CIA’s World Factbook Is Gone

February 6, 2026 by Al Williams 3 Comments

Before the Internet, there was a certain value to knowing how to find out about things. Reference librarians could help you locate specialized data like the Thomas Register, the EE and IC Masters for electronics, or even an encyclopedia or CRC handbook. But if you wanted up-to-date info on any country of the world, you’d often turn to the CIA. The originally classified document was what the CIA knew about every country in the world. Well, at least what they’d admit to knowing, anyway. But now, the Factbook is gone.

The publication started in 1962 as the classified “The National Basic Intelligence Factbook,” it went public in 1971 and became “The World Factbook” in the 1980s. While it is gone, you can rewind it, including a snapshot taken just before it went dark on Archive.org.

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Ordering Pizza On Your Sega Dreamcast Is Very Clunky Indeed

January 30, 2026 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

If you’re ordering pizza these days, you’re probably using a smartphone app or perhaps still making a regular old phone call. If you’re creative and a little bit tricky, though, you can order pizza right from your Sega Dreamcast. You just need to jump through a few hoops, as demonstrated by [Delux] and [The Dreamcast Junkyard] in the recent past.

You used to be able to order pizza on the Dreamcast natively, all the way back in 1999. However, the modern Domino’s website doesn’t really work on the ancient Dreamcast browser anymore. The simple fact is that web technology has advanced a long way in the last couple of decades, and Sega didn’t exactly spend a lot of time maintaining a browser on a console that died mere months after its rivals hit the market.

Thus, to place a pizza order on the Dreamcast these days, you need to work within its limitations. [Delux] uses the Dreamcast with the Broadband Adapter to access a PC on the local network via the XDP web browser. That PC is hosting Web Rendering Proxy, a tool which converts complicated modern websites into something a simpler machine can parse. From there, it’s a matter of connecting to the Domino’s website, and slowly clicking through the online ordering pages. Between the proxy delay, the Dreamcast’s glacial processing speed, and the clunky Domino’s ordering interface, it takes ages. Never before has adding coupons felt like such a hassle. Still, after 15 minutes of fuss, the order is completed… and a short time later, a hot fresh pizza arrives.

It’s a fun hack, but really it’s the PC running the proxy that’s doing the heavy lifting. In 2026, it’s far more elegant to order a pizza from your Nintendo Wii.

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Zombie Netscape Won’t Die

January 27, 2026 by Lewin Day 28 Comments

The very concept of the web browser began with a humble piece of software called NCSA Mosaic, all the way back in 1993. It was soon eclipsed by Netscape Navigator, and later Internet Explorer, which became the titans of the 1990s browser market. In turn, they too would falter. Navigator’s dying corpse ended up feeding what would become Mozilla Firefox, and Internet Explorer later morphed into the unexceptional browser known as Edge.

Few of us have had any reason to think about Netscape Navigator since its demise in 2008. And yet, the name lingers on. A zombie from a forgotten age, risen again to haunt us today.

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Escaping The Linux Networking Stack At Cloudflare

December 31, 2025 by Maya Posch 2 Comments

Courtesy of the complex routing and network configurations that Cloudflare uses, their engineers like to push the Linux network stack to its limits and ideally beyond. In a blog article [Chris Branch] details how they ran into limitations while expanding their use of soft-unicast functionality that fits with their extensive use of anycast to push as much redundancy onto the external network as possible.

The particular issue that they ran into had to do with the Netfilter connection tracking (conntrack) module and the Linux socket subsystem when you use packet rewriting. For soft-unicast it is important that multiple processes are aware of the same connection, yet due to how Linux works this made it impossible to use packet rewriting. Instead they had to use a local proxy initially, but this creates overhead.

To work around this the solution appeared to be to abuse the TCP_REPAIR socket option in Linux, which normally exists to e.g. migrate VM network connections. This enables one to describe the entire socket connection state, thus ‘repairing’ it. Combined with TCP Fast Open to skip the whole handshake bit with a TFO ‘cookie’. This still left a few more issues to fix, with an early demux providing a potential solution.

Ironically, ultimately it was decided to not break the Linux networking stack that much and stick with the much less complicated local proxy to terminate TCP connections and redirect traffic to a local socket. Unfortunately escaping the Linux networking stack isn’t that straightforward.

So Long Firefox, Hello Vivaldi

November 25, 2025 by Jenny List 115 Comments

It’s been twenty-three years since the day Phoenix was released, the web browser that eventually became Firefox. I downloaded it on the first day and installed it on my trusty HP Omnibook 800 laptop, and until this year I’ve used it ever since. Yet after all this time, I’m ready to abandon it for another browser. In the previous article in this series I went into my concerns over the direction being taken by Mozilla with respect to their inclusion of AI features and my worries about privacy in Firefox, and I explained why a plurality of browser engines is important for the Web. Now it’s time to follow me on my search for a replacement, and you may be surprised by one aspect of my eventual choice.

Where Do I Go From Here?

Hackaday in the Ladybird browser — It’s Hackaday, in Ladybird! (Ooof, that font.)

Happily for my own purposes, there are a range of Firefox alternatives which fulfill my browser needs without AI cruft and while allowing me to be a little more at peace with my data security and privacy. There’s Chromium of course even if it’s still way too close to Google for my liking, and there are a host of open-source WebKit and Blink based browsers too numerous to name here.

In the Gecko world that should be an easier jump for a Firefox escapee there are also several choices, for example LibreWolf, and Waterfox. In terms of other browser engines there’s the extremely promising but still early in development Ladybird, and the more mature Servo, which though it is available as a no-frills browser, bills itself as an embedded browser engine. I have not considered some other projects that are either lightweight browser engines, or ones not under significant active development. Continue reading “So Long Firefox, Hello Vivaldi” →

So Long, Firefox, Part One

November 20, 2025 by Jenny List 153 Comments

It’s likely that Hackaday readers have among them a greater than average number of people who can name one special thing they did on September 23rd, 2002. On that day a new web browser was released, Phoenix version 0.1, and it was a lightweight browser-only derivative of the hugely bloated Mozilla suite. Renamed a few times to become Firefox, it rose to challenge the once-mighty Microsoft Internet Explorer, only to in turn be overtaken by Google’s Chrome.

Now in 2025 it’s a minority browser with an estimated market share just over 2%, and it’s safe to say that Mozilla’s take on AI and the use of advertising data has put them at odds with many of us who’ve kept the faith since that September day 23 years ago. Over the last few months I’ve been actively chasing alternatives, and it’s with sadness that in November 2025, I can finally say I’m Firefox-free.

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