Top all-time · #701
mrb's blog
Personal blog · blog.zorinaq.comsecuritysystems
mrb's blog is a personal blog at blog.zorinaq.com about security and systems. Since 2010, 91 different Hacker News readers have linked it 268 times, most often “My experience with the great firewall of China”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 0 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link mrb's blog for hard numbers on Bitcoin and mining energy use, and for his critiques of Digiconomist-style estimates. Commenters also cite his posts on password-hash cracking speed, Windows kernel development and his Costco and GFW write-ups.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Computer and network security, reverse engineering, security vulnerability research and exploitation, high-performance computing, GPGPU, assembly optimization, free and open source software, Unix kernels internals, decentralized cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin), entrepreneurship, angel investing, etc.
Most-linked posts?
- My experience with the great firewall of China20 people · 23 mentions · first linked 2016-07-16
- "I Contribute to the Windows Kernel. We Are Slower" (2013)16 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2017-05-17
- Windows NT Kernel Contributor Explains Why Performance is Behind Other OS10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2013-05-11
- Nginx DNS resolver vulnerabilities allow cache poisoning attack8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2016-08-25
- Electricity consumption of Bitcoin: a market-based and technical analysis6 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2017-03-11
- “I Contribute to the Windows Kernel. We Are Slower Than Other Operating Systems”6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-01-16
- Serious Faults in Digiconomist's Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index5 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2017-02-09
- Whitepixel v2 now brute forcing 33.1 billion password/sec4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2010-12-14
- /bitcoin-mining-is-not-wasteful/3 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2017-02-18
- Bitcoin Mining Is Not Wasteful3 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-01-26
What Hacker News says?
« Shouldn't that be observable somehow? » No, because of two reasons. First, many miners simply pointed their hardware to mine other cryptocurrencies such as ETHW or ETC. For example we have evidence that about a quarter of Ethereum's mining farms moved to ETC over the last 24h. Second, contrary to sensationalist headlines Ethereum miners only represent a drop in the bucket of the global electricity consumption: onl…
Comment linking /serious-faults-in-beci/
on “The Ethereum merge is done”Submitted Windows NT Kernel Contributor Explains Why Performance is Behind Other OS as a story · 656 points
HN discussionIn my experience, in China as of 2016, "ssh -D" vasn't reliable at all, I wrote more details at https://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewa... (see "idea 1")
Comment linking /my-experience-with-the-great-firewall-of-china/
on “Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?”Submitted Neutrinos Faster Than Light, or FPGA artifacts? as a story · 223 points
HN discussion> like at https://blog.zorinaq.com 2013, Bitcoin hits $1k: https://blog.zorinaq.com/1-bitcoin-1000-us-dollars/ "Sure a crash that would bring it back down to below $1,000 is possible or likely, but it would not change its long-term prospect, a few years from now, from being valued between $5,000 and $50,000 and possibly more." from then, 4 years to $5k, 8 years to $50k.
Comment linking /1-bitcoin-1000-us-dollars/
on “Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites”Submitted My Experience With the Great Firewall of China as a story · 156 points
HN discussionOne micro feature I implement on my blog that I would like to see everywhere: a single-page index of all the posts, like at https://blog.zorinaq.com Don't paginate this. I want to see at a glance the titles of all the posts the author wrote. I want to be able to ctrl-f to search these titles. Heck, even if you had 100k titles they could still easily be shown on one page, as it would compress to 1 or 2MB transmitted…
Comment linking /
on “Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites”Submitted 1TB Hard Drive Prices up 180% in a Month as a story · 143 points
HN discussionFrom what I am reading here, a large part of the cost is up-front with chip design and setup. I suppose it depends on pricing. They also may wish to sell more after those four thousand units. http://blog.zorinaq.com/asic-development-costs-are-lower-tha...
Comment linking /asic-development-costs-are-lower-than-you-think/
on “SpaceX Gets FCC Approval to Sell Wireless High-Speed Home Internet from Space”Submitted Hablog – High-availability, distributed, lightweight, static site with comments as a story · 102 points
HN discussion> Sure, you could write C++ the way you describe but that is just poor code. C++ puts people into a sea of complexity and then blames them when they do not get a good result. The purpose of high level programming languages is to make things easier for people, not make them even more likely to fail to write good code and then blame them when they do not. > For example, exceptions have been explicitly disabled on ever…
Comment linking /i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-we-are-slower-than-other-oper/
on “Migrating away from Rust”Submitted “I Contribute to the Windows Kernel. We Are Slower Than Other OS” (2013) as a story · 72 points
HN discussion> You're looking at more like 5+ billion/sec today. Sounds about right http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=43 And a few times more if it's md5.
Comment linking /?e=43
on “The FBI stole an Instapaper server in an unrelated raid”Submitted Many SSD Benchmark Reviews Contain Flaws as a story · 70 points
HN discussionA few years ago I suggested Twitter should roll out an optional $1-per-month plan to let users tweet 280 characters.¹ If 10% of their MAU sign up, this would up their revenue by 17% (extra $400M yearly.) ¹ http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month...
Comment linking /revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month-to-raise-the-limit-to-280-c/
on “Giving you more characters”Submitted Nginx DNS resolver vulnerabilities allow cache poisoning attack as a story · 63 points
HN discussionA few hundred million? Try in the billions. Like 33.1 Billion/s for md5. http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=42 This is why you don't use really fast hashes for passwords and you iterate (key stretch). Bcrypt like you said.
Comment linking /?e=42
on “6.5 Million LinkedIn Password Hashes Leaked”Submitted "I Contribute to the Windows Kernel. We Are Slower" (2013) as a story · 58 points
HN discussionI know this is only tangentially related, but could you verify the famous HN post by an anonymous Windows kernel developer explaining why Windows is so much slower than Linux http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-w... It's one of the most insightful posts I've seen on this site, and if true, would certainly help to explain why Windows is so much worse than other operating systems :)
Comment linking /i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-we-are-slower-than-other-oper/
on “A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to “What Do You Think about ReactOS?””Submitted Electricity consumption of Bitcoin: a market-based and technical analysis as a story · 55 points
HN discussionI will never understand why some people disregard IP spoofing as a real risk. For example when I reported a vulnerability to the nginx developers ( http://blog.zorinaq.com/nginx-resolver-vulns/ ) about their DNS stub resolver using predictable transaction IDs, they refused to consider it a vulnerability, effectively saying no one could exploit it because spoofing the IP of the DNS server can't be done on the Interne…
Comment linking /nginx-resolver-vulns/
on “IP Spoofing”Submitted Whitepixel v2 now brute forcing 33.1 billion password/sec as a story · 37 points
HN discussion« A bitcoin transaction wastes as much electricity as it takes to power an American home for a week » This is false, or at best a deceptive statement.¹ A transaction does not consume energy. It's like saying each bit on a CD-ROM "use fuel" when it's shipped on a mail truck. Miners work on a hash of a block, so the number of transactions in the block is independent of energy use. For example the transaction rate coul…
Comment linking /serious-faults-in-beci/
on “BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia”Submitted 'Verified by Visa' Forces Users to Select Weak Passwords as a story · 18 points
HN discussionYou are exactly correct. With the formulas you described: naïve CFR = deaths / cases resolved CFR = deaths / (deaths + recoveries) It can be shown pretty dramatically in outbreak simulations how more accurate the resolved CFR is than the naïve CFR. See for example the chart https://blog.zorinaq.com/assets/outbreak2.svg In that specific example, the naïve CFR underestimates by 5x, while the resolved CFR is only off b…
Comment linking /case-fatality-ratio-ncov/
on “Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths”Submitted The Case Fatality Ratio of the Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) as a story · 16 points
HN discussionYou do realize that cracking unsalted SHA1 passwords isn't that hard, right? Perhaps you should educate yourself on the wonderful world of GPU password cracking and the enormous speeds a handful of consumer-grade video cards working in concert can utterly smash through a database like this. edit: Here's a blog post about being able to brute force 33.1 billion MD5 hashes a second using GPU's: http://blog.zorinaq.com/…
Comment linking /?e=43
on “LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS”Submitted My experience with the great firewall of China as a story · 13 points
HN discussionThe site is mostly static, expect the server-side Python code to handle the submission of blog comments. I use no VPN but have automated rsync runs, over SSH, to sync data files periodically. A description of my setup is at: http://blog.zorinaq.com/release-of-hablog-and-new-design/
Comment linking /release-of-hablog-and-new-design/
on “$5 Showdown: Linode vs. DigitalOcean vs. Amazon Lightsail vs. Vultr”Submitted Whitepixel breaks 28.6 billion password/sec as a story · 12 points
HN discussion
