Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 239 posts.

Networking & Internet
160

Zero Trust Networks

I am leery of jargon. I am as guilty of using it as the next engineer, but there comes a point where there are just too many precise, narrowly-understood terms polluting your vocabulary. The circle of people you can talk to shrinks until going to the store to buy milk feels like an exercise in speaking a foreign…

165

Egypt Blocks Access to Telegram

Technology and Law Community "Masaar” documented the blocking of the Telegram website and application by the Egyptian authorities on 22 October 2020. The authorities blocked Telegram on three of the Internet service networks operating in Egypt. These networks included “We”, “Vodafone” and “Orange”. Masaar learned…

169

Cloud Traffic

I recently watched Build an enterprise-grade service mesh with Traffic Director , featuring Stewart Reichling and Kelsey Hightower of GCP, and of course Google Cloud’s Traffic Director . Coming at this with a brain steeped in 5½ years of AWS technology and culture was surprising in ways that seem worth sharing.

170

Creating a Home IPv6 Network

One of the recent experiences of Linux Plumbers Conference convinced me that if you want to be part of a true open source WebRTC based peer to peer audio/video interaction, you need an internet address that’s not behind a NAT. In reality, the protocol still works as long as you can contact a stun server to tell you…

172

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…