Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 143 posts.

Networking & Internet
10

Swing VPN app is a DDoS botnet

tldr: Swing VPN is using its user base to DDOS sites using its users as a an attack botnet. Introduction It all started with a friend of mine complaining that his phone was doing a request to a specific app every few seconds. Initial assumption was that the phone was infected with a virus but a 2 minute investigation…

21

Underwater ears everywhere

Programming note: the subscribe link was broken for a while because I am bad at computers (yet another case of "forgot to enable the systemd unit"). It's fixed now. The unsubscribe link was also broken and is now fixed but, you know, maybe that was a feature. Did wonders for reader retention.

26

ProtonMail Rewrites Your Emails

I switched to ProtonMail a few years back after getting fed up with Google. It’s been mostly acceptable, but a few months ago the Android client started mangling emails – if I hit “send” too soon, it would send out only part of what I’d typed; I had to wait 10 seconds or so after I finished typing before hitting send…

28

The networkQuality tool on macOS

Getting Started with networkQuality The networkQuality tool is a built-in tool released in macOS Monterey that can help diagnose network issues and measure network performance. In this post, we'll go over how to use the networkQuality tool and some of its key features. Running the Default Tests To

30

Free Public WiFi

Once, many years ago, I stayed on the 62nd floor of the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia. This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was directly correlated with the price of the WiFi service, and as a high school student I was not prepared to pay in excess of $15 a day for the internet. As I…