received a tip via telephone, “You should go to the Houtem tower tomorrow morning. Jump may work on the network.” Unfortunately I couldn’t make it back to Houtem. But i…
TCP/IP over audio
We present a simple to use implementation of networking across ultrasonic frequencies, by making use of Gnuradio and a microphone and speakers. This allows you to use TCP/IP , UDP across an audio link.
Hyperlocal Mesh Networks
The NY Times has a post up this morning about a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Red Hook where they have built a hyperlocal mesh network to service the entire neighborhood, from housing projects to townhouses. Red Hook is a cool place. We were there last night to sample Hometown Bar-B-Que‘s massive beef ribs and a […]
How Big is Email?
Estimating the size of the world’s communications.
Verizon made an enemy tonight
On a flight back to New York I read Level 3’s assessment of the latest round of the Netflix vs Internet Provider debacle. The summarized version is that basically Netflix is slow because Verizon refuses to add capacity to peer with Level 3. Fixing the situation would cost Verizon
Android betrays tethering data
Software engineer, Free, Open Source Software Consultant, Innovator, Fedora & Debian Developer
If You Can Read This, You're SNIing
When TLS was defined, it didn’t allow more than one hostname to be available on a single IP address / port pair, leading to “virtual hosting” issues; each Web site (for example) now requires a dedicated IP address.
Using Freenet
I've been following the Freenet project for many years, occasionally firing it up and seeing if I can do anything useful with it. I've been using it regularly over the last month and it has come a long way since I first tried it. It's much faster than what it was in the past. This post describes a bit of...
Headerless Train Announcements
A blog about signals, programming, music, and other stuff.
HFT in my Backyard – IV
[Update, November 18, 2014: check episode 2 with the Latent answer to this post] There’s a thin grey line Between the black and white It’s evidently hard to find at night Depeche Mode, …
High-Performance Packet Filtering with Pflua
wingolog: article: high-performance packet filtering with pflua
HTTP/2 interop pains
At around 06:49 CEST on the morning of August 27 2014, Google deployed an HTTP/2 draft-14 implementation on their front-end servers that handle logins to Google accounts (and possibly others). Those at least take care of all the various login stuff you do with Google, G+, gmail, etc. The little problem with that was…