The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,337 posts.
What I detect in Google’s behavior (and John Battelle’s more-or-less defense of it) is a sense of entitlement. That because in the past ad networks could track almost all users via cookies, they are entitled to continue tracking almost all users across the web via cookies, even when a large (and growing) number of…
We can now conclusively link Stuxnet to the centrifuge structure at the Natanz nuclear enrichment lab in Iran. Watch this new video presentation from Ralph Langner, the researcher who has done the most work on Stuxnet. It’s a long clip, but the good stuff is between 21:00 and 29:00. The pictures he’s referring to are…
Do Use SSH Keys When ever you can use a key for SSH. Once you create it, you can distribute the public side widely to enable access where ever you need it. Generating one is easy: ssh-keygen -t dsa Don't Use a Blank Passphrase on Your Key This key is now your identity. Protect it.
A few months back I got a call one evening which was clearly a virus call centre scam; you know, the ones that call you out of the blue, tell you your PC is infected with all sorts of nasties and offer to fix it for you? Or maybe you
When you start Chrome, it attempts to connect to three random domains. I've seen a few theories about why exactly this happens that brush up against the nefarious. The true rationale is incredibly mundane: hopefully this short summary will clear things up.
The National Security Agency (NSA) has recently declassified an amazing letter that John Nash sent to it in 1955. It seems that around the year 1950 Nash tried to interest some US security organs …
When a browser connects to an HTTPS site it receives signed certificates which allow it to verify that it's really connecting to the domain that it should be connecting to. In those certificates are pointers to services, run by the Certificate Authorities (CAs) that issued the certificate, that allow the browser to…
The storyline: TSA screener finds two pipes in passenger’s bags. Screener determines that they’re not a threat. Screener confiscates them anyway, because of their “material and appearance.” Because they’re not actually a threat, screener leaves them at the checkpoint. Everyone forgets about them. Six hours later, the…
Back in 2007 I stumbled upon something called a QR Code . It was a neat two-dimensional barcode that encodes textual information visually—with URLs being a promising application for the emerging smartphone market (thanks to the release of the iPhone that year). So I did what any self-respecting personal blogger would…
Introducing Mempodipper , an exploit for CVE-2012-0056. /proc/ pid /mem is an interface for reading and writing, directly, process memory by seeking around with the same addresses as the process's virtual memory space. In 2.6.39, the protections against unauthorized access to /proc/ pid /mem were deemed sufficient…
I was reminded of this by 37signals' response on Monday to last week's cat.jpg privacy failure . To be clear, I have a lot of sympathy for 37signals: Once someone looked in their logs and saw "cat.jpg" as the name of the one hundred millionth file they had stored, I'm sure the resulting fit of laughter significantly…
I have a love/hate relationship with the Cato Institute. Most of their analysis I strongly disagree with, but some of it I equally strongly agree with. Last September 11—the tenth anniversary of 9/11—Cato’s David Rittgers published “Abolish the Department of Homeland Security“: DHS has too many subdivisions in too…
Programming Zen is a blog about programming and emerging technologies, authored by Antonio Cangiano, a Software Development Manager and AI Evangelist at IBM.
