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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,337 posts.

Security & Privacy
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3667

Today I Briefed Congress on the NSA

This morning, I spent an hour in a closed room with six members of Congress: Rep. Lofgren, Rep. Sensenbrenner, Rep. Bobby Scott, Rep. Goodlatte, Rep. Mike Thompson, and Rep. Amash. No staffers, no public: just them. Lofgren had asked me to brief her and a few Representatives on the NSA. She said that the NSA wasn’t…

3669

Malicious Use of the HTML5 Vibrate API

There is a new API in town! HTML5 will (soon) let you make the user's device vibrate. What fun! Obviously, it's useful for triggering alerts, improved immersivness during gameplay, and all sorts of other fun things like sending Morse Code messages via vibration. At the moment, Chrome (and other Android browsers) ask…

3670

Root a Mac in 10 seconds or less

Often times, physical access to a machine means game over. While people like to think that OSX is immune to most security threats, even Apple computers can be susceptible to physical attacks. Mac OSX is capable of booting into single user mode by holding a special key combination (Command-S). From this point, an…

3676

On Hacking MicroSD Cards

Today at the Chaos Computer Congress ( 30C3 ), xobs and I disclosed a finding that some SD cards contain vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution — on the memory card itself. On the dark side, code execution on the memory card enables a class of MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks, where the card seems to be…

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Geohot presents an evasi0n7 writeup

Hi, I'm on a plane from SFO to New York, and made something for you. Not even a rap song. ******* geohot( @tomcr00se ) presents an evasi0n7 writeup ******* == Intro == I was bored, reversed, wrote this write-up, and wanted to do something with it. I tried to sell it to the Chinese for $7 and a trip to the Pizza Hut…