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maxmouchet

758 karma · joined July 14, 2013

Working on IP geolocation at ipinfo.io.

https://www.maxmouchet.com

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maxmouchet··on The Internet 1997 – 2021
I've reused the LGL (Large Graph Layout) algorithm used by The Opte Project [1,2] with more recent and comprehensive (multipath) traceroutes in 2022 [3].

I've also played a bit with an interactive visualization of the graph by using map tiles [4].

[1] https://github.com/TheOpteProject/LGL

[2] https://github.com/maxmouchet/minilgl (cleaned-up version of the code)

[3] https://www.maxmouchet.com/internet-viz/

[4] https://github.com/maxmouchet/internet-visualization

maxmouchet··on Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis (2019)
You take a smaller H3 :-) The maximum area of a resolution 15 H3 is 1 square meter, so unlikely to split a house in two.
maxmouchet··on Using less memory to look up IP addresses in Mess With DNS
Ah right haha. Thanks for the heads up, I should have checked ^^
maxmouchet··on Using less memory to look up IP addresses in Mess With DNS
Oh this is nice, and a cool use of HTTP range requests!
maxmouchet··on Using less memory to look up IP addresses in Mess With DNS
Bogus announcements are probably filtered by your upstream(s) (see [1] for a common list of filters).

IP-to-ASN mappings are typically built from route collectors [2,3] that peer with various networks and receive their announcements. AFAIK route collectors don't filter anything and it's easy to find bogus announcements (e.g. private ASNs) in the data.

I can't find 4294967296 from a quick glance at the latest RouteViews data but I can find other private ASNs. For example AS7594 - AS2764 - AS4294901866 for 210.10.189.0/24 seen by the route-views.perth collector.

I don't know what kind of filtering iptoasn.com is doing but at work (ipinfo.io) we do filter bogus origins, as well as a bunch of other things like RPKI/IRR-invalid routes and hyper-specific prefixes (> /24 or /48) [4].

[1] https://bgpfilterguide.nlnog.net

[2] https://www.routeviews.org/routeviews/

[3] https://www.ripe.net/analyse/internet-measurements/routing-i...

[4] https://hyperspecifics.io

maxmouchet··on Using less memory to look up IP addresses in Mess With DNS
Another solution is to use an MMDB (“MaxMind DB”) file [1] which is essentially a binary tree + deduplicated values (same as idea 3.1).

There are several free ASN MMDBs [2,3] but you can also build your own MMDB files from any Prefix->Value mapping with the mmdbwriter library [4] or a CLI tool built on top of it like mmdbctl [5].

Assuming the ASN MMDB is fully loaded in memory, it would use around 60MB.

[1] https://maxmind.github.io/MaxMind-DB/

[2] https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/docs/databases/asn/

[3] https://ipinfo.io/products/free-ip-data-downloads

[4] https://github.com/maxmind/mmdbwriter

[5] https://github.com/ipinfo/mmdbctl

(I work for IPinfo, but there are lots of other companies offering MMDB files).

maxmouchet··on AWS data center latencies, visualized
I can't speak for AWS specifically, but in my PhD thesis [1] I found a bunch of such examples by using RIPE Atlas probes. Essentially looking for pairs of probes where the RTT between probe A and probe C is larger than probe A-B + B-C.

Now there are some issues with this methodology (all common issues with ICMP/RTT measurements + traffic was not really routed through the "relay" probe), but such pairs do exist.

[1] https://theses.hal.science/tel-03666771/document (see page 84 for an example; if you can read French :-))

maxmouchet··on Pi calculation world record with over 202T digits
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8018818 and https://github.com/philipl/pifs :-)
maxmouchet··on Pi calculation world record with over 202T digits
Nice achievement but always a bit disappointing that those records are based on throwing more money at the problem, rather than new theoretical grounds, or software improvements (IIRC y-cruncher is not open source).
maxmouchet··on A transport protocol's view of Starlink
Additionally, I would not expect such “baseline” changes in the minimum RTT to be due to variation in CPU processing time.

These changes are more typical of a physical path change, as suggested by the author.

CPU/soft processing latency would look more like additive noise.

I give some examples of RTT patterns in this talk: https://ripe77.ripe.net/archives/video/2250/

maxmouchet··on Reverse DNS IPv4 Map
Hosts with randomized addresses are likely to have auto-generated PTR records, or none at all, so for the purpose of rDNS resolution those are not a big issue.

And that’s a detail, but SLAAC as in RFC4842 is deterministic. The randomization is introduced by the privacy extensions in RFC4941.

maxmouchet··on DNS Toys (2022)
It works by querying a specific DNS resolver (dns.toys):

  dig +short TXT mumbai.weather @dns.google
  # NXDOMAIN
 
  dig +short TXT mumbai.weather @dns.toys  
  "Mumbai (IN)" "30.90C (87.62F)" "45.90% hu." "clearsky_day" "15:30, Sun"
  "Mumbai (IN)" "28.10C (82.58F)" "56.00% hu." "fair_day" "17:30, Sun"
  ...
maxmouchet··on Are compostable coffee cups any better for the environment?
The same way glasses in restaurants are washed and reused :-)

Another solution is to bring your own cup.

maxmouchet··on UTM: An Apple hypervisor with some unique extra abilities
Rosetta is used to run the amd64 binaries, but not the (arm) kernel of the Docker VM.
maxmouchet··on Ask HN: Would more people take public transportation if it had business class?
Anectodally, Paris metro used to have two classes: https://www.messynessychic.com/2014/12/04/that-time-the-pari...
maxmouchet··on Ordering Photocopies from Japan's National Library
Same for the National Library of France:

https://gallica.bnf.fr/accueil/en/content/accueil-en

https://gallica-bnf-fr.translate.goog/blog/11122015/des-tira...

maxmouchet··on Colima: Container runtimes on macOS (and Linux) with minimal setup
It's a bit disappointing that OrbStack is not open source, but it works really well.

In my experience (co)lima was already an improvement over Docker Desktop in terms of reliability and background resource usage, but OrbStack is even more lightweight. I also do a bit of low-level networking development and Docker Desktop was rewriting some fields of the IP packets (besides NAT translation) which was annoying. It works seamlessly here.

It still has the same VM memory usage issue as other tools (Linux page cache taking more and more memory over time and not releasing it to the host), but they claim it will work correctly once a bug in Virtualization.framework is fixed: https://twitter.com/OrbStack/status/1645782250116505600

maxmouchet··on Apple Has Begun Scanning Your Local Image Files Without Consent
Wouldn't it be more likely that medianalysisd (which is present in macOS since many years) does something like object recognition [1] and connects to Apple servers for updating the model or telemetry or something similar?

[1] https://eclecticlight.co/2022/03/23/how-visual-look-up-works...

maxmouchet··on New Patches Aim To Boost Linux Plan 9 (9p) resource sharing Performance By ~10x
> The 9p code on Linux remains important for VirtFS and other purposes around sharing files with guest virtual machines.
maxmouchet··on VMware Fusion 13 – native support for Apple Silicon Macs
They do but it's experimental and only for Linux guests: https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/releases/tag/v2.2.4
maxmouchet··on MagicDNS is generally available
One downside of using tailscale cert, or LE for "private" records is that it writes the domain name in a public Certificate Transparency Log [1]. So make sure that the name doesn't contain any sensitive information.

An alternative is to issue wildcard certificates with LE, so that the subdomains names are kept private.

[1] https://crt.sh/

maxmouchet··on Identity management for WireGuard
I am not familiar with pritunl, but it should not be necessary to keep the private key in a file. It is possible to configure wireguard directly with code [1] without calling the wg binary manually as pritunl seems to be doing [2].

[1] https://github.com/WireGuard/wgctrl-go [2] https://github.com/pritunl/pritunl/blob/f82528ff2b7250965faf...

maxmouchet··on ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_(computer_worm)
maxmouchet··on Making Wi-Fi serial console adapters with old portable routers
This makes me wonder what are all the uses for old electronic equipments, by repurposing some of their chips. Is there any database/resource on this?
maxmouchet··on Making email more efficient – Would you use this?
I really like the idea of displaying the folders and their content on the homepage! I would definitely pay for something like this, if it also has the possibility to create custom folders.
maxmouchet··on Level 3 Global Outage
"Tubes" is a good book to get an high level overview: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/178533/tubes/9780141049090
maxmouchet··on How I got the French Tech Visa to start my company in France
We often hear stories on how hard it is to start a business in France. As a French, I'd like to hear how easy it is in other countries (UK, US?). For example, what are the costs, the amount of paperwork...
maxmouchet··on A random sampling of internet service prices around the world
A table (in French) comparing FTTH prices in France: https://lafibre.info/images/doc/comparatif_offres_fibre_ftth....

From https://lafibre.info/free-les-news/keynote-freebox-pop/.

maxmouchet··on Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel
Semshi [1] does it for Python and I find it very useful for identifying errors such as missing imports, misspelled variables, etc.

[1] https://github.com/numirias/semshi

maxmouchet··on LibreOffice: The Next Five Years
I agree, and programmers (at least on HN) seems to prefer minimalist and/or retro interfaces.

However I'm pretty confident that if I show such an interface to non technical people, they will feel that it doesn't look nice, compared to whatever proprietary app they use on their phone, Windows/Mac, ...

I personally don't use Word nor LibreOffice (I use mostly LaTeX), but if we want free software to become more popular, there must be a focus on the design.

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