If you were 5 microseconds late today, blame it on NIST. Their facility in Boulder Colorado just had its power cut for multiple days. After a backup generator failed, their main ensemble clock lost track of UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated. But even if you used the NTP timing servers they run, they were never off by…
I want to write a post about Pitchfork, explaining where it comes from, why it is like it is, and how I see its future. But before I can get to that, I think I need to share my mental model on a few things, in this case, HTTP/2.
(Hat tip to the late Bill Strauss and The Capitol Steps' Lirty Dies.) A few moons ago I was thinking of ways to take my Palm OS Fossil Wr...
For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted “to prevent immoral activities.” No additional explanation was given. The timing…
Why Pi-hole, the Raspberry Pi DNS sinkhole, is worth running at home to block trackers, ads, and analytics endpoints across every device on the network.
Normal practice in deploying post-quantum cryptography is to deploy ECC+PQ. IETF's TLS working group is standardizing ECC+PQ. But IETF management is also non-consensually ramming a particular NSA-driven document through the IETF process, a "non-hybrid" document that adds just PQ as another TLS option.
Avoid ISP routers
Towards the end of last year, we learned that a group (allegedly affiliated with the Chinese government, referred to as “Salt Typhoon”) breached T-Mobile and other telecommunications co…
Everything you wanted to know about using Cloudflare Zero Trust Argo tunnels for your personal network
It was launched to measure moisture. Now it’s ghost-trailing jammers across an electronic battlefield.
I’ve found a way to configure private, custom domains for web-apps I have running on my computer. So instead of having to remember and type “localhost:4333”, I can simply navigate to “appname.localhost”. I love it!
A technical blog about Rust, Linux and other topics.
Before we go any further, one thing that I want to make clear is that the word assume is going to be doing some heavy lifting throughout this post. This was a rabbit hole that I recently went down …
This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 38th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2024. You can watch the talk that was recorded by the wonderful C3VOC team below if that’s your preferred medium:
One of my longest-running projects has been an open hardware Ethernet switch. This has been one of the key driving forces behind many of my other projects, such as ngscopeclient and the high speed probes. It was also the project that got me into high speed digital design.
Late last year, I started experiencing some unusual intermittent connection issues on my Desktop. In general, I had a stable connection with average latency; however, at (seemingly) random times throughout the week, I would start experiencing sudden 2000ms+ latency spikes every couple of seconds.
I’m sorry, but I can’t help with that. We acheived AGI. The clankers died on Christmas. This post is scheduled to automatically publish: 2025-12-25. Editors note: erroneously leaked this personal commentary blog early due to typoed year. Since it's erroneous early publication, this leak has remained on the hackernews…
Notes from setting up a truly minimal self-hosted email server with Postfix and OpenDKIM. Covers TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DNS, reverse DNS, multiple domains, and delivering to Gmail.
Air traffic control has been in the news lately, on account of my country's declining ability to do it. Well, that's a long-term trend, resulting from decades of under-investment, severe capture by our increasingly incompetent defense-industrial complex, no small degree of management incompetence in the FAA, and…
Experiences with the Matrix protocol, Matrix Synapse server, bridges, and Element mobile apps.
How dare you!
This post is written by a human being (me).
It's normal for post-quantum cryptography to be rolled out as an extra layer of security on top of traditional pre-quantum cryptography, rather than as a replacement .
I should have titled this post “I hate S3”. 📢 What is the status quo? FTP is dead (yay), SFTP is too dependent on SSH and unix authentication. AWS made S3 pervasive and now every webapp that needs to store files assumes you’ll be able to connect it S3. This …
Yesterday I read this toot (German) over on mastodon which starts with “IPv6 is hard.” No it’s not. It’s different. I ran across this multiple times: There is an A and an AAAA-record for a FQDN, but the web server is only reachable via IPv4. You can easily test this with curl $ curl -4 https://github.com -o /dev/null…
Learning how the IMAP protocol actually works
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…
