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URLs: It's Complicated
Let's play silly games with URLs...
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Download speeds: What Do 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G mean?
There are four types of mobile internet connection: 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G. We compare the real-world impact in terms of speeds and download times.
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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…
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ANSI escape codes (2019)
My team writes a lot of command line tools, and we like to assume that people aren’t using a literal VT100 (meaning: we liberally use colours, italics, and basically every other terminal feature available to us). This tends to result in strings in our code that look a little like this:
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The communications systems at the US Central Command headquarters
A weblog about Signals Intelligence, Communications Security and top level telecommunications equipment
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“We're Shutting Down Our 3G Network”
This is a tale of first world problems, culminating in me being pissed off about getting a free phone--so I'll say up front: Yes, I know this is petty and silly, but also, I'm furious with how AT&T has handled their transition off 3G and I'm here to complain about it.
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gRPC Is Easy to Misconfigure
Google's gRPC is an RPC system that supports many languages, and is relatively widely used. I think its popularity is due to being used for parts of Docker and Kubernetes. I think gRPC is mostly fine, but it is surprisingly easy to screw up by misconfiguring it. Part of that is because RPC systems are challenging to…
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A few HiDPI tricks for Linux
As part of that switch, I needed to configure parts of my Linux environment (which was originally stock Ubuntu, but is now i3 with a heavily customized userspace) to function correctly on HiDPI displays.
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Useful Old Technologies: ASN.1 (2013)
Useful old technologies: ASN.1
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Staying Out of TTL Hell
Cache strategies that don't trade-off correctness for speed
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Analysis and reverse-engineering of the original Starlink router
Honestly, I love the design of this thing. It reminds me of something from the good old sci-fi.
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Curl those funny IPv4 addresses
Everyone knows that on most systems you can specify IPv4 addresses just 4 decimal numbers separated with periods (dots). Example: 192.168.0.1 Useful when you for example want to ping your local wifi router and similar. "ping 192.168.0.1" Other bases The IPv4 string is usually parsed by the inet_addr() function or at…
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No U PNP
Previously on Deep Space Nine, we discussed (read: I complained about) the short life and quick death of DLNA. On the way, I mentioned DLNA's dependence on UPnP as an underlying autoconfiguration protocol. Let's talk a bit more about UPnP, because it's 1) an interesting protocol, 2) widely misunderstood, and 3)…
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Why Isn’t Telegram End-to-End Encrypted by Default (2017)
telegra.ph/why-isnt-telegram-end-to-end-encrypted-by-default-08-142021127 points145 commentscited by 11Security & Privacy details
I've been getting this question more often this year. It's based on the wrong assumption that some other popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp are "end-to-end encrypted by default", while Telegram is not. This post is intended to disprove this myth that has been so carefully crafted by Facebook/WhatsApp marketing…
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Was the NE2000 really that bad?
Over the last few months I have been on and off digging into the history of early PC networking products, especially Ethernet-based ones. In that context, it is impossible to miss the classic NE2000 adapter with all its offshoots and clones. Especially in the Linux community, the NE2000 seems to have had rather bad…
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Setting up a Raspberry Pi with 2 Network Interfaces as a simple router
I needed a very basic 'Internet sharing' router setup with one of my Raspberry Pis, and I thought I'd document the setup process here in case I need to do it again. I should note that for more complex use cases, or where you really need to worry about security and performance, you should use something like OpenWRT…
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The utilization of 44/8: the reason I mapped IPv4 and IPv6
In the early days, when the Internet was just beginning, back in 1981, radio amateurs were allocated, by what is now known as IANA , an IPv4 block for usage and experimentation by all members of this hobby, internationally. This block was 44.0.0.0/8, which is a huge amount of address space by today’s standards, but…
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Talking to Postgres Through Java 16 Unix-Domain Socket Channels
Reading a blog post about what’s coming up in JDK 16 recently, I learned that one of the new features is support for Unix domain sockets (JEP 380). Before Java 16, you’d have to resort to 3rd party …
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Netflix and Spotify on a Raspberry Pi 4 with Chromium and Widevine
As of 3-30-2020, if you want the “paste-one-line-it-just-works” go to: vpetkov.net/2020/03/30/raspberry-pi-netflix-one-line-easy-install-along-with-hulu-amazon-prime-disney-plus-hbo-spotify-pandora-and-many-others/ ^^^ Please use the post linked above for my “one-line it just works” install ^^^ (Ignore everything…
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Re-thinking electronic mail
There are many problems with the existing Internet email system, such as spam, scam, surveillance, insecurity, centralization, and complexity. The problems are starting to outweigh the benefits of the system. Fixing the problems by evolving the current system seems overwhelmingly difficult. This essay examines some…
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How not to migrate an email domain
I did the thing! I moved IntroCave.com over to IntroMaker.com. It's still a bit of a work in progress ( some thoughts here ), but I decided to break this out as a separate post.
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(All) DNS Resource Records
Just how many weird Resource Records can you stuff into a zone file? And what do these weird RRs actually return?