I discovered caching CDNs were throttling my everyday browsing
Update: 28 Nov 2023 Zen Internet and I have amicably parted ways over this matter. Their technical response has been added to this post.
Exploring the Halo 1 System Link Protocol
One of my all-time favorite games is Halo: Combat Evolved that launched together with the original Xbox in 2001. One major part of the game was multiplayer, up to 16 people at a LAN party could play together by connecting four Xbox consoles over Ethernet , referred to as System Link .
Last week's Let's Encrypt downtime
How I detected that Let's Encrypt issued 645 non-compliant certificates
Exploiting DNS response parsing on the Wii U
It's annual Wii U exploit time! 😄 Image of the Wii U connection test screen on the GamePad. After reverse engineering parts of the Wii Us' ...
Using a Mac without a network connection
New version of ViableS runs in a sandbox, with no shared folders, and can now be isolated from networks. So how well does Ventura work without internet?
Theseus DHT Protocol (2018)
A distributed hash table with unusually strong security properties
Reverse-engineering Ethernet backoff on the Intel 82586 network chip's die
Introduced in 1973, Ethernet is the predominant way of wiring computers together. Chips were soon introduced to handle the low-level aspects...
Fun with DNS TXT Records
TXT Record Specification Primer # Reading through the RFC Using the Domain Name System To Store Arbitrary String Attributes to summarise the relevant part: Any printable ASCII character is permitted for the attribute name. More importantly, on the restrictions section Some DNS server implementations place limits on…
WiFi: “beamforming” only begins to describe it (2014)
[Note to the impatient: to try out my beamforming simulation, which produced the above image, visit my beamlab test page - ideally in a brow...
Your WiFi Can See You
And it's so much worse than you think
Closing a stale SSH connection
Suppose you’re connected to a remote host with SSH and after a while the SSH session goes stale. The terminal is unresponsive and no keypress seem to take effect. There might be something with the network, the remote host is restarting or maybe your machine has been in hibernation, there could be multiple reasons for…
OpenSSH versus SSH
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
X.com is Twitter, but what are [a-z].com?
An exploration into the internet's most simple domain names
Why did Usenet fail?
This is annecdata - not a serious academic study. Adjust your expectations accordingly. When I first got online, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy - so CompuServe was my gateway to the Internet. I loved their well organised chat room. A couple of clicks and I could be discussing Babylon 5 with people in…
Yes, Android 14 still allows modification of system certificates
Tim Perry recently claimed in an article that “Android 14 blocks all modification of system certificates, even as root”. This sparked significant discussion on Hacker News. Thankfully my tests show that it is still possible to adjust the system certificate store in Android 14.
How does iCloud work? Plus a new version of Cirrus
Differences between CloudKit and iCloud Drive, what each does, and how it works. New version of Cirrus to test and check iCloud function.
Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving
Music and blogging
AOL pretends to be the internet
In 1994, Ted Leonsis was the head of the new media marketing firm he created, Redgate Communications, spun out six […]
What the QWAC? An EV Certificate all over again
Almost 2 years on from the last time I wrote about QWACs, I'm sadly not here to tell you that things have gone well since then. In fact, I'm actually here to tell you that things are not going well at all... QWAC Back in Jan 2022, I
Twitter bug causes self-DDoS, related to Musk’s emergency blocks, rate limits
An "amateur hour" Javascript bug is self-DDOSing Twitter, sending infinite requests from users related to — or possibly even causing — Elon Musk's "temporary emergency measures" to stop web scraping.
Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)
Daniel Kulesz's personal website