241
We Chat, They Watch
WeChat communications conducted entirely among non-China-registered accounts are subject to pervasive content surveillance that was previously thought to be exclusively reserved for China-registered accounts.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,584 posts.
242
Android developer verification: Early access starts
News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.
243
Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
Signal still knows nothing about you, but inexplicably the government continues to ask.
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If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear
Since 1851 Amsterdam had a registry that recorded the following innocent pieces of data about the residents: Name, Date of birth, Address, Marital Status, Parents, Profession, Religion, Previous Addresses and Date of Death if deceased. For many years this system served well and was kept meticulously up to date.
247
Privacy Nightmare on Wheels’: Every Car Brand Reviewed by Mozilla
Mozilla’s latest edition of *Privacy Not Included reveals how 25 major car brands collect and share deeply personal data, including sexual activity, facial expressions, and genetic and health information.
248
Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?
This blog is reserved for more serious things, and ordinarily I wouldn’t spend time on questions like the above. But much as I’d like to spend my time writing about exciting topics, som…
249
Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)
For many years, the Signal app on Android has supported sending and receiving plaintext SMS and MMS messages in addition to Signal messages. SMS and MMS are standardized communication protocols that allow mobile devices to send and transmit messages, and most people picking up their phone to text...
250
iMessage with PQ3 Cryptographic Protocol
We are introducing PQ3, a groundbreaking cryptographic protocol for iMessage that advances the state of the art of end-to-end secure messaging. With compromise-resilient encryption and extensive defenses against even highly sophisticated quantum attacks, PQ3 provides protocol protections that surpass those in all…
251
AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware
This is the first-ever public confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered via targeted ads. We call the technique AdFection, and show how it was used to infect devices at Al Jazeera with Candiru’s spyware. We also uncover Discover-Tech, and show how the company helps mercenary surveillance vendors track and…
252
Improving DNS Privacy with Oblivious DoH
Oblivious DoH (ODoH) makes secure DNS over HTTPS (DoH) queries into private queries which prevent the leakage of client IP addresses to resolvers. The new proposed ODoH standard addresses this problem and today we are enabling users to use this protocol with 1.1.1.1
253
The database servers powering Let's Encrypt
Let’s Encrypt helps to protect a huge portion of the Web by providing TLS certificates to more than 235 million websites. A database is at the heart of how Let’s Encrypt manages certificate issuance. If this database isn’t performing well enough, it can cause API errors and timeouts for our subscribers. Database…
254
If you’re not using SSH certificates you’re doing SSH wrong (2019)
SSH has some pretty gnarly issues when it comes to usability, operability, and security. The good news is this is all easy to fix. SSH is ubiquitous. It’s the de-facto solution for remote administration of *nix systems. SSH certificate authentication makes SSH easier to use, easier to operate, and more secure.
255
Pulling JPEGs out of thin air
This is an interesting demonstration of the capabilities of afl ; I was actually pretty surprised that it worked! $ mkdir in_dir $ echo ' h...
256
Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha
We recently migrated the CAPTCHA provider we use from Google's reCAPTCHA to a service provided by the independent hCaptcha. Here's a walk through of the rationale in more detail.
257
Why I Wrote PGP (1999)
"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." -Mahatma Gandhi
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Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview
New details about what we found, and how agentic harnesses are now able to reproduce real bugs and dismiss false positives.
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Flatpak: A security nightmare – two years later
Flatpak - a security nightmare
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Catalina is checking notarization of unsigned executables
This is a follow-up to Allan Odgaard's excellent article macOS 10.15: Slow by Design . I want to talk specifically about the first section "Spawning a new Process", because there has been widespread misunderstanding of this. Odgaard provides a simple test to show that the first run of an executable is delayed while…
261
Deprecating Non-Secure HTTP
Today we are announcing our intent to phase out non-secure HTTP. There's pretty broad agreement that HTTPS is the way forward for the web. In recent months, there have been ...
262
The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003 (2013)
Josh wrote recently about a serious security bug that appeared in Debian Linux back in 2006, and whether it was really a backdoor inserted by the NSA. (He concluded that it probably was not.) Today I want to write about another incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. This one […]
263
Rust and C++ Interoperability in Chrome
Chrome engineers are experimenting with Rust. For the foreseeable future, C++ is the reigning monarch in our codebase, and any use of Rust will need to fit in with C++ — not the other way around. This seems to present some C++/ Rust interoperability challenges which nobody else has faced.
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Privacy-Preserving Ad Click Attribution for the Web
A typical website is made of numerous components coming from a wide variety of sources.
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Noyb aims to end “cookie banner terror” and issues more than 500 GDPR complaints
Today, noyb.eu sent over 500 draft complaints to companies who use unlawful cookie banners - making it the largest wave of complaints since the GDPR came into force.
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Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026
Case studies from threat actors disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026 across seven areas of harm, from cyber operations to biological misuse.
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The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook
Facebook is a great service. I have a profile , and so does nearly everyone I know under the age of 60.
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Saying goodbye to encrypted SMS/MMS
It’s 2015, and the end of the road for encrypted SMS/MMS in TextSecure. The TextSecure story started back in 2009, at the dawn of the smartphone era. Back then, TextSecure focused on securing the transport that everyone coming from feature phones was familiar with: SMS. Today, many things have c...
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Privacy not included: Holiday gift list for privacy and security
Privacy Not Included was launched in 2017 to help you understand the privacy risks of tech products that connect to the internet. We are continuing that work in the form of Product Reviews at our magazine Nothing Personal, where our privacy experts do hours of hands-on testing and research on the most popular consumer…
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Feudal Security
It’s a feudal world out there. Some of us have pledged our allegiance to Google: We have Gmail accounts, we use Google Calendar and Google Docs, and we have Android phones. Others have pledged allegiance to Apple: We have Macintosh laptops, iPhones, and iPads; and we let iCloud automatically synchronize and back up…