The Internet Doesn't Route Around Damage Anymore
99% of the data between continents rides a few hundred undersea cables through a handful of chokepoints. When one is cut, there's no rerouting your way out — you wait for a ship.
Blog
Protocols, security incidents, and how the internet actually works. 147 posts.
How National Firewalls Poison DNS
A national firewall doesn't block a censored DNS lookup — it answers it, with a forged reply that wins a race against the truth. Sometimes the lie points at a real company's server, and sometimes it leaks to people the censor never meant to reach.
Port 25: The Day ISPs Gave Up on Email Federation
You cannot run a mail server from your home internet connection. The port SMTP was born on in 1982 is blocked on most consumer networks — and that quiet, entirely justified defense is also the thing that killed email as a peer-to-peer system.
Path MTU Black Holes: The Bug That Only Hits Big Packets
The connection establishes. Small requests work. Then a large transfer stalls forever, and everyone blames the app. It's usually a router silently dropping oversized packets and an ICMP message a firewall ate — a failure mode baked so deep into the internet that 'the network works' and 'the network passes large packets' are two different claims.
How Video Calls Punch Through NAT
A machine behind NAT can't accept incoming connections — that's the whole definition of NAT. Yet video calls connect two such machines directly all the time. The trick is hole punching: both sides fire packets at the same instant, each drilling a temporary opening the other slips through. Here's the mechanism, why one NAT type defeats it, and the relay you pay rent on when it does.
Cloudbleed: When a Buffer Leaked Everyone's Secrets
In 2017 a single wrong comparison in a Cloudflare parser let a pointer run off the end of a buffer and dump adjacent memory into web pages — so one site's requests could surface another site's passwords, and search engines cached the spills.
Terrapin: Trimming Messages Off the Start of SSH
In 2023 researchers showed they could silently delete a message from the start of an SSH session — and the cipher that made it cleanest was chacha20-poly1305, the one every hardening guide told you to prefer. The bug wasn't in any server. It was in the seam the protocol never checked.
The 1.35 Tbps Attack That Lasted Eight Minutes
On February 28, 2018, GitHub absorbed a 1.35 Tbps DDoS — the largest ever recorded at the time. No botnet built it. It was assembled from open memcached servers and a routing flaw the internet has refused to fix since 2000.
SYN Cookies: The 1996 Hack Still Saving Your Server
In September 1996 a SYN flood took a New York ISP offline. Within weeks, two people worked out a defense that stores no state at all — it hides the connection inside a number the attacker can't forge. Linux has shipped it switched on by default since 2009, and it's still a little bit lossy on purpose.
NAT: The Hack That Ate the Internet
In 1994 NAT was pitched as a short-term patch to buy time until IPv6 shipped. Thirty years later it's load-bearing infrastructure, it quietly deleted the internet's founding design principle, and by working too well it delayed its own replacement.
regreSSHion: The Bug That Came Back
In 2006 OpenSSH killed a remote-root hole in its signal handler. In late 2020 a logging rewrite quietly deleted the fix, and the same bug shipped to millions of servers for three years — because nothing tested that it stayed dead.
The Day Facebook Deleted Itself From the Internet
In October 2021 Facebook didn't get hacked or DDoSed. It ran one maintenance command, and its own safety mechanisms erased it from the internet's map — then locked the engineers out of the room where the fix lived.