Tag: #network

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• Visitor Analytics Shows Only 0.5 Percent of Your Traffic — Judge Bots by Origin, Not by Self-Report

  Drawing on one year of defending a 1.5-million-page site against scrapers, this post sets out the principles of dealing with bot traffic. JavaScript-based analytics cannot count bots, so you have to read server logs, and

  2026-08-09 · 11 min read #network#bot#cloudflare#waf#scraping

• Seeing TCP Congestion Control — CUBIC, BBRv3, and a gVisor Netstack Running in Your Browser

  On July 28, 2026, "Simulating TCP loss and congestion in browser using Go/WASM" went up on Hacker News. It builds two entire copies of the gVisor netstack to WebAssembly, runs them in browser workers, and puts a bottlene

  2026-07-31 · 16 min read #network#tcp#congestion-control#bbr#wasm

• Decoding the TLS handshake and certificate errors — why the browser works but curl fails

  When the browser shows a healthy padlock while only curl and server-side calls fail with a certificate error, the problem is server configuration. The browser downloads the missing intermediate certificate itself through

  2026-07-26 · 15 min read #network#tls#ssl#openssl#security

• HTTP Keep-Alive and connection reuse — the timeout race condition behind intermittent 502s

  When the backend logs contain no errors at all and only the load balancer intermittently mixes in 502s, it is usually a connection reuse race condition. At the exact moment the server closes an idle connection, the clien

  2026-07-26 · 15 min read #network#http#performance#load-balancer#tcp

• Connection refused vs. timeout — narrowing the cause at the TCP level

  When a connection fails, the terminal hands back one of two messages. Connection refused means the peer returned an RST; timeout means nothing at all answered the SYN you sent. That one-line difference almost entirely de

  2026-07-26 · 12 min read #network#tcp#troubleshooting#linux#kubernetes

• ping works but only large requests hang — dissecting MTU, MSS and the PMTUD blackhole

  When small requests go through fine but only large responses stall halfway, it is almost always a path MTU problem. TCP advertises MSS based on the interface MTU, and when a narrower segment sits somewhere along the path

  2026-07-26 · 14 min read #network#mtu#tcp#vpn#kubernetes

• dig works but the application fails — start by checking the DNS resolution order

  A situation where dig answers normally but only the application cannot find the name is not a bug, it is structure. dig and nslookup bypass /etc/hosts and nsswitch.conf entirely and query the resolver directly. This post

  2026-07-26 · 14 min read #network#dns#linux#kubernetes#troubleshooting

• Why Jobs Come from Acquaintances of Acquaintances, Not Best Friends — The Strength of Weak Ties

  The Strength of Weak Ties, the 1973 paper by Granovetter that ranks among the most cited in sociology, flips intuition on its head: the decisive information for job seekers came not from close friends but from acquaintan

  2026-07-20 · 6 min read #humanities#sociology#network#career#relationships

• The State of Media over QUIC — Spec at draft-19, Deployment at draft-07, and Its First Author Has Forked to moq-lite

  IETF Media over QUIC (MoQ) wants to merge WebRTC's interactive latency with HLS/DASH's scalability into a single architecture, and as of July 6, 2026 it has reached draft-ietf-moq-transport-19, with the working group's m

  2026-07-17 · 13 min read #network#quic#streaming#webrtc#rfc

• The 18 CVEs in curl 8.21.0 — the "High-Quality Chaos" That Followed the End of the Bug Bounty

  On June 24, 2026, curl 8.21.0 set a new project record by shipping 18 CVEs in a single release. Yet all 18 are Low or Medium, and there hasn't been a single High since October 2023. Behind that number is a project that,

  2026-07-17 · 15 min read #network#security#curl#cve#open-source

• Content-Encoding: zstd — Safari 26.3 Fills In the Third Engine, and What's Next Is RFC 9842 Dictionary Compression

  In February 2026, Safari 26.3 added support for Content-Encoding: zstd, so all three browser engines now receive zstd responses, following Chrome 123 (2024-03) and Firefox 126 (2024-05). Because it's negotiation-based, a

  2026-07-17 · 12 min read #performance#web#network#browser

• October 11, 2026: The Root KSK Changes — What's Actually in the Root Zone Right Now ♪ Listenable

  The root KSK — DNSSEC's trust anchor — moves from KSK-2017 to KSK-2024 on October 11, 2026. For most resolvers this is a non-event thanks to RFC 5011, but for a validating resolver that failed to pick up the new trust an

  2026-07-16 · 25 min read #network#dns#dnssec#security#protocol

• Why QUIC Gets Slower on Fast Internet — Receiver-Side CPU and the Kernel QUIC That Hasn't Arrived ♪ Listenable

  QUIC clearly won on handshake latency and loss recovery — Google's internet-scale measurements show an 8.0% (desktop) drop in search latency and an 18.0% drop in video rebuffer rate as evidence. But once the link gets fa

  2026-07-16 · 20 min read #network#protocol#performance#linux-kernel

• What ROV Blocked, What ASPA Still Can't — the June 2026 Telegram Hijack and the Next Layer of Routing Security ♪ Listenable

  On June 16, 2026, India's Rcom (AS18101) hijacked Telegram's prefixes, and Kentik's measurement shows the hijacked path reached only 1.6% of Kentik's own BGP sources — a case where RPKI ROV actually worked. But that's be

  2026-07-16 · 23 min read #network#bgp#rpki#routing#security

• A DNS Deep Dive — The Infrastructure Hidden Behind Names ♪ Listenable

  DNS is not a simple name tag but a vast distributed infrastructure that holds up the internet. From the hierarchy and recursive/authoritative resolution, record types, TTL and caching, Anycast and GeoDNS, to DNSSEC and D

  2026-06-29 · 22 min read #network#dns#anycast#cdn#infrastructure

• DNS in Depth — The World of Name Resolution That Free Hosting Revealed ♪ Listenable

  DNS is trending again. From recursion and authority to caching and TTL, global Anycast distribution, DNSSEC, and DoH/DoT, we take a deep look at the entire process of name resolution. As free DNS hosting becomes the norm

  2026-06-25 · 22 min read #network#dns#anycast#dnssec#doh