Top all-time · #2689
David Leadbeater
Personal blog · dgl.cx · on HN as dglsecuritysystems
David Leadbeater's personal blog at dgl.cx covers security and systems. Since 2008, 28 different Hacker News readers have linked it 45 times, most often “SQLite as a Document Database (2020)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-18, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link David Leadbeater's posts on terminal escape-sequence security, Wikipedia-over-DNS, SSH and HTTPS on one port via haproxy, and SQLite JSON support. Commenters mostly cite them as sources or how-tos.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- SQLite as a Document Database (2020)6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-06-20
- "<ESC>[31M"? ANSI Terminal security in 2023 and finding 10 CVEs5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-10-06
- Wikipedia over DNS (2008)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2008-12-02
- Using HAProxy to make SSH and SSL available on the same port3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-01-25
- Déjà vu: Ghostly CVEs in my terminal title3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-12-31
- Blink and you'll miss it – a URL handler surprise3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-06-17
- Nat-Again: IRC NAT helper flaws (CVE-2022-2663)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-09-01
- Bash a newline: Exploiting SSH via ProxyCommand, again (CVE-2025-61984)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-07
- Wikipedia over DNS2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-04-01
What Hacker News says?
https://dgl.cx/2024/12/ghostty-terminal-title https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/security/advisories/G...
Comment linking /2024/12/ghostty-terminal-title
on “Ghostty 1.0”Submitted Breaking Git with a carriage return and cloning RCE as a story · 373 points
HN discussionThere definitely have been CVEs in Terminal.app, over many years: - https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2008-0042 - https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2002-1898 - https://infocon.org/cons/Disobey/Disobey%202017/Mikko%20Kent... [video, I can't find a reference to that in Apple's release notes] - There is also https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2018/q1/216 -- which led to a vague credit for Federico Bento in https://supp…
Comment linking /2023/09/ansi-terminal-security
on “iTerm2 critical security release”Submitted SQLite as a Document Database (2020) as a story · 256 points
HN discussionProbably worth noting that Ghostty was very recently vulnerable to an old/familiar class of terminal vuln that bit a bunch of older terminal applications a while back: https://dgl.cx/2024/12/ghostty-terminal-title So moving to a newer / less "bloated" terminal may also just wind the clock back and cause you to encounter a similar sequence of vulns again, like some kind of unfortunate real-world "New Game Plus".
Comment linking /2024/12/ghostty-terminal-title
on “iTerm2 critical security release”Submitted SQLite as a Document Database as a story · 239 points
HN discussionYou'd compress the JSON, and leave the data that you extract from the JSON uncompressed using Generated Columns[1]. That way you can save the original JSON data, but still have fast querying, etc. It would look something like this: CREATE TABLE t1( json TEXT, data INT GENERATED ALWAYS AS (json_extract(body, '$.d')) STORED ); If all you need is fast querying you could make `data` a `VIRTUAL` column and set up an inde…
Comment linking /2020/06/sqlite-json-support
on “Show HN: Reduce SQLite database size by up to 80% with transparent compression”Submitted Déjà vu: Ghostly CVEs in my terminal title as a story · 208 points
HN discussion> One day, on a plane with WiFi before paying, I noticed that DNS queries were still allowed and thought it would be nice to chat with an LLM over it. There used to be a service where DNS requests to FOO.that-service.org would return the abstract for the Wikipedia article "FOO". edit: I think it was this one, seems to be defunct now: https://dgl.cx/2008/10/wikipedia-summary-dns
Comment linking /2008/10/wikipedia-summary-dns
on “Ch.at – A lightweight LLM chat service accessible through HTTP, SSH, DNS and API”Submitted Images over DNS as a story · 201 points
HN discussionxterm does and some others, I posted about this and emojis a while ago: https://dgl.cx/2025/06/can-your-terminal-do-emojis
Comment linking /2025/06/can-your-terminal-do-emojis
on “State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions”Submitted Can your terminal do emojis? How big? as a story · 178 points
HN discussionReal criminals can: - Host such data off of a server bought with a stolen credit card and accessed via anonymous proxies. - Use any of the normal pastebin sides out there with offline encryption methods. (E.g. use PGP + copy/paste encrypted text into browser) - Host such data off of a hacked server. I don't really see how ZeroBin is scary. You could even do something like this: https://dgl.cx/wikipedia-dns with a ha…
Comment linking /wikipedia-dns
on “ZeroBin, opensource Pastebin where the server has zero knowledge of pasted data”Submitted Show HN: Wordle over DNS as a story · 170 points
HN discussionYou can also do this with haproxy. I ran it for a while (I think it was for git). Here is a page about how to do it: https://dgl.cx/2010/01/haproxy-ssh-and-ssl-on-same-port defaults timeout connect 5s timeout client 50s timeout server 20s listen ssl :443 tcp-request inspect-delay 2s acl is_ssl req_ssl_ver 2:3.1 tcp-request content accept if is_ssl use_backend ssh if !is_ssl server www-ssl :444 timeout client 2h back…
Comment linking /2010/01/haproxy-ssh-and-ssl-on-same-port
on “Show HN: Run SSH and HTTP(S) on the same port”Submitted Wikipedia over DNS (2008) as a story · 74 points
HN discussionUnless I'm misunderstanding SQLite can do this as well, but with less nice syntax. The above could be written something like: SELECT id, json_extract(data, '$.foo') FROM t WHERE json_extract(data, '$.bar') > 5 in SQLite. You can also add an index on one of these expressions: https://dgl.cx/2020/06/sqlite-json-support
Comment linking /2020/06/sqlite-json-support
on “There are over one trillion SQLite databases in active use”Submitted Wikipedia over DNS as a story · 69 points
HN discussionOr just use both :) https://dgl.cx/2010/01/haproxy-ssh-and-ssl-on-same-port
Comment linking /2010/01/haproxy-ssh-and-ssl-on-same-port
on “Patch to Log SSH Passwords – One Year Results”Submitted Wikipedia over DNS as a story · 64 points
HN discussionI ended up writing a small wrapper on top of SQLite based on this: https://dgl.cx/2020/06/sqlite-json-support With proper concurrency control, it can work very well even for multi process applications.
Comment linking /2020/06/sqlite-json-support
on “Ask HN: What is the SQLite of nosql databases?”Submitted Microsoft .NET SDK is violating the GDPR, object now as a story · 37 points
HN discussionDidn't know about Wikipedia-over-DNS, that's pretty cool: https://dgl.cx/wikipedia-dns
Comment linking /wikipedia-dns
on “Storing ASCII art in the DNS”Submitted Vim blowfish encryption as a story · 36 points
HN discussionThese categories of vulnerability are not new: https://dgl.cx/2023/09/ansi-terminal-security -- any time you take any untrusted data and do literally anything with it, you're at risk.
Comment linking /2023/09/ansi-terminal-security
on “Even "cat readme.txt" is not safe”Submitted Nat-Again: IRC NAT helper flaws (CVE-2022-2663) as a story · 12 points
HN discussionSeems like we live in parallel worlds but I will show you how I am right except you can really proof I am wrong: At Google, they recommend to go to https://www.google.com/advanced_search so you can write all the keywords you want. In this case I searched for: kvt reverse exploit [1] you can quickly see that google search results are inaccurate and it shows first my HN post because it was very recent. Also the recent…
Comment linking /2023/09/ansi-terminal-security
on “The People Who Ruined the Internet”Submitted Wikipedia over DNS as a story · 11 points
HN discussionInteresting project! I have lately been trying out these cool and perhaps in some way similar sqlite libraries: - https://github.com/haxtra/kvstore-sqlite (Basic key-value store for SQLite databases.) - https://github.com/haxtra/super-sqlite3 (Fast SQLite library with optional full db encryption, simple query builder, and a host of utility features, all in one neat package.) - https://github.com/haxtra/live-object (…
Comment linking /2020/06/sqlite-json-support
on “Show HN: Doculite – Use SQLite like Firestore”Submitted Exploiting SSH via ProxyCommand as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
