Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected])

Internet Plumber - #DNS, #BGP, #FreeBSD, #Infrastructure, #ThreatIntel, Distributed Systems

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

DNSDiag 2.8.1 released!

New features/fixes include:
✅DNS Cookie support (--cookie)
✅ EDNS Client Subnet testing (--ecs)
✅ Automatic Extended DNS Error display
✅ DNS over QUIC/HTTP3 in dnstraceroute
✅ Fixed a few bugs and made some QoL changes

https://t.co/WXLOyZNS13

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

@marcodavids @Quad9DNS And since forever all Quad9 services do aggressive NSEC3 caching, to prevent abusive load to go towards Authoritative Servers. As far as I am aware, that is unique among major public resolvers.

[「𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗼」🐕🚶🏼 @marcodavids]

DNSSEC Validation enabled on 9.9.9.10 and 9.9.9.12

@Quad9DNS

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

@heymingwei Thanks for the nerdsnipe!

[Spencer Baggins @bigaiguy]

A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name.

He wrote the code that streams every YouTube video, every Netflix show, every TikTok clip. He wrote the code that runs the virtual servers underneath AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. He calculated more digits of pi than anyone in history. He has no Twitter. He has no marketing. He just keeps shipping.

His name is Fabrice Bellard.

Here is the story, because almost nobody outside the systems programming world knows what one man has built.

Fabrice was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France. He studied at École Polytechnique, the top French engineering school. He never went to Silicon Valley. He never built a startup empire. He just wrote code.

In 2000 he started a project called FFmpeg, an open-source multimedia framework for encoding, decoding, and streaming video. He was 28. The project did one thing nobody else had done well. It handled every video and audio format that existed, in one library, on every operating system. He led it himself for years.

Today FFmpeg is the invisible engine of the internet. YouTube uses it. Netflix uses it. VLC uses it. Chrome and Firefox use parts of it. Every Android phone, every iPhone, every smart TV, every video editing tool you have ever touched runs FFmpeg somewhere underneath. If you have watched a video on a screen in the last 20 years, Fabrice's code processed it.

He was not done.

In 2003 he started QEMU, a machine emulator and virtualizer. He wrote it solo until version 0.7.1 in 2005. QEMU lets you run any operating system on any other operating system. It became the foundation of modern virtualization. KVM, the Linux kernel hypervisor, runs on top of QEMU. Every major cloud provider, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, runs virtual machines on infrastructure built around it. The Quick Emulator is the most cited piece of cloud infrastructure code on Earth.

He kept going.

In 2001 he won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest with a small C compiler that grew into TCC, the Tiny C Compiler. TCC can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in under 15 seconds. In 2004 he calculated the most digits of pi ever computed at the time, using a personal desktop computer and an algorithm he derived himself called Bellard's formula. In 2011 he wrote a complete PC emulator in pure JavaScript that runs Linux in your browser, a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real.

In 2019 he released QuickJS, a small but complete JavaScript engine that fits where V8 cannot. In 2021 he released NNCP, a neural network based lossless data compressor that immediately took the lead on the Large Text Compression Benchmark.

Then he turned his attention to large language models. He built TextSynth Server, a web server with a REST API for running LLMs locally. He released ts_zip and ts_sms, compression utilities that use language models to compress text and short messages at ratios traditional algorithms cannot reach. He released TSAC, a very low bitrate audio compression system. In December 2025 he released Micro QuickJS, a new JavaScript engine for microcontrollers, separate from QuickJS, designed for environments with almost no memory.

Fabrice co-founded a telecom company called Amarisoft in 2012, where he serves as CTO. Amarisoft builds 4G and 5G base station software used by carriers and labs around the world. He has been running it for over a decade while continuing to ship personal projects from his own home page at bellard dot org

He has no Twitter. He has no Instagram. He gives almost no interviews. His personal website is a flat list of projects with no styling, no fonts, no marketing copy. Just titles and links.

A quiet French engineer who never moved to Silicon Valley wrote the code that quietly runs the internet.

He is still shipping.

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

@marcodavids Future is dark

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

@marcodavids And that’s even beginning of the long journey of getting it adopted

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

Amazing folks at https://t.co/YJyGvbGZBl did another great job: 👏

[CERT Polska @CERT_Polska_en]

🔍 Have you tried monitoring certificate transparency logs lately and found existing tools or libraries disappointing?
✅ Fear not! We're releasing a better one, with tiled format support, async operations, state persistence and an easy-to-use API.
🔗 https://t.co/ouU7Zn6XAO

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

Something that started as a small curiosity and weekend project turned into a long article with several surprises for myself (including how bad I am at time estimates). I went down quite a few rabbit holes along the way.

EDNS Client Subnet in Practice: Evaluating Public Resolver Behaviors:

https://t.co/0nQypgBxHy

#dns

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

@marcodavids Enjoy Montreal and the meeting!

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

I posted a bit of more details and some examples about new options to this article:

https://t.co/eni649s6kn

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

dnsdiag v2.9.0 is out! 🎉

New features:
• NSID support in dnstraceroute
• DoQ and DoH3 protocol support in dnseval
• Improved error handling across all tools
• Tons of Quality of Life improvement

https://t.co/dxpm0YwUQP

#DNS #infosec #lovedns

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

I am building packages for new dnsdiag, and building packages on Windows has become so cumbersome that I don't even think it is worth it. And probably no one will ever need those packages on Windows anyways, so I won't be releasing Windows binaries in future.
Honestly, not a great use of anyone's time.

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

Heading to OARC in a few weeks? Join one of the table topics! I’ll be moderating an ADoT/ADoQ Adoption discussion among several other interesting choices.
https://t.co/eNIUECOx7f
#DNS

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

Running some experiments on public DNS resolvers to see how they handle ECS. Surprise: resolvers aren’t all created equal!
I will share my findings soon.

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

🚀 DNSDiag 2.7.0 is out!

✅ Support for DNS over HTTP/3 (DoH3)
✅ Improved support for DoQ
✅ Improved DoQ & DoH3 error handling
✅ Cleaner display of RTT, flags & EDE info

🔗 Release notes: https://t.co/VbFoyGY1nU

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

DNS-OARC 45 in Stockholm is just a few weeks away! 🇸🇪

Looking forward to seeing many of you there - let’s catch up and hang out!

https://t.co/JJKoby6mwN

#DNS #LoveDNS

[Babak Farrokhi (@[email protected]) @farrokhi]

@inetAnt @heymingwei I couldn’t resist and upgraded one iPhone and one MBP. Boy, do I wish I had resisted the impulse. It’s no exaggeration to say the upgrade has reduced usability tremendously.