The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,337 posts.
Earlier this month, a retired New York City locksmith was selling a set of “master keys” on eBay: Three of the five are standard issue for members of the FDNY, and the set had a metal dog tag that was embossed with an FDNY lieutenant’s shield number, 6896. The keys include the all-purpose “1620,” a master firefighter…
Jon Howell dreams of a new Internet. In this new Internet, cross-browser compatibility checking is a distant memory and new features can be unilaterally be added to browsers without having to convince the world to upgrade first. The idea which makes this Internet possible is so crazy, it just might work.
Feross Aboukhadijeh is a computer security researcher, teacher, web developer, designer, long distance runner, gamer, music lover, and builder of websites that (sometimes) go viral.
On a NIST-sponsored hash function mailing list, Jesse Walker (from Intel; also a member of the Skein team) did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to estimate how long it will be before we see a practical collision attack against SHA-1. I’m reprinting his analysis here, so it reaches a broader audience. According…
Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry…
NIST is about to announce the new hash algorithm that will become SHA-3. This is the result of a six-year competition, and my own Skein is one of the five remaining finalists (out of an initial 64). It’s probably too late for me to affect the final decision, but I am hoping for “no award.” It’s not that the new hash…
Update: Virgin fixed the issue Tuesday night after taking their login page down for four hours. Please see my update at the bottom of this post.
Is your PIN number too predictable? Detailed analysis on PIN number databases.
Who likes being treated like they’re in a minority group? Unless it means you’re in that exclusive group of playboy (or girl) billionaires, “minority group” often ends up with you being unfairly discriminated against because you don’t represent the perceived majority. As with social discrimination, technology…
I’m doing a deep dive into the pre-history of the Fourth Amendment, and am continuously amazed at how perfectly the condemnations of the “general warrants” that incensed the Framers apply to the programmatic authority granted the NSA under the FISA Amendments Act. The legal challenge to that statute is currently hung…
After nearly three years of work, I have a pleasure to announce that Qubes 1.0 has finally been released! To see the installation instructio...
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under homomorphic-hashing , damn-cool-algorithms , fountain-codes
Today I went to launch VMware 4.1.0 on my OS X 10.8.1 Mac and was met with this surprising refusal to open:
Normally I avoid complaining about Apple because (a) there are plenty of other people carrying that flag, and (b) I honestly like Apple and own numerous lovely iProducts. I’m even using one t…
Tell me if you’ve been in this situation: you’re chatting about online anonymity with your wife and the other Knight-Mozilla Fellows over a pizza in Florence. A quiet-spoken stranger who had been sitting across the room walks up to your table and says “are you all here for the Tor hackathon?” You respond “why yes, yes…
Excellent blog post by Valerie Aurora about sexual harassment at the DefCon hackers conference. Aside from the fact that this is utterly reprehensible behavior by the perpetrators involved, this is a real problem for our community. The response of “this is just what hacker culture is, and changing it will destroy…
UPDATE: it appears that the pathetic cowards who perjured themselves filing these maliciously false copyright infringement claims have chick...
Way back in 1974, Paul Karger and Roger Schell discovered a devastating attack against computer systems. Ken Thompson described it in his classic 1984 speech, “Reflections on Trusting Trust.” Basically, an attacker changes a compiler binary to produce malicious versions of some programs, INCLUDING ITSELF. Once this is…
Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web…
You should read Mat Honan’s heartbreaking tale of a hack attack and the ensuing discussion on Techmeme. Much of the story is about Amazon or Apple’s security practices, but I would stil…
