Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 83 posts.

Security & Privacy
2017
15

The Difficulty Of Private Contact Discovery

Building a social network is not easy. Social networks have value proportional to their size, so participants aren’t motivated to join new social networks which aren’t already large. It’s a paradox where if people haven’t already joined, people aren’t motivated to join. The trouble is that whi...

21

Why Constant-Time Crypto?

In 1996, Paul Kocher published a novel attack on RSA, specifically on RSA implementations , that extracted information on the private key by simply measuring the time taken by the private key operation on various inputs. It took a few years for people to accept the idea that such attacks were practical and could be…

23

Intel's Management Engine

Recent CPUs from Intel requires a binary called the “Management Engine” (Intel ME, or ME for short). This binary is one of three parts required if a business elects to use Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT), which Purism avoids. Purism laptops can function with a neutralized and disabled ME, as we have tested…

26

Meet Algo, the VPN that works

I think you’ll agree when I say: there’s no VPN option on the market designed with equal emphasis on security and ease of use. That changes now. Today we’re introducing Algo, a self-hosted personal VPN server designed for ease of deployment and security. Algo automatically deploys an on-demand VPN service in the cloud…

29

5 Problems with National ID Cards

The terrorist attacks of September 11have revived proposals for a national identity card system as a way to verify the identity of airline passengers and prevent terrorists from entering the country. For example, the Chairman and CEO of Oracle Corp., Larry Ellison, recently called for the creation of a national ID…