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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,333 posts.
iMessage, explained
This blog post is going to be a cursory overview of the internals iMessage, as I’ve discovered during my work on pypush, an open source project that reimplements iMessage.
AI and Mass Spying
Spying and surveillance are different but related things. If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired…
A decade of Have I Been Pwned
A decade ago to the day, I published a tweet launching what would surely become yet another pet project that scratched an itch, was kinda useful to a few people but other than that, would shortly fade away into the same obscurity as all the other ones I'd launched
Open source supply chain security at Google [video]
I was a remote opening keynote speaker at ACM SCORED 2023 , which we decided meant that I sent a video to play and I was on Discord during the talk for attendees to text directly with question as the video played, and then we did some live but still remote Q&A after the talk.
Analyzing the Monoprice Blackbird HDCP 2.2 to 1.4 Down Converter
I got my hands on a Monoprice Blackbird 4K Pro HDCP 2.2 to 1.4 Converter . According to the marketing copy it “is the definitive solution for playback of new 4K HDCP 2.2 encoded content on 4K displays with the old HDCP 1.4 standard.”
Titled Tuesday Cheating
Fantastic Cheaters and Where to Find Them
Linux being secure is a common misconception
Linux being secure is a common misconception in the security and privacy realm. Linux is thought to be secure primarily because of its source model, popular usage in servers, small userbase and confusion about its security features. This article is intended to debunk these misunderstandings by demonstrating the lack…
Deobfuscating World of Warships' Python Scripts
An in-depth analysis of how World of Warships obfuscates its game scripts and how to mostly deobfuscate them automatically.
From email to phone number, a new OSINT approach (2019)
How to find out someone's phone number if you just know their email address and how it can be automated using a new OSINT tool: email2phonenumber
Reptar
We have a CPU mystery! We found a way to cause some processors to enter a glitch state where the normal rules don’t apply, but what does that mean…?
We've learned nothing from the SolarWinds hack
Mac's Tech Blog
Discouraging the use of web application firewalls
Mac's Tech Blog
Ubuntu Pro Shenanigans
10/18/2026: Drive Specifications Matter (Complete) 10/09/2026: Gear Review: XTEINK X4 Pro 10/09/2026: Gear Review: OLYVUE V78 Dash Cam 10/01/2026: UNREDACTED Magazine Issue 013 09/21/2026: Updated OSINT Scripts 09/20/2026: New Socials 08/29/2026: Blog Archive 08/20/2026: Free PDF Self-Publishing Guide 08/19/2026: OS…
Hacking Google Bard – From Prompt Injection to Data Exfiltration
Recently Google Bard got some powerful updates, including Extensions. Extensions allow Bard to access YouTube, search for flights and hotels, and also to access …
It's still easy for anyone to become you at Experian
In the summer of 2022, KrebsOnSecurity documented the plight of several readers who had their accounts at big-three consumer credit reporting bureau Experian hijacked after identity thieves simply re-registered the accounts using a different email address. Sixteen months later, Experian clearly has not addressed this…
Are we doing this again? Yes, we're doing this again
Y esterday I was rudely summoned away from a beautiful autumn day of wild foraging by The King.
What the QWAC? An EV Certificate all over again
Almost 2 years on from the last time I wrote about QWACs, I'm sadly not here to tell you that things have gone well since then. In fact, I'm actually here to tell you that things are not going well at all... QWAC Back in Jan 2022, I
PostgreSQL Encryption: The Available Options
On an episode of Postgres FM , the hosts had a (very brief) discussion of data encryption in PostgreSQL. While Postgres FM is a podcast well worth a subscribe, the hosts aren’t data security experts, and so as someone who builds a queryable database encryption system , I found the coverage to be somewhat… lacking. I…
Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant
I'm organizing a boycott of Apple's Feedback Assistant , starting immediately, and I encourage all Apple developers to join me. Here's how I propose that each of us can effectively participate in the boycott and let Apple know that we're boycotting Feedback Assistant:
Who's behind the SWAT USA reshipping service?
Last week, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that one of the largest cybercrime services for laundering stolen merchandise was hacked recently, exposing its internal operations, finances and organizational structure. In today’s Part II, we’ll examine clues about the real-life identity of “ Fearlless ,” the nickname…
Enable ARMv9 Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) on Pixel 8
The Pixel 8 hardware ( Tensor G3 ) supports the ARM Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) , and software support is available both in Android userspace and the Linux kernel. This feature is a powerful defense against linear buffer overflows and many types of use-after-free flaws. I’m extremely happy to see this hardware…
Exploiting DNS response parsing on the Wii U
It's annual Wii U exploit time! 😄 Image of the Wii U connection test screen on the GamePad. After reverse engineering parts of the Wii Us' ...
EU parliament agreement to remove chat control and safeguard secure encryption
This week, the European Parliament's negotiators reached a broad majority agreement on a common position concerning the controversial EU chat control bill. The Commission’s bill proposes bulk scanning and reporting of private messages for allegedly suspicious content by using error-prone algorithms,
Running the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Compiler
Supply chain security is a hot topic today, but it is a very old problem. In October 1983, 40 years ago this week, Ken Thompson chose supply chain security as the topic for his Turing award lecture, although the specific term wasn’t used back then. (The field of computer science was still young and small enough that…
What Transport for London can learn about us from our mobile data
Big Brother meets Big Data